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"Bridges History and criticism."
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Christian Menn : Brèucken = bridges
\"Christian Menn is one of the most renowned structural engineers in the world. He is known in particular for his remarkable bridges, such as the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge in Boston. This book is the first to document Menn's work in detail, alongside his vision, philosophy, and thinking about design and engineering. Presenting around thirty of his designs--both built and unbuilt--via full-color photographs, plans, and drawings, the book celebrates Menn's creative solutions to challenging engineering problems and his constant rethinking of the fundamentals of his profession. Menn's own writings on his work are accompanied by essays from fellow engineer David P. Billington, scholar Werner Oechslin, writer Iso Camartin, and others, all of whom offer different takes on Menn's achievement.\"-- Amazon.com.
Book
The rise and fall of meter
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline.The Rise and Fall of Metertells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.
eBook
Bridge and Tunnel Boys
Born four months apart, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel both released their debut albums in the early 1970s, quickly becoming two of the most successful rock stars of their generation. While their critical receptions have been very different, surprising parallels emerge when we look at the arcs of their careers and the musical influences that have inspired them.Bridge and Tunnel Boys compares the life and work of Long Islander Joel and Asbury Park, New Jersey, native Springsteen, considering how each man forged a distinctive sound that derived from his unique position on the periphery of the Big Apple. Locating their music within a longer tradition of the New York metropolitan sound, dating back to the early 1900s, cultural historian Jim Cullen explores how each man drew from the city's diverse racial and ethnic influences. His study explains how, despite frequently releasing songs that questioned the American dream, Springsteen and Joel were able to appeal to wide audiences during both the national uncertainty of the 1970s and the triumphalism of the Reagan era. By placing these two New York-area icons in a new context, Bridge and Tunnel Boys allows us to hear their most beloved songs with new appreciation.
eBook
Religious Diversity and Cultural Transmission in Pre-modern Europe
Over the past several decades, historians of Medieval Europe have worked to show the complexity and diversity of Europe’s religious, linguistic and cultural landscape. Medieval Europe was neither a multicultural paradise nor an ethnically pure enclave. Archaeology, ethnolinguistics, literary studies and textual studies all show the constant movement of populations into and across Europe, from earliest antiquity until today. I have participated in two European-funded projects that explore different aspects of that religious and cultural diversity. From 2010 to 2015, I directed an ERC advanced grant entitled ‘RELMIN: The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th–15th centuries)’. Since 2019, I am one of the four directors of an ERC synergy grant, ‘The European Qur’ān,’ which explores the place of the Qur’ān in European culture between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. This article presents these two European research programmes and their implications for understanding the history of Europe’s religious diversity.
Journal Article
Building an Unreal City: Reading the Construction of St. Louis in Eliot's The Waste Land
In 1959, T. S. Eliot said of his poetry, “My urban imagery was that of St. Louis.” This paper reads Eliot's The Waste Land in light of this comment, investigating the extent to which the construction of his hometown, St. Louis, in the nineteenth century, impinges upon the poem. The paper outlines the cultural conditions of St. Louis's construction as part of a settler colonial project, heavily influenced by certain narratives of quest and conquest. Throughout the construction of St. Louis, geographical and historical realities were continually replaced by an urban landscape which served to reflect these settler narratives. Using three separate case studies – the construction of the Eads Bridge, the destruction of the Cahokia mounds, and the St. Louis fire of 1849 – this paper makes the case that Eliot's characterization of urban space in The Waste Land as “unreal” is rooted in the construction of his hometown.
Journal Article
Fate Leads the Willing, and Drags the Unwilling
In this article, I explore the role that Austrian-born musicologist/composer Eric Werner (1901–1988) cultivated as a representative of musical Wissenschaft des Judenthums in postwar America. I focus here on the diary that Werner kept between 1955 and 1957 – a heretofore untapped resource – which chronicles his efforts to build intellectual refugee networks while simultaneously helping to restart an international network of Jewish music discourse spanning America, Europe and Israel. Music, in Werner’s view, required a scientific basis for study from which authentic practices could be rebuilt. Thus, while Werner relied on revitalising cantors as vessels of Jewish music, he viewed musicology as the core discipline from which Jewish music ‘tradition’ could arise.
Journal Article
Loving in Verse
The current critical tendency in the study of Renaissance literature is to regard the relationship between a poet and his predecessor as either familial or antagonistic. Stephen Guy-Bray argues that neither of these models can be applied to all poetic relationships and that, in fact, the romantic and even sexual nature of some relationships must be considered.
Loving in Verseexamines how three poets present their relationship to their most important predecessors, beginning with Dante's use of Virgil and Statius in theDivine Comedy, moving on to Spenser's use of medieval English poets in theFaerie Queene, and finally addressing Hart Crane's use of Whitman inThe Bridge. In each case, Guy-Bray shows how the younger poet presents himself and the older poet as part of a male couple. He goes on to demonstrate how male couples are, in fact, found throughout these poems, and while some are indeed familial or hostile, many are romantic or sexual. Using concepts from queer theory and close readings of images and allusions in these texts,Loving in Versedemonstrates the importance of homoeroticism to an examination of poetic influence. A discussion of the theories of poetic influence from four twentieth-century writers (T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom, Roland Barthes, and Frank O'Hara) concludes Guy-Bray's analysis.
eBook
Chiang Yee
A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for theSilent Travellerseries--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style.
This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.
eBook
Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore
This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to-woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy.
Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, \"Efforts of Affection,\" as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of \"Crusoe in England\" and \"In the Village,\" Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation.
eBook