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Louise Uwacu Louise Uwacu is a Canadian writer and speaker. Author of "The nightmare of a POSITIVISION*; "Yes we are dying, but we are still breathing" ". Published in the spring of 2009 by AuthorHouse. This book was published 15 years after she fled from Rwanda and became an international traveler on fake passports. She insists that her message is for the young people that will owe all that money their parents have borrowed from China and other banks of this world. In her own words: "This is the story of how I went from my mother's womb in Rwanda, grew into a rebellious teenager in Kenya, crossed through Europe and became a Fearless woman in North America. Through various travel tales and numerous encounters across three different continents; I am giving you the naked version of me and revealing the hidden side of our dramas and dreams" Biography. Louise Uwacu was born in Kabgayi, Rwanda, in February 1977. She spent her childhood and attended primary school in Kigali until 1988 when her family moved to Nairobi, Kenya. Where she continued her high school studies at the French school, Lycée Denis Diderot. Her family had just moved back to Rwanda, when shortly after the war, the massacres and genocide of 1994 erupted. After becoming a refugee, she landed in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1998 and lived there for 10 years. She currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Uwacu holds a degree in Political Science from the University of Quebec in Montreal. It was at her graduation in 2002 that a speaker inspired her to "find out what you want to be before you take on the responsibilities of being that person". She hosts her own talk shows and continues to write for her own website. She is a gifted speaker and entertainer in at least five languages. She is the co-founder and chief executive officer of the Canadian non-profit organization POSITIVISION. She intends to write and sell more books and eventually build more and more schools for Africa. She has produced and hosted a documentary titled "Positivision in Mali" it follows her journey to the villages of Mali in January 2008. Louise Uwacu has been quoted and featured in several publications including "The Guardian", "Success for Women Magazine", "The Boston Herald". "The nightmare of a POSITIVISION". This is the story of a human being haunted by the nightmares of war, child abuse, separation from family and so much more. And yet, she is still aiming for a peaceful life. She hopes to find freedom in North America. She lands in Canada in 1998 as a refugee aged 21 and with 30 dollars in her pocket, only to find that surviving peace might turn out to be harder and even more challenging than war. Louise Uwacu wants the world to ignore the politicians and beauty pageants participants, who only speak of "world peace" without ever following up with real actions. She reminds her readers that despite all the nightmares that you might have to go through to get to your dream Life; be comforted in the timeless truth: with a POSITIVISION, success is our only option.

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Rella Braithwaite Rella Aylestock Braithwaite (January 29, 1923 – July 23, 2019) was a Canadian author. She was born in Lebanon, a descendant of Black pioneers who settled in the Queen's Bush area, and was educated in Listowel, Ontario. In 1946, Braithwaite and her husband Bob settled in Scarborough, Ontario; she served on the local school board. She wrote a column on Black history for the "Contrast" newspaper. In 1975, Braithwaite published "The Black Woman in Canada" on outstanding Canadian Black women. She also helped the Ministry of Education in Ontario develop a Black Studies guide for use in the classroom. Her daughter is singer Diana Braithwaite.

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Randell Adjei Randell Adjei is a Canadian poet who was named in April 2021 as the first Poet Laureate of Ontario. Predominantly a spoken word poet, Adjei published his debut book "I Am Not My Struggles" in 2018. He is also the founder and creative director of R.I.S.E. (Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere), an arts organization and talent incubator for young writers and musicians of colour in the Toronto area. Adjei was born in Ghana and raised in Scarborough, Toronto.

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Cameron Bailey Cameron Bailey is a Canadian film critic and festival programmer. He is the artistic director and co-head of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Biography. Born in London, England to parents from Barbados, he spent his early childhood in St. James, Barbados, before moving to Canada with his family at the age of eight. Educated at the University of Western Ontario, he worked as a film reviewer for "Now", "Canada AM", CBC Radio One, "Take One" and other publications before joining the Toronto International Film Festival as a programmer. He also cowrote the screenplay for the 1997 film "The Planet of Junior Brown" with Clement Virgo, and wrote and directed the short film "Hotel Saudade". In 2012, Bailey was named artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival. He participated in the 2015 edition of "Canada Reads", where he advocated for Kim Thúy's novel "Ru". "Ru" ultimately won the competition. In 2018, Bailey was promoted to the newly created position of artistic director and co-head of the Toronto International Film Festival.

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Bertrand Bickersteth Bertrand Bickersteth is a Canadian poet. His debut collection, "The Response of Weeds", was published in 2020 and won the Gerald Lampert Award from the League of Canadian Poets in 2021. From Calgary, Alberta, he is a communication instructor at Olds College. In addition to his poetry, he has also published academic work on Black Canadian culture, including the history of Black Canadian settlement in Western Canada and critical analysis of the work of Wayde Compton and Canisia Lubrin. "The Response of Weeds" was also shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize at the 2021 Alberta Literary Awards.

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Kaie Kellough Kaie Kellough (born 1975) is a Canadian poet and novelist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, raised in Calgary, Alberta, and in 1998 moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he lives. Kellough has published three books of poetry, two audio recordings, one novel, and one collection of short stories. He is also a practitioner of vocal sound poetry. His work multiplies and layers voice, while exploring the fundamentals of language-production. His debut novel, "Accordéon", was a shortlisted nominee for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. His newest poetry book, "Magnetic Equator", was published in 2019, was shortlisted for the 2019 QWF A.M. Klein Award for Poetry, and won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. His short story collection "Dominoes at the Crossroads" was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2020, and for the ReLit Award for short fiction in 2021.

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Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite Lawrence Christopher Patrick (aka Ytzhak) Braithwaite (March 17, 1963 – July 14, 2008) was a Canadian novelist, spoken-word artist, dub poet, essayist, digital drummer and short fiction writer. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he has been called "one of the outstanding Canadian prose writers alive" (Gail Scott) and linked to the "New Narrative" movement, a term coined by Steve Abbott. He was the author of the legendary cult novel "Wigger". Braithwaite's work has been praised by Dodie Bellamy for its "sublime impenetrability". and is fueled by a modernist and Fredric Jameson-influenced late modernist approach to writing and recording. His work is influenced by the musical and social realism of punk rock, opera, musique concrète, noise, hip hop, rap, industrial, black metal, country music and dub. Braithwaite utilized the intensity of the New York City No Wave scene and the Los Angeles and Montreal hardcore punk music subcultures to compose his narrative. His family has laid him to rest in Notre-Dames-des-Neiges Cemetery, Montreal, Quebec. Braithwaite was openly gay. He was a vocal critic of the LGBT community's sometimes inadequate response to issues of racism.

