Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.
Leading Proust scholar William C. Carter has started a website “devoted to studying and celebrating the life and works of Marcel Proust” that offers both a wealth of literary resources and an online course. Along with University of Alabama at Birmingham student Nicolas D. Drogoul, Carter has launched Proust Ink
Ali Ahmad Said Esber is better known to the Arabic world as Adonis, though he is only beginning his entrance into the Anglo world. Syrian-born and currently living in Paris, Adonis is, and has been for decades, one of the most popular modern poets writing in Arabic. His twenty volumes
If you drive down a certain series of winding roads in Bethany, CT, you will come upon a classic mailbox stamped with very Bauhausian numerals, marking the entrance to 88 Beacon Road, the home of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Housed in a quietly beautiful building designed by architect
Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg interviewed Sarah Greenough on her new book of letter correspondence: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Unlike new 21st-century ways of sending love notes such as texts and Facebook messages, which seem only to escalate
In his semi-autobiographical Cyclops, Croatian author Ranko Marinković relates the experiences of a young man in Zagreb who starves himself in order to avoid combat in World War II.
Although this month’s Global and International Studies theme suggests a look at places far afield from home, in the US, where people come every day in search of a new life, international studies can be found even in the interactions of neighbors or a walk through a town or city. Claudia Gryvatz Copquin’s The Neighborhoods of Queens is an in-depth look at Queens, covering every neighborhood throughout the borough.
You probably have ten different places to be today, or at least it feels like it. Although that may be a little overwhelming, it’s a familiar feeling. A neatly cluttered schedule—that’s modern life, and perhaps you’re even proud of it. To the title character of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, however, you
Many early perceptions of French culture saw France as “a secondary player or latecomer” to the Renaissance. Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France, edited by Martha Wolff, asserts that French aristocrats and artists formed their artistic identity “by means of selective assimilation” and deserves a place as an originator of the Renaissance.
Adina Hoffman’s biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Al, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, is not a love story. Instead, it is a story of loss and how from that loss Taha has created art. Amira became a “muse” in Taha’s work, a symbol of everything his family lost when they became refugees; indeed, it was everything.