ellauri014.html on line 1621: In Adone, Marino quotes and rewrites passages from Dante´s Divine Comedy, Ariosto, Tasso and the French literature of the day. The aim of these borrowings is not plagiarism but rather to introduce an erudite game with the reader who must recognise the sources and appreciate the results of the revision. Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry. In this way, Marino also turns Adone into a kind of poetic encyclopaedia, which collects and modernises all the previous productions of human genius.
ellauri067.html on line 298: Called today "the Father of Connecticut", Rev. Thomas Hooker was a towering figure in the early development of colonial New England. He was one of the great preachers of his time, an erudite writer on Christian subjects, the first minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the first settlers and founders of both the city of Hartford and the state of Connecticut.
ellauri097.html on line 103: Such turns of phrase evoked the erudite cynicism and rapier sharpness of language displayed by Ambrose Bierce in his darkly-satiric The Devil's Dictionary. A noted curmudgeon, democratic in subjects attacked, Mencken savaged politics, hypocrisy, and social convention. A master of English, he was given to bombast and once disdained the lowly hot dog bun's descent into "the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster of Paris, flecks of bath sponge and atmospheric air all compact."
ellauri194.html on line 314: Sedgwick' died of breast cancer in 2009 aged 58,. She deploys erudite and playful readings of texts by Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Marcel Proust to interrogate assumptions about the stability of sexual identity and how language works to define a homo/heterosexual binary. She writes: "An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern western culture must be not merely incomplete but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition."
ellauri368.html on line 315: Joseph Perl (1773-1839) is one of the most remarkable links in the chain of Judaic uterature. In 1819, four years after seminal hasidic works of the Ba'al Shem Tov and Nahman of Bratslav appeared, Perl printed Megalei Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), an erudite Hebrew parody that satirized them.
ellauri368.html on line 320: Then came Perl, show inserted more than just a grain of sand into the happy oyster of hasidic life. Joseph Perl hailed from Tarnopol and became an erudite follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, or haskalah. He learned German and published an attack on the Hasidim in that language, Ueber das Wesen der Sekte Hasidim (on the essence of the Hasidic Sect, 1816). In so doing he aroused the ire of the hasidim; Perl encodes both his scorn and their fury into his epistolary novel, Revealer of Secrets. The plot of Revealer of Secrets revolves around an offensive anti-hasidic book in German, which is evidently Perl's own tract dating from 1816. The hasidic characters in Revealer of Secrets plot to find and destroy the offending book; in the course of their fictional search, they reveal many of the baser traits that Perl attacked in his 1816 essay.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 124: I would argue that the first real fissure in the adulatory critical wall hailing the “literary giant” came in 1990, in George Steiner’s erudite assessment of the first volume of Brian Boyd’s Nabokov biography, “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years.” Writing in The New Yorker, Steiner perceived, a lack of generosity of spirit in Boyd’s subject: “Nabokov’s case seems to entail a deep-lying inhumanity, or, more precisely, unhumanity,” Steiner wrote. “There is compassion in Nabokov, but it is far outweighed by lofty or morose disdain.”
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