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George Elliott Clarke George Elliott Clarke, (born February 12, 1960) is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015 and as the 2016–2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His work is known largely for its use of a vast range of literary and artistic traditions (both "high" and "low"), its lush physicality and its bold political substance. One of Canada's most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that he has coined "Africadia". Life. Clarke was born to William and Geraldine Clarke in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist and Afro-Métis community of Three Mile Plains, and grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He graduated from Queen Elizabeth High School in 1978. He earned a BA honours degree in English from the University of Waterloo (1984), an MA degree in English from Dalhousie University (1989) and a PhD degree in English from Queen's University (1993). He has received honorary degrees from Dalhousie University (LL.D.), the University of New Brunswick (Litt.D.), the University of Alberta (Litt.D.), the University of Waterloo (Litt.D.), and most recently, Saint Mary's University (Litt.D). He taught English and Canadian Studies at Duke University from 1994 to 1999 and was appointed the Seagrams Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at McGill University for the academic year 1998-1999. In 1999, he became professor of English at the University of Toronto, where, in 2003, he was appointed the inaugural E J Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature. Clarke has also served as a Noted Scholar at the University of British Columbia (2002), as a Visiting Scholar at Mount Allison University (2005), and as the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2013–14); and, outside of the academic sphere, as a researcher for the Ontario Provincial Parliament (1982–83), editor of the Imprint (University of Waterloo, 1984–85) and The Rap (Halifax, 1985–87), social worker for the Black United Front of Nova Scotia (1985–86), parliamentary aide to Howard McCurdy (1987–91), and newspaper columnist for The Daily News (Halifax) (1988–89). Clarke is a sought-after conference speaker and is active in poetry circles throughout Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and Europe. He is also a founding member of the music collective Afro-Fétis Nation, which put out its first album, "Constitution", in May 2019. The group derives its name from the artists' mixed Africadian and Mi'kmaq descent. Clarke has described the group's sound as "a mash-up of southern-fried blues and saltwater spirituals, with Nashville guitars, Mi’kmaw-and-“African” drums, Highland bagpipes and Acadien fiddles." Writing career. Clarke is recognized both for his own oeuvre, which includes seventeen collections of poetry, two novels, and four works of drama and opera, and for collecting and promoting stories of African-Canadian writers and poets in anthologies and studies such as "Border Lines" (1995), "Eyeing the North Star" (1997), "Odysseys Home" (2002), "Fire on the Water" (2002), "Directions Home" (2012) and "Locating Home" (2017). His artistic influences stretch from Shakespeare to Miles Davis, from Ezra Pound to Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Malcolm X, and it is from the fertile contradictions and tensions between thinkers of all periods of history that Clarke's later work draws much of its power. His style, with its embrace of the vernacular, the rambunctious, the unresolved and the spontaneous, lends itself well to the bold, passionate performances for which he is well known. His poetic and academic careers intersect in their particular emphasis on the perspectives of the African descendants in Canada and Nova Scotia, especially the African-American slaves’ descendants who settled on the East coast of Nova Scotia, whom he calls "Africadian." He writes that it is a word that he "minted from 'Africa' and 'Acadia' (the old name for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia". He views "Africadian" literature as "literal and liberal—I canonize songs and sonnets, histories and homilies." Clarke has stated that he found further writing inspiration in the 1970s and his "individualist poetic scored with implicit social commentary" came from the "Gang of Seven" intellectuals, "poet-politicos: jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, troubadour-bard Bob Dylan, libertine lyricist Irving Layton, guerrilla leader and poet Mao Zedong, reactionary modernist Ezra Pound, Black Power orator Malcolm X and the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau." Clarke found "as a whole, the group’s blunt talk, suave styles, acerbic independence, raunchy macho, feisty lyricism, singing heroic and a scarf-and-beret chivalry quite, well, liberating." His poetry and scholarship, which address and challenge historic encounters with racism, segregated areas, discrimination, hatred, forced relocation and a loss of a sense of identity and a sense of belonging experienced by the Black populations of Canada, have earned him worldwide acclaim. In his anthology "Fire On The Water", Clarke uses a biblical timeline stretching from Genesis to Psalms and Proverbs to Revelation to present Black writings and authors born within a specific period. These names reflect the Africadians’ and other Black peoples’ forebears and the first singers' own preferences for singing "the Lord’s song in this strange land." In his most recent book, "These Are the Words", a collaboration with Canadian Poet John B. Lee, Clarke translates one of the nine books of the Bible's apocrypha into a vigorous English vernacular. It is a prime example of his wide and open poetic sensibility, in which the spiritual and the sensual have equally their part. His intellectual contributions involve both his ability to combine literary criticism and theatrical forte and his continuance of the themes of cultural inclusiveness and Canadian iconic symbolism. In his 2007 play "Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path", Clarke features his Liberal hero Trudeau (1919–2000) describing him as "the Shakespearean character: ...He’s a figure about whom it is almost impossible to say anything definitive because he is encompassed by so many contradictions but that’s what makes him interesting." In presenting a multicultural Trudeau on the international stage, Clarke seeks to capture the human dimensions, the personality of Trudeau rather than his politics so as to emphasize the dialogues among key characters and "show the people as people not just exponents of ideas". In 2012 Clarke was given substantial critical recognition in a volume devoted to the body of his writing, "Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke", edited by Joseph Pivato. In his 2016 and 2017 collections of poems, the names of which, "Canticles I (MXXVI)" and "Canticles I (MMXVII)", are a reference to Ezra Pound's The Cantos and The Song of Solomon, Clarke puts famous thinkers, explorers and rulers of the 17th, 18th and 20th Centuries into a dialogue on slavery and heritage. Together, these collections make up the first part of a projected three-part epic. Canticles II: MMXIX was released in 2019. In his time as Poet Laureate of Toronto, Clarke created the Poets' Corner at City Hall, and worked with the Toronto Public Library to create the Toronto Poetry Map, an electronic map of the city that marks all sites referenced in Canadian poetry, and presents the relevant lines to the viewer. He also founded the East End Poetry Festival. For these accomplishments and more he is credited with expanding the role and responsibilities of the Poet Laureate considerably. Clarke similarly expanded the role of Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate during his tenure, becoming the first to have his poems recited in the Houses and recorded in Hansard. Family. Mr Clarke is a great-nephew of the late Canadian opera singer Portia White, politician Bill White and labour union leader Jack White. Clarke is a seventh-generation African Canadian and is descended from African-American refugees from the War of 1812 who escaped to the British and were relocated to Nova Scotia. Clarke is the great grandson of William Andrew White, an American-born Baptist preacher and missionary, army chaplain, and radio pioneer, who was one of the very few black officers in the British army worldwide during World War I. Clarke also has Indigenous ancestors for the Mi'kmaq communities. Awards and merits. In 1998 Clarke won the Portia White Prize for Artistic Achievement. In 2001, he won the Governor General's Award for poetry for his book "Execution Poems," as well as the National Magazine Gold Medal for Poetry. He has also won the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award (2004), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize (2005-2008), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (2006), and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (2009). Clarke was appointed to the Order of Nova Scotia in 2006, and to the Order of Canada, at the rank of Officer, in 2008. On January 16, 2008 Clarke was made an honorary Fellow of the Haliburton Literary Society, the oldest literary society in North America, at the University of King's College, Halifax; and in 2009 he was a co-recipient of the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations from the City of Toronto for his outstanding achievements and commitment in making a distinct difference in racial relations in Toronto. Clarke was chosen expressly for "his local and national leadership role in creating an understanding and awareness of African and black culture and excellence in his contribution to redefining culture." In November 2012, Clarke became Toronto's fourth Poet Laureate. In January 2016, Clarke became Canada's seventh Parliamentary Poet Laureate. In 2018, thanks to a gift from Ms. Rebecca Gardiner, the George Elliott Clarke Scholarship Fund was established at Duke University.

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Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali is a Somali-Canadian writer. Ali wrote his first book, a memoir, "Angry Queer Somali Boy", while living in a shelter for homeless men in Toronto. Early life. Ali was born in a traditional Somali family in Somalia in 1985. His estranged father took him from his mother when he was young, and Ali then lived with his father, step-mother, and step-sisters in Abu Dhabi. His father then lied to apply for refugee status in The Netherlands. While still a youth, his family immigrated to Canada. Ali developed problems with over-using drugs and alcohol. Writing career. The "CBC" described his book in an article on important books on mental health. "The Advocate" described his book in an article on "The Best LGBTQ Memoirs of 2019". The "CBC" placed his book on their recommended reading list for the winter of 2020.

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Ryad Assani-Razaki Ryad Assani-Razaki (born November 4, 1981) is a Beninese-Canadian writer. His debut short story collection "Deux cercles" won the Trillium Book Award for French-language fiction in 2010, and his novel "La main d'Iman" won the Prix Robert-Cliche in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction in 2012. Born in Cotonou, Benin, Assani-Razaki first moved to North America in 1999, to study computer science at the University of North Carolina. After graduating in 2002, he struggled to find a job until registering for a master's in computer science at the Université de Montréal in 2004. He wrote his first short story in 2006, after witnessing an Asian man struggle to order food in a fast food restaurant because of his difficulties with the language. "Deux cercles" was published in 2009.

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Rinaldo Walcott Rinaldo Walcott (Born 1960) is a Canadian academic and writer. He wrote in 2021 "I was born in the Caribbean Barbados and have lived most of my life in Canada, specifically Toronto." Currently, he is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is also affiliated with the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Walcott was formerly an assistant professor at York University. From 2002 to 2007, he was the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Walcott's work focuses on Black studies, Canadian studies, cultural studies, queer theory, gender studies, and diaspora studies. He is out as queer. Work. Walcott published "Black Like Who?" in 1997, coming out of research related to his PhD studies which focused on, in Walcott's own words, "questions of popular culture and exploring how rap music in the early 1990s was emerging as an important social and political force across North America". The collection of essays in "Black Like Who?" expand this inquiry into areas such as poetry, literature, diasporic studies, film criticism and other discussions central to issues surrounding Black space, place, and landscape in Canada.

