ellauri107.html on line 189: Hawthorne had also given Melville a positive book review but characteristically expressed it with ambiguity. As Kesterson says,
ellauri110.html on line 349: Propriety did not prevent him from engaging in a number of extramarital liaisons with various women that were chronicled in his diary, often in some detail when relating the intimate details. The most dramatic of these encounters was with Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged as a companion for Elisabeth Pepys. On 25 October 1668, Pepys was surprised by his wife as he embraced Deb Willet; he writes that his wife "coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her] coats; and endeed I was with my main [hand] in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also...." Following this event, he was characteristically filled with remorse, but (equally characteristically) continued to pursue Willet after she had been dismissed from the Pepys household. Pepys also had a habit of fondling the breasts of his maid Mary Mercer while she dressed him in the morning.
ellauri222.html on line 767: In their quest to find the beaver that gives meaning to life, Bellow's protagonists must also come to terms with death. The message Bellow conveys in almost all of his novels is that one must fear death to know the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Henderson overcomes his fear of death when he is buried and symbolically resurrected in the African king Dahfu's experiment. Similarly, in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm confronts death in a symbolic drowning. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift echoes Whitman in viewing death as the essential question, pointing out that it is only through death that Sauls can complete the cycle of life by liberating self from the body. Bellow's meditations on death darken in Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December. While the title character in Mr. Sammler's Planet eagerly awaits the death of the person he most values in the world, Bellow contemplates the approaching death of Western culture at the hands of those who have abandoned humanistic values. The Dean's December presents an apocalyptic vision of urban decay in a Chicago totally lacking the comic touches that soften Charlie Citrone's portrait of this same city as a "moronic inferno" in Humboldt's Gift. An uncharacteristically bleak yarn from he old standup comic. With More Die of Heartbreak and the recent novellas, however, Bellow returns to his more characteristic blend of pathos and farce in contemplating the relationship between life and death. In the recent Ravelstein, Bellow once again charts this essential confrontation when Saul recounts not only his best friend's death from AIDS but also his own near-death experience from food poisoning. Through this foreground, in a fictionalized memoir to his own gay friend Allan Bloom, Bellow reveals the resilient love and tenderness that offer the modern world its saving grace.
ellauri272.html on line 420: Ammons’s concerns with the transcendental everyman coalesce in what may prove to be his finest effort: the National Book Award winner of 1993, Garbage. The title, suggested when Ammons drove by a Florida landfill, is characteristically flippant and yet perfectly serious. “Garbage is a brilliant book,” said David Baker in the Kenyon Review. “It may very well be a great one. ...
ellauri428.html on line 266: A narrative, de Bres reminds us, is a particular kind of diachronic representation of a series of events, which characteristically displays connections between them, focusing on their pertinence to exercises of agency, and aims to convey their significance to an audience (3). Narrativists about meaningfulness claim that narratives, or perhaps narrative structure, contributes (in part) to the meaningfulness of a life (and not just to sense of meaningfulness). But how, and why?
xxx/ellauri442.html on line 60: I shall not enter in to the meta-philosophical discussion of the general merits and demerits of the institutionalisation or academisation of philosophy. Some of the valuable contributions in this area include Hamlyn’s warmly-tuned (1992), Calhoun’s critical (1997) as well as Collins’ astonishing (1998). Stanley Cavell stresses the significance of Emerson and Thoreau, ‘the most underhanded second-rate philosophical minds…to have been produced in the United States’ (Cavell 2004 pp12-13 of his ‘Introduction’ to his characteristically original Cities of Words.)
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