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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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Tag: fiction

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Frank Kermode, August 2000, photo by Charlie MacDonald

Kermode Cats Barnes Stories

May 10, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins   Life is a Fiction Over a half century ago, shortly before the twentieth-century British literary critic Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending was published, I found myself in a debate with the campus chaplain, a priest named Joe Casey, whom I barely knew at the time. The topic—Life is a Fiction—came from me, although I don’t recall how Father Joe and I ended up on a stage in front of several hundred students. My […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, cats, fiction, life, literary theory, storytelling

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Solzhenitsyn, War Horse, Lotus Seed—Tag

December 14, 2015 by William Eaton

  The typical question regarding a book, any book, is, “What’s it about?” Perhaps an equally important question is: “How does this author tell the story?” My sophomore year of high school, I had to read a book. The class was World Civilization; the book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The curious thing is, I loved it. Against all odds, one Sunday afternoon, this book captured my attention, word for word. I consider […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: children's books, fiction, graffiti, lotus, Solzhenitsyn, War Horse

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Dogs, Memory, Home, Devastation

December 13, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Jason Wirth’s Commiserating with Devastated Things is a wonderful book tracing themes in the novels of Milan Kundera—not to mention the resonances of these themes with Virgil, Cervantes, and Hermann Broch (among others). I’ve learned about St. Francis joyously embracing a leper, about Holy Fools in Russian Orthodoxy and in Dostoevsky (in the person of Prince Myshkin). And I’ve learned about the systematic slaughter of dogs by the Soviets as they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to install civil terror. Kundera […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: cruelty, Czechoslovakia, dogs, fiction, Milan Kundera, Russia

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Theodor Herzl (retouched)

Theodor Herzl: Comedy and Politics Mix

November 5, 2015 by William Eaton

Comic Figures in Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Literary Writing By Alex Marshall   Known first and foremost as the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was also author of the pamphlet The Jewish State and, subsequently, a national hero in Israel. However, before his Zionism, he was a well-known literary figure in Vienna. Herzl is generally seen as a serious-minded writer and political leader, whose jokes were limited to either stage comedies with no bearing on Jewish politics, or […]

Categories: Article • Tags: comedy, fiction, Jews, theater, Theodor Herzl, Vienna, Zionism

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Kingsley Amis Human Behavior

October 27, 2015 by William Eaton

(1) About two hundred pages into Kingsley Amis’s well-known and still wonderful comic novel Lucky Jim there is a paragraph that seems to rise above the rest, to take the novel’s vision of human behavior to another level, beyond particulars to revelation. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, British musical comedians of Kingsley Amis’s generation, had a nice line about how “the purpose of satire . . . is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth, and […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: agency, ethics, fiction, Flanders and Swann, Kingsley Amis, Merleau-Ponty, satire, Sixties

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Hélène Cixous’s Tomb(e)

April 22, 2015 by William Eaton

Review of Tomb(e) by Hélène Cixous, translated by Laurent Milesi (Seagull Books, 2014). Distributed by The University of Chicago Press. By Walter Cummins   What are we to make of prose like this? Never did I love so powerfully but for dreaming still and dreaming the Dream of Dreams, as if Love killed me in order to give me life, through a marvelous retrospective cancellation of the dantext which I had mistaken for life. I have known the orgasm of the […]

Categories: Review • Tags: fiction, Finnegans Wake, French, Hélène Cixous, John Coltrane, literature

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Real Imagined Science

November 17, 2014 by William Eaton

Real Science Imagined Through Fiction The Development of Terraforming during the Twentieth Century By Pete Schmidt {Note: This is one in Zeteo’s Fall 2014 series of pieces related to borders.} [print_link] [email_link]   In the 1950s “hard science fiction” authors began to develop ideas and processes for changing other planets into habitable, Earth-like worlds. Named terraforming, the idea reflected the stalwart belief of mid-century American society in the ability to use science and technology to harness and control nature for […]

Categories: Article, Fall 2014 Issue • Tags: fiction, science, science fiction, terraforming

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An American Romance?

August 29, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link]   “I hate to see somebody get screwed,” Maggio said. “Then you might as well get use to it,” the Chief said. “You probly be seein it often before you die.” These lines summarize the dilemma dramatized in James Jones’s 1951 bestseller, From Here to Eternity; do we get used to injustice, accommodate to it, accept it, or do we do something about it? Readers may be surprised at this interpretation, for the cultural imprint left by the […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: fiction, Hollywood, homosexuality, literature, social justice

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Reading: 14-20 October 2013 (ZiR)

October 15, 2013 by William Eaton

A Week of Reading from . . . Rachael Benavidez, Zeteo Associate Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 14 October 2013 On Loss Yesterday marked the loss of Cuban-American novelist Oscar Hijuelos, the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Hijuelos wrote about the assimilation experience of immigrants to the United States. From a 2011 article in The New York Times: Despite the […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: banned books, fiction, literature, New York Times, obituary, Ralph Ellison

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Welcome to Zeteo, since 2012

Zeteo is for people who are readers, lookers, listeners, thinkers. Increasingly we are interested in short texts that call attention to other texts, works of art or music that deserve more attention than they are getting. And we are interested similarly in historical phenomena, ignored aspects of contemporary life, . . . We look forward to hearing about your ideas, your reading, what you’ve seen . . .

  • Aaron Botwick
    • Reviving Shylock
  • Adrian Wittenberg
    • Identity, Illness, Guillain-Barre
  • Ana Maria Caballero
    • In Favor of Fantasy
  • claratimsit
    • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • danielpage49
    • Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Moss
  • Daniel Taub
    • The Chosen Comedians
  • Ed Mooney
    • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • Emily Sosolik
    • Spiritualism, Summerland, Slavery in the Afterlife
  • fritztucker
    • Look Rich or Go Bankrupt Trying
  • Alexia Raynal
    • Narcissism in children
  • Jennifer Dean
    • Storytelling
  • John Sumser
    • Cartier-Bresson, Senior, Trump (Gaps)
  • Martin Green
    • Foreign Meddling, President’s Ego: World War I
  • Steven A. Burr
    • Reading, Violence, Solidarity
  • sjzeteo2015
    • Reading a poem/A poet reading
  • stewchef
    • Culinary Star Wars
  • Walter Cummins
    • Rum and Coca, the Congo and Brazil
  • William Eaton
    • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)

Recent Posts

  • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)
  • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • Cy Twombly, Charles White — Art & the Unspeakable
  • Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

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