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Mary Ann Shadd Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the first black woman to attend law school in the US. Mary Shadd edited "The Provincial Freeman," established in 1853. Published weekly in southern Ontario, it advocated equality, integration and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States. Mary's family was involved in the Underground Railroad assisting those fleeing slavery. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, her family relocated to Canada. She returned to the United States during the American Civil War where she recruited soldiers for the Union. Self taught, Mary went to Howard University Law School, and continued advocacy for civil rights for African Americans and women for the rest of her life. Early life. Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 9, 1823, the eldest of 13 children to Abraham Doras Shadd (1801–1882) and Harriet Burton Parnell, who were free African-Americans. Abraham D. Shadd was a grandson of Hans Schad, alias John Shadd, a native of Hesse-Cassel who had entered the United States serving as a Hessian soldier with the British Army during the French and Indian War. Hans Schad was wounded and left in the care of two African-American women, mother and daughter, both named Elizabeth Jackson. The Hessian soldier and the daughter were married in January 1756 and their first son was born six months later. A. D. Shadd was a son of Jeremiah Shadd, John's younger son, who was a Wilmington butcher. Abraham Shadd was trained as a shoemaker and had a shop in Wilmington and later in the nearby town of West Chester, Pennsylvania. In both places he was active as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and in other civil rights activities, being an active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, in 1833, named President of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Colour in Philadelphia. Growing up, her family's home frequently served as a refuge for fugitive slaves; however, when it became illegal to educate African-American children in the state of Delaware, the Shadd family moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary attended a Quaker Boarding School (despite being raised Catholic). In 1840, after being away at school, Shadd returned to East Chester and established a school for black children. She also later taught in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and New York City. Three years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, A. D. Shadd moved his family to the United Canadas (Canada West), settling in North Buxton, Ontario. In 1858, he became one of the first black men to be elected to political office in Canada, when he was elected to the position of Counsellor of Raleigh Township, Ontario. Social activism. In 1848, Frederick Douglass asked readers in his newspaper, " The North Star", to offer their suggestions on what could be done to improve life for African-Americans. Shadd, then only 25 years of age, wrote to him to say, "We should do more and talk less." She expressed her frustration with the many conventions that had been held to that date, such as those attended by her father, where speeches were made and resolutions passed about the evils of slavery and the need for justice for African-Americans. Yet little tangible improvement had resulted. Douglass published her letter in his paper. When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the United States threatened to return free northern blacks and escaped slaves into bondage, Shadd and her brother Isaac Shadd moved to Canada, and settled in Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, where Shad's efforts to create free black settlements in Canada first began. While in Windsor, she founded a racially integrated school with the support of the American Missionary Association. Public education in Ontario was not open to black students at the time. Shadd offered daytime classes for children and youth, and evening classes for adults. An advocate for emigration, in 1852, Shadd published a pamphlet entitled "A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: with Suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver's Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants." The pamphlet discussed the benefits of emigration, as well as the opportunities for blacks in the area. "The Provincial Freeman". In 1853, Shadd founded an anti-slavery paper, called " The" "Provincial Freeman""." The paper's slogan was "Devoted to antislavery, temperance and general literature." It was published weekly and the first issue was published in Toronto, Ontario, on March 24, 1853. It ran for four years before financial challenges forced the paper to fold. Shadd was aware that her name would affect the number of people reading it, because of the gender expectations of 19th-century society. So, she persuaded Samuel Ringgold Ward, a black abolitionist who published several abolitionist newspapers, including "Impartial Citizen," to help her publish it. She also enlisted the help of Rev. Alexander McArthur, a white clergyman. Their names were featured on the masthead, but Shadd was involved in all aspects of the paper. Isaac Shadd, Mary Ann Shadd's brother, managed the daily business affairs of the newspaper. Isaac was a committed abolitionist, and would later host gatherings to plan the raid on Harper's Ferry at his home. Shadd traveled widely in Canada and the United States to increase subscription to the paper, and to publicly solicit aid for runaway slaves. Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, these trips included significant risk to Shadd's well-being; free blacks could be captured by bounty hunters seeking escaped slaves. As was typical in the black press, "The Provincial Freeman" played an important role by giving voice to the opinions of black Canadian anti-slavery activists. The impact of African-American newspapers from 1850–1860 was significant in the abolitionist movement. However, it was challenging to sustain publication. Publishers like Shadd undertook their work because of a commitment to education and advocacy and used their newspapers as a means to influence opinion. They had to overcome financial, political, and social challenges to keep their papers afloat. Carol B. Conaway writes in "Racial Uplift: The Nineteenth Century Thought of Black Newspaper Publisher Mary Ann Shadd Cary" that these newspapers shifted the focus from whites to blacks in an empowering way. She writes that whites read these newspapers to monitor the dissatisfaction level of the treatment of African Americans and to measure their tolerance for continued slavery in America. Black newspapers often modeled their newspapers on mainstream white publications. According to research conducted by William David Sloan in his various historical textbooks, the first newspapers were about four pages and had one blank page to provide a place for people to write their own information before passing it along to friends and relatives. He goes even further to discuss how the newspapers during these early days were the center of information for society and culture. In 1854, Shadd changed the masthead to feature her own name, rather than McArthur and Ward. She also hired her sister to help edit the paper. There was intense criticism of the change, and Shadd was forced to resign the following year. Civil War and postbellum activism. Between 1855 and 1856, Shadd traveled in the United States as an anti-slavery speaker, advocating for full racial integration through education and self-reliance. In her speeches, she advised all blacks to insist on fair treatment and if all else failed, to take legal action. She sought to participate in the 1855 Philadelphia Colored Convention, but women had never been permitted to attend, and the assembly had to debate whether to let her sit as a delegate. Her advocacy of emigration made her a controversial figure and she was only admitted by a slim margin of 15 votes. According to Frederick Douglass's Paper, although she gave a speech at the Convention advocating for emigration, she was so well-received that the delegates voted to give her ten more minutes to speak. However, her presence at the Convention was largely elided from the minutes, likely because she was a woman. In 1856, she married Thomas F. Cary, a Toronto barber who was also involved with the "Provincial Freeman". She had a daughter named Sarah and a son named Linton. In 1858, she was a member of the Chatham Vigilance Committee that sought to prevent former slaves from being returned to the United States and brought back into slavery, such as the case of Sylvanus Demarest. After her husband died in 1860, Shadd Cary and her children returned to the United States. During the Civil War, at the behest of the abolitionist Martin Delany, she served as a recruiting officer to enlist black volunteers for the Union Army in the state of Indiana. After the Civil War, she taught in black schools in Wilmington. She then returned to Washington, D.C., with her daughter, and taught for fifteen years in the public schools. She then attended Howard University School of Law and graduated at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming only the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree. She wrote for the newspapers " National Era" and "The People's Advocate" and in 1880, organized the Colored Women's Progressive Franchise. Shadd Cary joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for women's suffrage, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and becoming the first African-American woman to vote in a national election. She died in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1893, from stomach cancer. She was interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery. Legacy. In the United States, Shadd Cary's former residence in the U Street Corridor of Washington, DC, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. In 1987 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. In 1998, Shadd Cary was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In Canada, she was designated a Person of National Historic Significance, with a plaque from the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board placed in Chatham, Ontario. There, at BME Freedom Park, Ontario provincial plaques also honor her and her newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. In Toronto, a Heritage Toronto plaque marks where she published the Provincial Freeman while living in the city from 1854 to 1855. Shadd Cary is featured in Canada's citizenship test study guide, released in 2009. In 1985 Mary Shadd Public School was opened in Scarborough Ontario Canada, in the town of Malvern, and was later enlarged in 1992. The school motto "Free to be...the best of me" and school anthem "We're on the right track...Mary Shadd" are tributes to Shadd, after whom the school was named. In 2018 the "New York Times" published a belated obituary for her. Shadd's 197th birthday was observed with a Google Doodle on October 9, 2020, appearing across Canada, the United States, Latvia, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. The Mary Ann Shadd Cary Post Office, named that in 2021, is at 500 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1, in Wilmington, Delaware. Archives. There is a Mary Ann Shadd Cary collection at Library and Archives Canada. The archival reference number is R4182, former archival reference number MG24-K22. The collection covers the date range 1852 to 1889. It consists of 1.6 centimeters of textual records, and 1 photograph.

