Spring 2012 Issue

American Atomization

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

The Atomization of America and Its Popular Music Culture Todd Rongstad A significant cultural shift in the American community is underway that is reflected in dramatic form by a comparative consideration of popular music and its cultural processes over the last century. A fundamentally singular popular culture of the twentieth century is atomizing into infinite parts in the twenty-first. At the same time, we are in the midst of rapid change in popular music culture relative to consumer behavior […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: music, music industry, popular music, technology, Walter Benjamin

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What the Market Will Bear, Occupy Wall Street poster by Roger Peet

The Scandal of Democracy

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

The Scandal of Democracy Chaotic Thoughts on the Occupied Squares By Pablo Bustinduy Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all — Hesiod, Theogony (II 116) Zeteo asked me to write a piece about the relations between Occupy Wall Street and the 15M, a political movement which erupted in Spain a few months before the events of New York. What follows, however, is not a list of affinities and discrepancies between […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: chaos, democracy, Dewey, Hesiod, Occupy Wall Street, Plato, Spain

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Literature, Empire and Region

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

A Parallel Narrative—Literature, Empire and Region at the Turn of the Twentieth Century A Review By Stephanie Tsank [Click for pdf] Review of: Schmidt, Peter. Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Stecopoulos, Harilaos. Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Wesling, Meg. Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines. New York: New York University Press, […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: education, empire, imperialism, literature

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Penrhyn Stanlaws, Metropolitan, January 1916

Magazines and Motorized Personal Transport

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

Magazine Cover Images of Motorized Personal Transportation in the 1910s Reflecting and Effecting Changing Times By June S. Knopf Note to Readers: Layout of this piece is being updated. Most of the figures remain to be uploaded. Click for the full collection of images in slightly different order. — March 2016. The automobile was invented by the late 1800s, but it was not until 1908 that Henry Ford produced his Model T cars using assembly line manufacturing, thus drastically reducing […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: automobiles, illustration, magazines, nature, twentieth century

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Finding Ourselves in Oedipus Again

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

Finding Ourselves in Oedipus Again and Again Ten views of human agency By William Eaton [Click for pdf] This paper will explore the extent of human agency: our capacity to make effective choices, choices that advance our true interests. It will do this by considering at least ten different readings of Sophocles’s Οἰδίπουσ Τύραννοσ (Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex). Interposed between the readings will be contemporary examples of agency, or of our lack thereof, and discussions of […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: Aristotle, choice, ethics, Freud, Oedipus, Sophocles

Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Moss

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Moss: A Question of Accuracy By Daniel D’Arezzo Among poets writing in English in the mid-twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) has emerged as one of the most influential—an influence not only on later generations of poets but on her contemporaries as well. Her oeuvre was not large: she published only a handful of books in her lifetime, and the poems were usually short; a longish poem like “Manuelzinho” has only 145 lines. She often […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Moss, New Yorker, poetry

Relativity and Quantum Theory in The Waves

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

Relativity and Quantum Theory in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves By Ian Ettinger In modernist fiction, several novels enfold similarly complex and indeterminate visions of reality. However, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves pushes the notion that reality is not as it appears further than perhaps any other modern novel. Amid the radical reconceptions proposed by physics, The Waves appears to be the only modern novel to attempt a complete rereading of how identity functions and becomes embodied in the indeterminate flux of […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: Heisenberg, physics, quantum theory, relativity, space-time, uncertainty principle, Virginia Woolf

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James Baldwin and the Black Press

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

“Next Time, the Fire in Giovanni’s Room” The Critical Reception of James Baldwin’s Second Novel in the Black Press By Rachel Corbman In February of 1950, the most prominent and widely distributed black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, published a supplely illustrated feature article that considered the history and future of African American literature. Penned by educator and scholar James W. Ivy, “Fifty Years of Progress in Literature” placed the then twenty-five year old James Baldwin on the vanguard of […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: African-Americans, Civil Rights Movement, gay lives, gender, homophobia, homosexuality, James Baldwin, race, sexuality