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What is the present?
A provocative new look at concepts of the present, their connection to ideas about time, and their effect on literature, art, and cultureThe problem of the present-what it is and what it means-is one that has vexed generations of thinkers and artists. Because modernity places so much value on the present, many critics argue that people today spend far too much time in the here and now-but how can we tell without first knowing what the here and now actually is? What Is the Present? takes a provocative new look at this moment in time that remains a mystery even though it is always with us.Michael North tackles puzzles that have preoccupied philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, history, and aesthetic theory and examines the complex role of the present in painting, fiction, and film. He engages with a range of thinkers, from Aristotle and Augustine to William James and Henri Bergson. He draws illuminating examples from artists such as Fra Angelico and Richard McGuire, filmmakers like D. W. Griffith and Christopher Nolan, and novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather. North offers a critical analysis of previous models of the present, from the experiential present to the historical period we call the contemporary. He argues that the present is not a cosmological or experiential fact but a metaphor, a figurative relationship with the whole of time. Presenting an entirely new conception of the temporal mystery Georg Lukacs called the \"unexplained instant,\" What Is the Present? explores how the arts have traditionally represented the present-and also how artists have offered radical alternatives to that tradition.
Book
Machine-age comedy
In this latest addition to Oxford’s Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists—including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace—to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.
eBook
Reading 1922
This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy, the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin’s popularity crested, and King Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered. In short, the year which not only in hindsight became the primal scene of literary modernism but which served as the cradle for a host of major political and aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe. In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the racial and linguistic struggles over the English language which gave birth to the many strains of modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass the global stage, and tells the story of how books changed the future of the world as we know it in one unforgettable year.
eBook
The Baltic : a history
\"The Baltic is an overview of the region as a whole that deals with politics, trade, and cultures. The book is organized into ten chronological, roughly thematic chapters, with each chapter beginning with a vignette (focus) centered on a place with particular significance to the era under discussion. Throughout, the book pays close attention not only to trade and other economic issues, but also to population groups and demographic change. Significant portions of the chapters are dedicated to a treatment development of the 'Brick Gothic' architectural style, the brilliant achievements of artists such as Berndt Notke, the founding of universities, 'Nordic Romanticism', Baltic Sea tourism etc.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The dialect of modernism : race, language, and twentieth-century literature
The second volume in Oxford’s new Race and American Culture series, The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.
eBook
People of the Morning Star : a novel of North America's forgotten past
A religious miracle: the Cahokians believed that the divine hero Morning Star had been resurrected in the flesh. But not all is fine and stable in glorious Cahokia. To the astonishment of the ruling clan, an attempt is made on the living god's life. Now it is up to Morning Star's aunt, Matron Blue Heron, to keep it quiet until she can uncover the plot and bring the culprits to justice. If she fails, Cahokia will be torn asunder in warfare, rage, and blood as civil war consumes them all.
BOOK
WORSHIPING SIS
There is a kind of psychological explanation for [Eustace Cherrington]'s dependence on his sister, in the early death of their mother. But nothing is made of this explanation, in part because Eustace takes his condition completely for granted. The metaphor of shrimp and anemone suggests that Eustace's extinction is inevitable, but [L. P. Hartley] sees such victimization in a peculiar way. The cause of all the events in the trilogy is, as in so many Victorian novels, the weakness of the father. ''Isn't that like Daddy?'' [HILDA] complains. ''We can't depend on him, can we?'' Mr. Cherrington's ''gay nature,'' his effeminate weakness, throws off balance the purely Victorian moral system on which these works are based. ONE of the general themes of Hartley's work is the instability that the 20th century introduced into sexual relationships. Mr. Cherrington's quasi marriage to his sister, Eustace's dominating aunt, seems the norm that Eustace must follow in an age in which only women are strong. When the trilogy ends with Eustace dying as he tamely offers his finger to another voracious anemone, the trilogy has almost reduced itself to one simple Freudian fear.
Book Review
Seeing the Simpson Verdicts in Black and White
For starters, we must acknowledge that there is no easy equivalency between the experiences of blacks and whites. It is by now a commonplace among critics to say that what blacks and whites see in this case depends on where they fall in the racial order. This observation assumes that black and white perspectives on race share an equal starting place of reasonable bias - that is, that one's self, or group, interest will color, but not control, what one thinks about racial issues. The problem with this assumption is that it neglects the history of how black and white interests were unequally weighted in determining what was viewed as reasonable to begin with. In other words, white perspectives on race have long set the limits for what is accepted as common sense or received wisdom on the subject. The success of this move among whites has hinged in large part on the power to deny the legitimacy, logic or persuasiveness of black beliefs about race. Black folk have often been made to feel foolish, ignorant or stupid - and in some cases, insane - for the racial views they hold. This history must be taken into account as we assess the radical discrepancy between white and black views of the Simpson trials. To assign equal value to the perspectives of whites and blacks as a group - the suspicions they harbor, the skepticism they nourish, the biases they express - is to pretend that racial differences in opinion were given equal consideration in determining the course our country should follow in resolving its racial agonies.
Newspaper Article
The Regulation of Peace River
This book presents a comprehensive overview of the first longitudinal study of the downstream response of a major river to the establishment of a large hydropower facility and dams. Peace River, a northward flowing boreal river in northwestern Canada was dammed in 1967 and the book describes the morphological response of the 1200 km downstream channel and the response of riparian vegetation to the change in flow regime over the first forty years of regulated flows.
Beginning with a description of the effect of regulation on the flow and sediment regimes of the river, the book proceeds to study changes in downstream channel geometry on the main stem, on the lowermost course of tributaries, and on the hydraulic geometry, the overall morphology of the channel, and riparian vegetation succession. The river is subject to annual freeze-up and break-up, so a chapter is devoted to the ice regime of the river. A chapter compares the effects of two extraordinary post-regulation flood events. The penultimate chapter presents a prediction of the ultimate equilibrium form of the regulated river based on rational regime theory. An online database of all the main observations will provide invaluable material for advanced students of river hydraulics and geomorphology.
This book carefully brings together a range of studies that have been previously inaccessible providing a rare and comprehensive analysis of the effects of a big dam on a river, a river that itself represents an example of the kind of system that is likely to receive considerable attention in the future from dam engineers and environmentalists.
• An invaluable reference to river scientists, hydroelectric power developers, engineers and environmentalists
• Focus on a northward flowing boreal river, a type that holds most of the remaining hydroelectric power potential in the Northern Hemisphere
• Exceptional separation of water and sediment sources, permitting study of the isolated effect of manipulating one of the two major governing conditions of river processes and form
• Unique example of water regulation and both natural and engineered flood flows
• Detailed study of both morphological changes of the channel and of the riparian vegetation
• Online data supplement including major data tables and numerous maps. Details of the main observations and provides material for problem study by advanced students of river hydraulics and geomorphology are provided
eBook