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Josiah Henson Josiah Henson (June 15, 1789 – May 5, 1883) was an author, abolitionist, and minister. Born into slavery, in Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, he escaped to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1830, and founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, near Dresden, in Kent County, Upper Canada, of Ontario. Henson's autobiography, "The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself" (1849), is believed to have inspired the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). Following the success of Stowe's novel, Henson issued an expanded version of his memoir in 1858, "Truth Stranger Than Fiction. Father Henson's Story of His Own Life" (published Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1858). Interest in his life continued, and nearly two decades later, his life story was updated and published as "Uncle Tom's Story of His Life: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson" (1876). Early life and slavery. Josiah Henson was born on a farm near Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, on a plantation owned by Francis Newman, where Henson experienced slave atrocities. Henson’s father was enslaved by Francis Newman whereas Josiah Henson, his mother, and his siblings were enslaved by Dr. Josiah McPherson. When he was a boy, his father was punished for standing up to a slave overseer, for which he received one hundred lashes. In addition, his right ear was nailed to the whipping post and then cut off. His father was sold away to Alabama. Josiah Henson experienced hardships and sufferings at the hands of his masters as well, including having his arms broken and an injury to his back. Following his family's master's death, young Josiah was separated from his mother, brothers, and sisters. At the slave auction, Henson’s siblings were sold first. His mother was bought by Issac Riley of Montgomery County and when she pleaded to her new owner to purchase Josiah Henson, Riley responded by hitting and kicking her. Josiah Henson was sold to Adam Robb of Rockville, Montgomery County. Adam Robb encountered Issac Riley and struck a deal which resulted in Henson being sold to Riley and was reunited with his mother. Josiah Henson became very ill. His mother pleaded with her owner, Isaac Riley, and Riley agreed to buy back Henson so she could at least have her youngest child with her, on the condition that he would work in the fields. Riley would not regret his decision, for Henson rose in his owners' esteem, and was eventually entrusted as the supervisor of his master's farm, located in Montgomery County, Maryland (in what is now North Bethesda). In 1825, Mr. Riley fell onto economic hardship and was sued by a brother-in-law. Desperate, he begged Henson, with tears in his eyes, to promise to help him. Duty bound, Henson agreed. Mr. Riley then told him that he needed to take his eighteen slaves to his brother in Kentucky by foot. They arrived in Daviess County, Kentucky, in the middle of April 1825 at the plantation of Mr. Amos Riley. In September 1828, Henson returned to Maryland in an attempt to buy his freedom from Issac Riley. He tried to buy his freedom by giving his master $350, which he had saved up, and a note promising a further $100. Originally, Henson only needed to pay the extra $100 by note. Mr. Riley, however, added an extra zero to the paper and changed the fee to $1000. Cheated of his money, Henson returned to Kentucky and then escaped to Kent County, Upper Canada, in 1830, after learning that he might be sold again. In the last of these attempts to attain freedom, Amos Riley, agreed to give Josiah his freedom in exchange for $300. Josiah raised the money only to find that his master had raised the fee. Soon after, Henson learned that Riley planned to sell him in New Orleans, Louisiana, separating him from his wife and four children. When he found this out, Henson became determined to escape to Canada and freedom. He took his family with him, including his wife and their children to start the new life northward. Escape from slavery. After convincing his wife to escape with him, Henson’s wife created a knapsack large enough to carry both of their smallest children and the eldest two would accompany his wife. The Henson family left Kentucky traveling through the night and sleeping in the woods throughout the day. They crossed into Indiana then into Cincinnati where they were safely welcomed in a home for a few days. As the Henson family was crossing Hull’s Road in Ohio, Josiah’s wife fainted out of exhaustion. As they continued on, they encountered Indians and were reinvigorated with food and rest. After crossing a lake in Ohio, Josiah encountered Captain Burnham, a ship captain, who agreed to transport the Henson family to Buffalo, New York and there they would cross the river into Canada. Upon setting foot into Canada, Josiah Henson described the ecstatic feelings of liberation by throwing himself onto the ground and rejoicing with his family. On October 28, 1830, Josiah Henson became a liberated man.   Slavery policy in Canada. Upper Canada had become a refuge for slaves who had escaped from the United States after 1793, when Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe passed "An Act to prevent the further introduction of Slaves, and limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province". The legislation did not immediately end slavery in the colony, but it did prevent the importation of slaves. As a result, any U.S. slave who set foot in what would eventually become Ontario was free. By the time Henson arrived, others had already made Upper Canada their home, including Black Loyalists from the American Revolution and refugees from the War of 1812. In 1833, slavery was outlawed in the British Empire. At this time, Canadians were still a part of colonial British Canada. Later life. Josiah Henson first worked on farms near Fort Erie, then Waterloo, moving with friends to Colchester in 1834 to set up a Black settlement on rented land. After earning enough, Henson was able to send his eldest son Tom to school who then taught Josiah how to read. Henson became literate and was able to lead the growing community of fugitive slaves in Canada. Through contacts and financial assistance there, he was able to purchase in Dawn Township, in neighbouring Kent County, to realize his vision of a self-sufficient community. The Dawn Settlement eventually reached a population of 500 at its height, exporting black walnut lumber to the United States and Britain. Henson purchased an additional next to the Settlement, where his family lived. Henson also became an active Methodist preacher and spoke as an abolitionist on routes between Tennessee and Ontario. He also served in the Canadian Army as a military officer, having led a Black militia unit in the Canadian Rebellion of 1837. In 1838, Henson and the militia successfully captured the rebel ship Anne, cutting off their supply lines to southwestern Upper Canada. Though many residents of the Dawn Settlement returned to the United States after slavery was abolished there, Henson and his wife continued to live in Dawn for the rest of their lives. Henson became the spiritual leader within the community and embarked on several trips to the United States and Great Britain where he met with Queen Victoria. While in Britain, Josiah publicly spoke to audiences and raised funds for the community back in Canada. Henson conducted several trips back to Kentucky to guide other slaves to freedom. In 1878, Rev. Henson was described as "a jovial old man", who "considering his age is pretty active". Miscellaneous. Josiah Henson is the first black man to be featured on a Canadian stamp. He was also recognized by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in 1999 as a National Historic Person. A federal plaque to him is located in the Henson family cemetery, next to Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site. A 2018 documentary titled "" covers his life. Historic sites. Josiah Henson Museum & Park—North Bethesda, Maryland. The actual cabin in which Josiah Henson and other slaves were housed no longer exists. The Riley family house, however, remains and is currently in a residential development in Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland. After having remained in the hands of private owners for nearly two centuries, on January 6, 2006, the Montgomery Planning Board agreed to purchase the property and the acre of land on which it stands for $1,000,000. The house was opened to the public for one weekend in 2006. As of March 2009, the site has received an additional $50,000 from the Maryland state Board of Public Works for the planning and design phase of a multiyear restoration project. An additional $100,000 may come from the Federal government that would go towards restoration and planning. The site was planned to be opened permanently to the public in 2012, until then there were guided tours four times a year. As of 2018, the Josiah Henson Museum & Park, in North Bethesda, Maryland, contains the Riley/Bolton house, where Henson's owner lived. The Montgomery County park site (construction/restoration) reopened to the public on April 23, 2021, after the completion of the renovations and installation of new exhibits and building of the visitor center. "Ongoing archaeological excavations seek to find where Josiah Henson may have lived on the site." Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site. Located near Dresden, Ontario, in Canada, Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site includes the cabin that was home to Josiah Henson during much of his time in the area, from 1841 until his death in 1883. The five-acre complex includes Henson's cabin, an interpretive centre about Henson and the Dawn settlement, an exhibit gallery about the Underground Railroad, outbuildings, a 19th-century historic house, a cemetery and a gift shop. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Harriet Beecher Stowe published the anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", in 1852. During the first year of being published, over one million copies were sold in Great Britain and the United States, which led it to become the best selling novel of the 19th-century. Stowe had the intentions of this novel being published when she wrote it; she had taken out a copyright for "Uncle Tom's Cabin" before it appeared in "The National Era." Stowe knew in order for her novel to play a pivotal role in the development of American culture; focusing on racism, slavery, and gender, she had to make a larger impact than the abolitionists of the press. Established by a Russian journalist, Stowe used "defamiliarization" to create new perspectives when it came to the issues she focused on, by presenting them in unfamiliar ways so people can see it in a different way. This helped support her endorsing domestic family values of all races, and presented the prejudicial assumption options about cultural differences in the 19th-century.

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Jael Richardson Jael Ealey Richardson is a Canadian writer and broadcaster. The daughter of former Canadian Football League quarterback Chuck Ealey, she is best known for "The Stone Thrower", a book about her father which has been published both as an adult memoir in 2012 and as an illustrated children's book in 2015. She has also written the theatrical play "my upside down black face", which was excerpted in "T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto's Black Storytellers". An graduate of the University of Guelph, she is the cofounder and artistic director of Brampton, Ontario's annual Festival of Literary Diversity, and has served as a writer in residence for the Toronto District School Board. She is a regular contributor of book reviews to CBC Radio One's arts magazine series "Q", has served as a guest host of "Q", and was cohost with Shelagh Rogers of the network's broadcast of the 2017 and 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize galas. Her debut novel, "Gutter Child", was published in 2021.

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Fitzroy Gordon Fitzroy Anthony Gordon (March 19, 1954 – April 30, 2019) was a Jamaican-Canadian broadcaster, radio host and DJ, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was most notable as the founder of G98.7, Canada's second radio station geared specifically to Black and Caribbean audiences. As a broadcaster, he was dedicated to community service, notably through his shows "Dr. Love" on CHIN Radio and "Grapevine" on G98.7. Early career. Born in Jamaica on March 19, 1954, Gordon immigrated to Canada in 1979 and worked as a sports journalist writing for newspapers and magazines in the Canadian and Caribbean communities. Gordon began his radio career on Toronto's CHIN radio station, producing and hosting the "Dr. Love Show", an overnight music and talk show aimed at the Caribbean community, for nineteen years. He simultaneously maintained a 15-year career as a sports journalist, specializing on cricket, on The Score where he hosted the International Sports Report, and the FAN 590 in Toronto, and as a columnist for newspapers the "Toronto Sun", the "Gleaner & Star", and "Contrast". In 1998 Gordon left CHIN in order to pursue his dream of opening a radio station dedicated to Black and Caribbean audiences. G98.7. G98.7 was a project realized through over a decade of work. Gordon was strongly motivated by a desire to see a platform for Black and Caribbean voices in Toronto. His first application for a broadcast licence from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was turned down in 2001. In 2009 he was given a partial license, which did not include broadcast frequency. Finally securing a frequency at 98.7FM, Gordon needed the approval of the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to broadcast so close to CBC Toronto's 99.1 FM band. The CBC initially refused, and Gordon spent all of his personal savings fighting them. The licence was also challenged by commercial radio station FLOW 93.5FM, claiming that the station would duplicate its format. This was despite community input that FLOW did not represent them or their interests. After a CRTC ruling in favour of the station in 2011, the station was officially licensed in June of that year. It launched that November with Jimmy Cliff's cover of "I Can See Clearly Now." The station's listenership quickly expanded to reach a diverse audience throughout the city inclusive of many communities. Gordon hosted G98.7's "Gospel Morning" program on weekends, and the "Grapevine Talk Show" on Sunday afternoons. In addition to Toronto's Black and Caribbean communities, Gordon encouraged programming focusing on Toronto's large African communities as well. Awards and honours. In 2015, Gordon received a Special Recognition Award from the Jamaican Canadian Association. Death and legacy. The call numbers of G98.7, CKFG-FM, include the initials of Gordon (CKFG), in recognition of his indispensable role in its founding. Gordon suffered a stroke in 2017 and died on April 30, 2019 in Toronto at the age of 65. At the time of his death, Gordon had been working towards a television station geared towards the Black and Caribbean communities. His death was noted in official statements by the Prime Minister of Canada, Andrea Horwath, Leader of the Official Opposition NDP, and the Mayor of Toronto. Horwath spoke at the memorial service at the invitation of the Gordon family. Hundreds attended Global Kingdom Ministries in Scarborough for Gordon's funeral service, including Ontario's first Black Caucus, made up of NDP MPPs elected to the provincial parliament.

