Forty years ago , Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete.
It isn’t just that everyone now has a story; it’s that everyone is a story. Who you are is the narrative you recount about yourself. Whether the life history of someone forced into sex work reflects their true self, or whether self-narration might also be self-deception, are questions that seemingly don’t trouble this line of argument.
Has sex become too readily available? Banal, even? A boring chore? If so, what better way to make it fascinating again than to prohibit all mention of it? Don’t read about sex! Don’t think about sex! See no sex, hear no sex, speak no sex! Suddenly, the kids want to explore! “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17). If that’s the school board’s game, well played! Virginia may even get more babies out of it.
How dare I question the school board’s motives? I do dare. After all, it has questioned mine.
Tarantino’s books about the films and filmmaking of the past function less as museum exhibits than guides to keeping the form potent, relevant, and maybe still able to inspire another nine-year-old budding cineaste whose mind gets blown by a movie he never should have been allowed to see.
How are we supposed to wrap our heads around that? How can we possibly come to grips with a theory that doesn’t explain how anything works? People have struggled with these questions ever since quantum mechanics was developed, and they’ve come up with a number of ways to make sense of the processes involved in quantum behavior. Let’s explore three of these interpretations of quantum mechanics to see if any of them satisfy our cravings for a "why" behind all this odd phenomenology.
Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows — shadows doing impossible things — that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.
As I looked at the rolling, empty sand dunes sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the quiet town of Guadalupe, California, it was hard to imagine that for a few short weeks in 1923 this area was teeming with thousands of actors, crew members and animals participating in one of the silent film era's most epic productions. That said, it was neither the movie's filming, nor even the film itself that brought this town of just 1.3 sq miles in Santa Barbara County its notoriety. That has more to do with what has remained just below the surface here for the last 100 years.
What often elevates a writer is compassion, and O’Connor has it in spades – paying tribute to the courage of those who resist tyranny. Beautifully crafted, his razor-sharp dialogue is to be savoured, and he employs dark humour to great effect. The plot twists keep on coming until the novel’s coda, where a final joyful conceit is revealed.
What is there left of wonder in the world? Little perhaps for us postmoderns: a dying planet, a godless universe, the lingering angst of political strife and pandemics. The closest science has come to connecting us with the cosmos is the materialist reassurance of Carl Sagan’s adage, “We are made of star-stuff.” Yet our dismal globe is a thing of recent discovery. For a long time, other cultures looked through quite different lenses at the earth and skies above.
In Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book that Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (2023), Travis Zadeh takes us on a tour through one such lost world — a medieval Muslim cosmos in which the earth and all its parts had their place in a benign divine order. It is a cosmography contained within the pages of a single book that, for the best part of 700 years, was read from India to Egypt — the ʿAjaʾib al-Makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾ ib al-mawjūdāt (“The Wonders of Things Created and Rarities of Matters Existent,” in Zadeh’s rendering) by Abū Yaḥyā al-Qazwīnī, who was born around 1203 in what is today Western Iran. Nowadays, its many extant manuscript versions are mostly known for their fabulous illustrations, at once geometric and fantastic. The past decade has seen several exhibitions based on copies held in European and American libraries. But Zadeh is primarily concerned with al-Qazwīnī’s words, acting as a commentator in the classical sense of someone seeking to reveal the layers of reference and meaning in a text from another time. In taking this approach, Zadeh presents his book in the guise of the Persian literary commentary known as a javāb, or “answer,” to an author from centuries earlier. In this way, he gives us vicarious entry to a centuries-long conversation, not only with al-Qazwīnī himself but also with his many other commentators. Thus, Zadeh has not so much written a study of al-Qazwīnī as a biography of his book and its interpretation and circulation over the course of seven centuries.
Priscilla Gilman’s new memoir, “The Critic’s Daughter,” is about her tangled relationship with her father, the critic Richard Gilman. By the end of the book, there’s a lot of blood on the floor, but it doesn’t belong to the author or her ostensible subject.
How often driving down those roads
we hoped we wouldn’t hit something,