Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions.
Before Kant, philosophers had debated for centuries whether knowledge is derived from experience or reason. Kant says that both views are partly right and partly wrong, that they share the same error; both believe that the mind and the world, reason and nature are separated from one another. Building on an insight from Hume, Kant says that our reason organizes our sense perception to produce knowledge. The mind is a creative force for understanding the manifold of new, unconceptualized sense impressions with which the world bombards us. And Kant says we cannot know the "thing-in-itself" - the object apart from our conceptualization of it.
(complete, unabridged) George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, embodies through its various couples a nuptial kaleidoscope not matched since Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Conditions surrounding marriages in Victorian times for women were considerably different from what modern readers would surmise. Partly due to the deprivation of an equal opportunity to education, Victorian women were confronted with limited survival tactics. Beautiful English.
The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov
Incessantly cited by critics, Bakhtin's work none the less remains relatively unavailable: partly through lack of suitable editions, partly because no individual text conveys all the key concepts or arguments. This anthology provides in a convenient format a good selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish novelist who lived most of his life in Britain and didn't learn English until age 21. The young Conrad lived an adventurous life involving gunrunning and political conspiracy, and apparently had a disastrous love affair that plunged him into despair. He served 16 years in the merchant navy.In 1894, at age 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health and partly because he had decided on a literary career.