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Yejide Kilanko Yejide Kilanko (born 1975) is a Nigerian Canadian fiction writer and social worker. She is known for addressing violence against women in her work. Her debut novel, "Daughters Who Walk This Path", was a Canadian fiction bestseller in 2012. Early life and education. Kilanko was born in 1975 in Ibadan, Nigeria, where her father worked as a university professor. She began writing poetry at a young age. She studied political science at the University of Ibadan. Move to Canada and social work career. In 2000, Kilanko left Nigeria, marrying an American and immigrating to Laurel, Maryland, in the United States. She then moved in 2004 to Canada, where she now lives in Chatham-Kent, Ontario. In Canada, she studied social work at the University of Victoria and the University of Windsor. She works as a therapist in children's mental health. Writing. Kilanko initially focused on poetry, later turning to fiction. She was prompted to write her first novel after struggling with vicarious trauma from hearing about the experiences of the children she works with as a mental health counselor. Her debut book, "Daughters Who Walk This Path", was published in 2012. Set in her hometown of Ibadan, it deals with sexual assault and violence against women and children in Nigeria, told through the eyes of a child narrator. It was described by reviewers as breaking boundaries on the taboo of discussing sexual violence, particularly in Nigeria. "Daughters Who Walk This Path" was a Canadian national fiction bestseller for several weeks."" It was featured on the "Globe and Mail"'s list of 100 best books of 2012. In 2014, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recommended it for summer reading in the "Guardian". Her novel was also shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016, after it was released there by a Nigerian publisher. The prize eventually went to Abubakar Adam Ibrahim for his book "Season of Crimson Blossoms." Her subsequent work of fiction, the novella "Chasing Butterflies", was published in 2015 as a fundraiser for Worldreader. It also discusses violence against women, focusing on domestic violence. In 2018, she published a children's book, "There Is an Elephant in My Wardrobe", which is intended to help children with anxiety. Her forthcoming novel, "Moldable Women", "fictionalizes the stories of female Nigerian nurses living in the United States who were murdered by their much older husbands." The manuscript of "Moldable Women" was shortlisted for Canada's Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction in 2019. Kilanko identifies as a feminist and describes her work as inherently feminist. She says she is particularly influenced by African and African American women writers such as Buchi Emecheta, Chika Unigwe, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

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Archie Alleyne Archie Alleyne (January 7, 1933 – June 8, 2015) was a Canadian jazz drummer. Best known as a drummer for influential jazz musicians such as Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, he was also prominent as a recording artist on his own and with Canadian jazz musicians such as Oliver Jones, Cy McLean and Brian Browne. Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Alleyne became the house drummer at the Town Tavern jazz club in his 20s. Following a serious car accident in 1967, Alleyne stepped away from music for a number of years, becoming a partner in a soul food restaurant in Toronto. He returned to music in the early 1980s with Jones' band. Alleyne was named to the Order of Canada in 2011. He established the Archie Alleyne Scholarship Fund to provide bursaries to music students, and wrote "Colour Me Jazz: The Archie Alleyne Story", an autobiography slated for future publication.

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Kim Katrin Milan Kim Katrin (born March 9, 1984) is a Canadian American writer, multidisciplinary artist, activist, consultant, and educator. She was formerly credited as Kim Crosby and Kim Katrin Milan. She speaks on panels and keynotes conferences nationally, and facilitates radical community dialogues. Her art, activism and writing has been recognized nationally. Education. Katrin completed her artist residency under d'bi Young at the AnitAfrika Theatre and was a student of the Buddies in Bad Times Young Creator's Unit. She is a certified yoga trainer and teacher. Writing, art, and work. Katrin's writing and voice have been featured on NPR, CBC Radio, Out (magazine), the Toronto Star, The National Post, The Huffington Post, Autostraddle Feminist Wire, Elixher, and Daily Xtra. She has created over 70 workshop series on social change, anti-oppression, intersectionality, race, gender, leadership, youth and young women's empowerment. As a multidisciplinary artist, she regularly curates exhibitions, cabarets events, performs and works on productions across Canada. She produced and co-curated the Buddies in Bad Times Cabaret Insatiable Sisters with Gein Wong. She also engages in community based healing initiatives including teaching Queer and Brown Girls Yoga, and hosting yearly healing retreats for femme identified Folks of Colour and Indigenous Folks. Brave New Girls, retreats and healing skill shares. Other community work includes consulting, curricula development, community empowerment, facilitation and workshops. Professional affiliations and community service. Katrin sat on the boards of Artreach, Shadeism and the Toronto Arts Council Community Arts Council.

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Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for "The New Yorker" since 1996. He has published seven books: ' (2000); ' (2005); ' (2008); ' (2009), a collection of his journalism; ' (2013); "Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know" (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021)."' His first five books were on "The New York Times" Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast "Revisionist History" and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. Gladwell's writings often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences, like sociology and psychology, and make frequent and extended use of academic work. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011. Early life. Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (née Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, was a mathematics professor from Kent, England. Throughout his childhood, Malcolm lived in rural Ontario Mennonite country, where he attended a Mennonite church. Research done by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that one of Gladwell's maternal ancestors was a Jamaican free woman of colour (mixed black and white) who was a slaveowner. His great-great-great-grandmother was of Igbo ethnicity from West Africa. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer. When he was six his family moved from Southampton to the Mennonite community of Elmira, Ontario, Canada. Gladwell's father noted Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm was 11, his father, who was a professor of mathematics and engineering at the University of Waterloo, allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in History from the Trinity College of University of Toronto, in 1984. Career. Gladwell's grades were not high enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, "college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me"), so he decided to pursue advertising as a career. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at conservative magazine "The American Spectator" and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for "Insight on the News", a conservative magazine owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for "The Washington Post", where he worked until 1996. In a personal elucidation of the 10,000-hour rule he popularized in "Outliers", Gladwell notes, "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years—exactly that long." When Gladwell started at "The New Yorker" in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration". His first assignment was to write a piece about fashion. Instead of writing about high-class fashion, Gladwell opted to write a piece about a man who manufactured T-shirts, saying: "[I]t was much more interesting to write a piece about someone who made a T-shirt for $8 than it was to write about a dress that costs $100,000. I mean, you or I could make a dress for $100,000, but to make a T-shirt for $8 – that's much tougher." Gladwell gained popularity with two "New Yorker" articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt". These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, "The Tipping Point", for which he received a $1 million advance. He continues to write for "The New Yorker". Gladwell also served as a contributing editor for "Grantland", a sports journalism website founded by former ESPN columnist Bill Simmons. In a July 2002 article in "The New Yorker", Gladwell introduced the concept of the "talent myth" that companies and organizations, in his view, incorrectly follow. This work examines different managerial and administrative techniques that companies, both winners and losers, have used. He states that the misconception seems to be that management and executives are all too ready to classify employees without ample performance records and thus make hasty decisions. Many companies believe in disproportionately rewarding "stars" over other employees with bonuses and promotions. However, with the quick rise of inexperienced workers with little in-depth performance review, promotions are often incorrectly made, putting employees into positions they should not have and keeping other, more experienced employees from rising. He also points out that under this system, narcissistic personality types are more likely to climb the ladder, since they are more likely to take more credit for achievements and take less blame for failure. He states both that narcissists make the worst managers and that the system of rewarding "stars" eventually worsens a company's position. Gladwell states that the most successful long-term companies are those who reward experience above all else and require greater time for promotions. Works. With the release of "The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War" in April 2021, Gladwell has had seven books published. When asked for the process behind his writing, he said: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is, I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap". "The Tipping Point". The initial inspiration for his first book, "The Tipping Point", which was published in 2000, came from the sudden drop of crime in New York City. He wanted the book to have a broader appeal than just crime, however, and sought to explain similar phenomena through the lens of epidemiology. While Gladwell was a reporter for "The Washington Post", he covered the AIDS epidemic. He began to take note of "how strange epidemics were", saying epidemiologists have a "strikingly different way of looking at the world". The term "tipping point" comes from the moment in an epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate. Gladwell's theories of crime were heavily influenced by the "broken windows theory" of policing, and Gladwell is credited for packaging and popularizing the theory in a way that was implementable in New York City. Gladwell's theoretical implementation bears a striking resemblance to the "stop-and-frisk" policies of the NYPD. However, in the decade and a half since its publication, "The Tipping Point" and Gladwell have both come under fire for the tenuous link between "broken windows" and New York City's drop in violent crime. During a 2013 interview with BBC journalist Jon Ronson for "The Culture Show", Gladwell admitted that he was "too in love with the broken-windows notion". He went on to say that he was "so enamored by the metaphorical simplicity of that idea that I overstated its importance". "Blink". After "The Tipping Point," Gladwell published "Blink" in 2005. The book explains how the human unconscious interprets events or cues as well as how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly; Gladwell uses examples like the Getty kouros and psychologist John Gottman's research on the likelihood of divorce in married couples. Gladwell's hair was the inspiration for "Blink". He stated that once he allowed his hair to get longer, he started getting speeding tickets all the time, an oddity considering that he had never gotten one before, and that he started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. In a particular incident, he was accosted by three police officers while walking in downtown Manhattan, because his curly hair matched the profile of a rapist, despite the fact that the suspect looked nothing like him otherwise. Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" (2000) and "Blink" (2005) were international bestsellers. "The Tipping Point" sold more than two million copies in the United States. "Blink" sold equally well. As of November 2008, the two books had sold a combined 4.5 million copies. "Outliers". Gladwell's third book, "Outliers", published in 2008, examines how a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success. Gladwell's original question revolved around lawyers: "We take it for granted that there's this guy in New York who's the corporate lawyer, right? I just was curious: Why is it all the same guy?", referring to the fact that "a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography". In another example given in the book, Gladwell noticed that people ascribe Bill Gates's success to being "really smart" or "really ambitious". He noted that he knew a lot of people who are really smart and really ambitious, but not worth $60 billion. "It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations." "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures". Gladwell's fourth book, "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures", was published in 2009. "What the Dog Saw" bundles together Gladwell's favourite articles from "The New Yorker" since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. The stories share a common theme, namely that Gladwell tries to show us the world through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog. "David and Goliath". Gladwell's fifth book, "David and Goliath", was released in October 2013, and examines the struggle of underdogs versus favourites. The book is partially inspired by an article Gladwell wrote for "The New Yorker" in 2009 entitled "How David Beats Goliath". The book was a bestseller but received mixed reviews. "Talking to Strangers". Gladwell's sixth book, "Talking to Strangers", was released September 2019. The book examines interactions with strangers, covers examples that include the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia case at Penn State, and the death of Sandra Bland. Gladwell explained what inspired him to write the book as being "struck by how many high profile cases in the news were about the same thing—strangers misunderstanding each other." It challenges the assumptions we are programmed to make when encountering strangers, and the potentially dangerous consequences of misreading people we do not know. "The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War". Gladwell's seventh book, "The Bomber Mafia:A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War" was released April 2021. The book weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Reception. "The Tipping Point" was named as one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com customers, "The A.V. Club", "The Guardian", and "The Times". It was also Barnes & Noble's fifth bestselling nonfiction book of the decade. "Blink" was named to "Fast Company" list of the best business books of 2005. It was also number 5 on Amazon customers' favourite books of 2005, named to "The Christian Science Monitor" best nonfiction books of 2005, and in the top 50 of Amazon customers' favourite books of the decade. "Outliers" was a number 1 "New York Times" bestseller for 11 straight weeks and was "Time" number 10 nonfiction book of 2008 as well as named to the "San Francisco Chronicle" list of the 50 best nonfiction books of 2008. "Fortune" described "The Tipping Point" as "a fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way". The "Daily Telegraph" called it "a wonderfully offbeat study of that little-understood phenomenon, the social epidemic". Reviewing "Blink", "The Baltimore Sun" dubbed Gladwell "the most original American journalist since the young Tom Wolfe," though Gladwell is Canadian. Farhad Manjoo at "Salon" described the book as "a real pleasure. As in the best of Gladwell's work, "Blink" brims with surprising insights about our world and ourselves." "The Economist" called "Outliers" "a compelling read with an important message". David Leonhardt wrote in "The New York Times Book Review": "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today" and "Outliers" "leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward". Ian Sample wrote in "The Guardian": "Brought together, the pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art. There is depth to his research and clarity in his arguments, but it is the breadth of subjects he applies himself to that is truly impressive." Gladwell's critics have described him as prone to oversimplification. "The New Republic" called the final chapter of "Outliers," "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule". Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach. Even while praising Gladwell's writing style and content, Pinker summed up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning", while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book "Outliers." Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake in which Gladwell refers to "eigenvalue" as "Igon Value", Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong." A writer in "The Independent" accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights. "The Register" has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding: "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method." In that regard, "The New Republic" has called him "America's Best-Paid Fairy-Tale Writer". His approach was satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator". In 2005, Gladwell commanded a $45,000 speaking fee. In 2008, he was making "about 30 speeches a year—most for tens of thousands of dollars, some for free", according to a profile in "New York" magazine. In 2011, he gave three talks to groups of small businessmen as part of a three-city speaking tour put on by Bank of America. The program was titled "Bank of America Small Business Speaker Series: A Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell". Paul Starobin, writing in the "Columbia Journalism Review", said the engagement's "entire point seemed to be to forge a public link between a tarnished brand (the bank), and a winning one (a journalist often described in profiles as the epitome of cool)". An article by Melissa Bell of "The Washington Post" posed the question: "Malcolm Gladwell: Bank of America's new spokesman?" "Mother Jones" editor Clara Jeffery said Gladwell's job for Bank of America had "terrible ethical optics". However, Gladwell says he was unaware that Bank of America was "bragging about his speaking engagements" until the "Atlantic Wire" emailed him. Gladwell explained: In 2012, CBS's "60 Minutes" attributed the trend of American parents "redshirting" their five-year-olds (postponing entrance into kindergarten to give them an advantage) to a section in Gladwell's "Outliers". Sociology professor Shayne Lee referenced "Outliers" in a CNN editorial commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Lee discussed the strategic timing of King's ascent from a "Gladwellian perspective". Gladwell gives credit to Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross for inventing the Gladwellian genre. Gladwell has provided blurbs for "scores of book covers", leading "The New York Times" to ask, "Is it possible that Mr. Gladwell has been spreading the love a bit too thinly?" Gladwell, who said he did not know how many blurbs he had written, acknowledged, "The more blurbs you give, the lower the value of the blurb. It's the tragedy of the commons." Podcast. Gladwell is host of the podcast "Revisionist History", initially produced through Panoply Media and now through Gladwell's own podcast company. It began in 2016, and has aired 5 10-episode seasons. Each episode begins with an inquiry about a person, event, or idea, and proceeds to question the received wisdom about the subject. Gladwell was recruited to create a podcast by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate Group, which also includes the podcast network Panoply Media. In September 2018, Gladwell announced he was co-founding a podcast company, later named Pushkin Industries, with Weisberg. About this decision, Gladwell told the "Los Angeles Times": "There is a certain kind of whimsy and emotionality that can only be captured on audio." He also has a music podcast with Bruce Headlam and Rick Rubin, titled Broken Record where they interview musicians. It has two seasons, 2018-2019 and 2020 with a total of 49 episodes. Personal life. Gladwell is a Christian. His family attended Above Bar Church in Southampton, UK, and later Gale Presbyterian in Elmira when they moved to Canada. His parents and siblings are part of the Mennonite community in Southwestern Ontario. Gladwell wandered away from his Christian roots when he moved to New York, only to rediscover his faith during the writing of "David and Goliath" and his encounter with Wilma Derksen regarding the death of her child. Gladwell is unmarried and has no children. Gladwell was a national class runner and an Ontario High School (Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations – OFSAA) champion. He was among Canada's fastest teenagers at 1500 metres, running 4:14 at the age of 13 and 4:05 when aged 14. In college, Gladwell ran 1500 metres in 3:55. In 2014, at the age of 51, he ran a 4:54 at the Fifth Avenue Mile. Other appearances. Gladwell was a featured storyteller for the Moth podcast. He told a story about a well-intentioned wedding toast for a young man and his friends that went wrong. Gladwell was featured in General Motors "EVerybody in." campaign. Gladwell is the only guest to have been featured as a headliner at every OZY Fest festival — an annual music and ideas festival produced by OZY Media — other than OZY co-founder and CEO Carlos Watson. Gladwell has also appeared on several television shows for OZY Media, including the "Carlos Watson Show" (YouTube) and "Third Rail With OZY" (PBS). Gladwell has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans.

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Orville Lloyd Douglas Orville Lloyd Douglas (born September 26, 1976) is a Canadian essayist, poet and writer. Biography. Orville Lloyd Douglas was born in Toronto, Ontario to Jamaican parents. He graduated from York University with two Bachelor of Arts degrees. He completed his first Bachelor's degree in History and the second Bachelor's degree with honours in Sexuality Studies. Writing. Douglas' work focuses on the tensions and intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality. He has contributed to several Canadian and international publications, including "CBC News", "The Hill", "Film International", "TheRoot.com", "Washington Blade", "The Guardian", "ColorLines", "Word Magazine", "The New Zealand Herald", "Georgia Straight", "The Toronto Star", "Xtra!", "NOW", "Library Journal" and "The Philadelphia Inquirer". Poetry. Douglas' poetry has been featured in "The Maple Tree Supplement", "Wilderness House Literary Review", " SNR Review", "The Vermilion Literary Project","Pedestal Magazine". His poetry has also appeared in the "Seminal" (2007), the first anthology of gay male Canadian poetry, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. His verse has also been featured in "The Venomed Kissed", an Incarnate Muse Press anthology exploring issues of childhood emotional and psychological abuse. Douglas' first collected volume of poetry, "You Don't Know Me", was published by TSAR Publications. It is no longer in print. The book explored many polemical issues such as death, drug abuse, male prostitution, suicidal idealization, suicide, depression, identity, love, homophobia in Caribbean culture, and gay racism. Douglas' second poetry volume, "Under My Skin", was published by Guernica Editions on May 15, 2014. Black stereotypes in the media. In 2006, Douglas' piece "TV Still Stereotyping black women" was published in "The Philadelphia Inquirer". His perspective is the character Dr. Miranda Bailey on the ABC drama "Grey's Anatomy" is the stereotypical loudmouth and overweight black mammy. He also criticized the ABC talk show "The View" for engendering the racist stereotype of making television host "Star Jones" a modern Aunt Jemima. In 2007, Douglas' fifteen-minute radio documentary "The Good Son", was broadcast across Canada on the CBC Radio One program "Outfront". The first section of the documentary was an interwoven quilt of Douglas reading his poetry and interviewing his father. The second part of the documentary was a monologue as Douglas talks about his frustrations. He explores issues such as homophobia in the black community, the pernicious hypocrisy and gay racism in the homosexual culture, heterosexual marriage, family discord, and racism against black men. In the essay "Shades of Blackface", published in "The New Zealand Herald", Douglas criticizes Angelina Jolie for taking the female lead in the film "A Mighty Heart". Douglas argues that since the real Mariane Pearl is what he terms a "biracial" woman an actress of similar heritage such as Thandie Newton should have had the role instead of a white actress. Pearl, a multiracial woman, is the daughter of an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother and a Dutch Jewish father. He expands his thoughts about Hollywood racism and sexism against black women in "The Georgia Straight" opinion article "Is White the New Black?" In the piece "The Slighting of Serena Williams" featured in "The Guardian", Douglas argues that the white American tennis establishment has a history of disrespecting African American tennis champion Serena Williams . His perspective is, the hostility the white media have towards Serena Williams is rooted in racism and sexism because she is a black woman dominating women's tennis, which is still a white sport. November 22, 2013, Douglas article "White Privilege Keeps Crack Smoking Mayor in Office", was published on the African American website TheRoot.com. The piece examined the reticence of the Canadian media to discuss Toronto mayor Rob Ford's white privilege and the issue of race in the crack scandal. Race and LGBT issues. The essay "Is Madea A Drag Queen?" appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of "ColorLines". Douglas perspective is Tyler Perry's movies parrots a black gay aesthetic, reinforcing racist and sexist stereotypes about black heterosexual women and black gay men. The article "Same Sex Marriage's Colour Bar" published in "The Guardian", challenges the stereotype that the gay community is a monolithic group. He argues it is hypocritical and racist for the white gay elite to complain about homophobia in the mainstream culture, yet discriminate against gay people of colour. In September 2013, Douglas's essay "Why I won't be watching The Butler & 12 Years A Slave" was published in "The Guardian". Douglas criticized Hollywood for having a lack of imagination and making derivative Oscar bait black dramatic films about slavery. He also accused Hollywood of being heterosexist and creating films that only focus on black heterosexuals and ignoring black gays and lesbians. Douglas piece caused an uproar in the African American community. November 9, 2013, Douglas' piece "Why I Hate Being A Black Man" was published in "The Guardian". The piece examines Douglas' conflicting feelings about being a black man and the negative perception and stereotypes of black males in Canada. November 16, 2013, CNN host Don Lemon interviewed Douglas about the article. February 2014, Douglas wrote an article for "The Hill", criticizing the focus of black history month only focusing on black heterosexuals while ignoring black LGBT people. According to Douglas, the erasure of queer black history is due to homophobia in the black community. Douglas' March 22, 2017 article in "Film International" criticizes "Moonlight" and similar films by noting that "the suffering is about homosexuality, race, drug addiction, crime, and poverty. Black family dysfunction is the key for black films that want white critical acclaim and success." On June 12, 2017, Douglas' essay "I'm black and gay. Black Lives Matter Toronto doesn't speak for me" was published in the Opinion section of the CBC News website. The piece criticized Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) for disrupting the Toronto Pride Parade in 2016 and stating that BLMTO are not spokespersons for all black people. He further condemned BLMTO for not addressing homophobia in black communities in Canada, specifically drawing on his own experience feeling concerned for his personal safety as a gay black man at Caribana. Controversy. Douglas' piece "Why I won't be watching "The Butler" and "12 Years a Slave"" caused an uproar in the African American community. A Black writer Michael Arceneaux wrote a rebuttal essay "We Don't Need To Get Over Slavery... Or Movies About Slavery". Arceneaux criticized Douglas for being ignorant and having an apathetic attitude towards black Americans and slavery.

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Katherine McKittrick Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora. Biography. McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004. She is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada (College) and a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is former Editor at "Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography". Academic work. McKittrick’s work focuses on black feminist thought, cultural geography, black studies, anti-colonial studies, and the arts. McKittrick's writing centers black life—as empirical, experiential, spatial, and analytical processes—while also drawing attention to how black creative texts are expressive of anti-colonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books "Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle" (2006). and "Dear Science and Other Stories" (2021) as well as her edited collection and contributions to the book "Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis" (2013). McKittrick also edited, with Clyde Woods, "Black Geographies and the Politics of Place" (2007). Her research explored the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, Jimi Hendrix, Drexciya, Édouard Glissant, and Dionne Brand.

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Odimumba Kwamdela Odimumba Kwamdela (born J. Ashton Brathwaite) was a Barbadian-born writer who has published 14 books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and three musically dubbed spoken word albums. Background. In 1960, while in his early teens, he left his native Barbados for London, England. He eventually enlisted in the British Army and served in the Middle East. After military service, he left London for Ontario, Canada. There he freelanced with Toronto newspapers before becoming founding publisher and editor of "Spear Magazine", reputed to be the first Black magazine published in Canada. He once said, "I had big dreams of making Spear the "Ebony" of Canada." Eventually becoming disappointed with what he saw as the limitation of Spear in a nation with too small a Black population and believing the "controversial" label given to the original edition of his book, "Niggers...This is Canada", made him the object of governmental harassment, he exiled himself to New York City. There, during the Black Arts Movement of the mid-1970s, he made adopted the name Odimumba Kwamdela in place of his birth name. Kwamdela taught in for the New York City Board of Education as a high school teacher of Writing and Graphic Arts, serving for several years in the roughest schools in the world, one for adolescent offenders located in infamous, volatile Rikers Island Jail. He wrote a book detailing these experiences.

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Walter Borden Walter Marven Borden, (born 1942) is a Canadian actor, poet and playwright. He is originally from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. His film and television credits include "Nurse.Fighter.Boy", "The Event", "Gerontophilia", "Lexx" and "Platinum". Most prominent as a stage actor, he joined Halifax's Neptune Theatre company in 1972. He has since appeared in stage productions across Canada, including William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", "Richard III", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Merchant of Venice" and "Henry VIII", Aeschylus' "Agamemnon", Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Flies", James Weldon Johnson's "", Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", and Djanet Sears' "Harlem Duet" and "The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God". Since 2003, he has been a member of the Stratford Festival of Canada. He has also recorded and released an album, "Walter Borden Reads Shakespeare's Sonnets to the Music of Fernando Sor", in collaboration with classical guitarist Paul Martell. Personal life. Openly gay, he also wrote and performed his own autobiographical play "Tightrope Time: Ain't Nuthin' More Than Some Itty Bitty Madness Between Twilight and Dawn", one of the first plays in the history of Black Canadian literature to directly present themes of male homosexuality. His later writing credits include "Testifyin′" and "Tellin′ It Like It Is". Awards. Borden was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal, the African Nova Scotia Music Association (ANSMA) Music Heritage Award, and the Portia White Prize, which is awarded annually by the Nova Scotia Arts Council to someone who has made a significant contribution to culture and the arts in Nova Scotia. He was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2006. In 2007, Borden was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award for his prominence as a theater actor.

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Kayla Perrin Kayla Perrin (possibly born in 1970) is a Jamaica-born Canadian author who has written romance novels, children's books, and suspense novels. "She has received an Arts Acclaim Award for her writing from the city of Brampton, Ontario." Perrin received the Harry Jerome Award for excellence in the arts in 2011. She was featured in the documentary "Who's Afraid of Happy Endings".

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Trey Anthony Trey Anthony (born 1983) is a British-born Canadian playwright, actor, and producer, best known for her award-winning play and television series "Da Kink in My Hair". As a producer, she worked for the Women's Television Network and the Urban Women's Comedy Festival. She founded Trey Anthony Studios, a television and theater production company dedicated to producing new works of theater. Personal life. Born in London, England to Jamaican parents, Anthony arrived in Canada at 12 years old with her mother. They lived in the working class city of Rexdale before moving to the suburbs of Brampton. Before leaving for Canada, Anthony's mother had left ahead, leaving her from the ages of 6 to 12 to be raised by her grandmother. Anthony's grandmother had in turn left her mother in Jamaica when leaving for the UK. Anthony's grandmother had been part of the Domestic Scheme Act, allowing her to go to a first world country if she proved she had no family ties. She has a brother, Darren Anthony, who is also a writer. Anthony is openly lesbian. Career. She is a regular on the Canadian comedy circuit. She began doing stand-up comedy during African Nubian Comedy Nights where she honed her comedic wit and timing. She soon became a crowd favorite and began writing and producing her own sketch comedy shows at Second City. These shows sold out monthly and Anthony moved her monthly shows to a bigger venue, growing her audience, and creating more demand for her theatrical work and projects. She is a recipient of the prestigious Harry Jerome Award for the arts and the recipient of an Eve Ensler Award of the Arts. In 2017, Anthony launched her new brand, "Black Girl in Love", which features the first lifestyle planner/organizer geared at professional black woman and also includes merchandise, workshops and retreats. She has performed at The Second City, the Urban Womyn's Comedy Festival and Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. She was also a writer and performer for Kenny Robinson's sketch comedy show "After Hours with Kenny Robinson" and a writer for "The Chris Rock Show". In 2017, her play "How Black Mothers Say I Love You" debuted at the Factory Theatre, Toronto. She is currently working on turning "How Black Mothers say I Love You" into a feature film. In 2020, Anthony appeared in CBC Gem's "Queer Pride Inside" special. 'Da Kink in My Hair. Her hit play and television series, "'Da Kink in My Hair", has received tremendous critical acclaim, and was named one of the top ten plays in Canadian theatrical history and the winner of four NAACP and received several Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Originally set as a one woman show, "'Da Kink" documents the lives of women in a Caribbean style Jamaican hair salon in Toronto. Starting out at the Toronto French Festival in 2001 "'Da Kink" has been produced in California, New York, London, and was the first Canadian play to be produced at the Princess of Wales Theatre. Anthony is the first Black Canadian woman to write and produce a television show on a major prime time Canadian network. A television series version of "'Da Kink in My Hair" began airing in 2007 and Anthony was a cast member before the show was cancelled in 2009. "'Da Kink in my Hair" is currently touring again in Canada. Trey Anthony Studios. Trey Anthony Studios was founded by Anthony with the mission to "produce television and theater for urban audiences." It has produced and continuous to produce Anthony's works and has also produced "Secrets of a Black Boy", a play written by her brother Darren.

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Wilson A. Head Wilson A. Head (September 30, 1914 – October 7, 1993) was an American/Canadian sociologist and community planner known for his work in race relations, human rights and peace in the United States, Canada and other parts of the world. Early life. Wilson Adonijah Head was born on September 30, 1914, in Milner, Georgia. He "was the son of a Georgia sharecropper, Evander Head (1892–1925), and of Evelyn Whittle (1898–1981), the eldest of five children"; siblings Frank, Marvin, Glenn, and Minnie Head. He was of African American, Northern European, and Cherokee descent. He grew up in deep poverty in the small black community of Milner, near Atlanta. His father died when he was 11, but his mother stressed the importance of education, telling him he would have to be "twice as smart as whites to compete". "He was once fired from a job for glancing at a newspaper. His boss didn't think blacks should know how to read. His mother took in laundry but when Head delivered it to her white customers, white boys would throw bricks at him or jump him." Wilson worked to put himself through school, graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in 1933 and, after taking two years to work and save the fees, graduated from Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama in 1940 with a Bachelor of Science in Education, by which time he had been named in Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, 1939–40. In his memoirs, "A Life on the Edge: Experiences in Black and White in North America", Dr. Head describes the poverty and injustices to which Black people in the "Deep South" were subjected, and which he experienced in his youth. Biography. In the 1930s, Dr. Head took part in a series of "sit-ins" on restaurants and bars, and protested against barbers, shopkeepers, and movie house owners who would not serve blacks a decade before the civil rights movement began. He also helped to desegregate a golf course in Windsor. He worked at times with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From 1943 to 1948, he was director of community development and community organization at Flanner House in Indianapolis, which served poor and indigent Black people. "In 1981, then president of the National Black Coalition of Canada, he testified before the Joint House Senate Committee on the Canadian Constitution". He was on the executive of The Metro Committee on Race Relations and Policing. Dr. Head moved to Windsor, Canada in 1959 "to get my children away from a racist society". In the US, he had been director of Chicago's Parkway Community House, and director of the State of Ohio's Juvenile Diagnostic Centre. When he came to Canada in 1959, he was the Executive Director of the Windsor Group Therapy Project. In 1965 he became the Director of Research and Planning for the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. "He lectured in Social Work at the University of Windsor, 1960–1964, University of Michigan, 1962–1964, Wayne State University, 1963–1965 and Sir Williams College, Chicago, 1961–1964. He was involved with a number of organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association of Toronto as Vice-President in 1967, The National Welfare Council founding member and National Black Coalition of Canada as Chairman and President from 1977 to 1982. Dr. Head became the first chairman of the Bachelor of Social Work Program at Atkinson College, York University". In 1988 Dr. Head was asked to participate in the Donald Marshall Inquiry Commission in Nova Scotia. This investigation led to his paper "Discrimination Against Blacks in Nova Scotia: The Criminal Justice System". Assault. On June 26, 1980, Dr. Head was assaulted while climbing the steps to the offices of UARR (Urban Alliance on Race Relations), College Street at Spadina Avenue, Toronto. He was attacked from behind with several blows to the head, resulting in a fall down the stairs. It took the police over 40 minutes to arrive at the scene after being called. The identity of his white assailant was never discovered. Ideology. Dr. Head was raised in the Baptist Church, but became a member of the Quakers (Society of Friends) in the 1940s. The Quakers supported him in his own convictions of pacifism, egalitarianism, and conscientious objection to military service. He was seen as a "moderate" in his views on combating racism, although he was notably the first to put racism on the agenda of the Canadian conscience. His "quiet, reasonable style became his hallmark". He opposed segregation of the races all his life. "He denounced the idea of all-black schools and social services, asserting, 'segregation is inherently inferior. In his role as executive of the Metro Committee on Race Relations and Policing in Toronto, he was an "outspoken critic of Metro police", citing racial profiling in their practices. Dr. Head fought fiercely against poverty in Canada. He strove for peace and disarmament as Chairman of the Toronto Chapter, "World Conference on Religion and Peace", 1978–1984, member of "Science for Peace: Operation Dismantle", member of "Social Workers for Peace and Disarmament", on the steering committee for "Disarmament and Peace Movements", and member of "Toronto Disarmament Network" "If the bomb falls, race relations will not matter; we will all be dead." He also advocated for the abolition of prisons. Death. Dr. Head died of cancer of the prostate at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario on October 7, 1993. Honors and awards. Head received countless honors and awards in his lifetime, among which are: Works. Dr. Head authored and coauthored numerous research studies and articles, the more notable of which are:

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Brandon Ash-Mohammed Brandon Ash-Mohammed is a Canadian stand-up comedian, whose debut comedy album "Capricornication" was released in 2020. A Black Canadian of Trinidadian heritage, he is an alumnus of the comedy school at Humber College. He also has some Muslim ancestry, but was not raised Muslim; one of his comedy pieces on "Capricorniation" centres on the assumptions that people sometimes make about his identity because of his surname. Openly gay, he was the creator of Toronto's popular Ethnic Rainbow series of comedy nights for queer BIPOC comedians, and the host of Pride Toronto's televised "Virtual Pride" special during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. He was featured in The Comedy Network's 2018 "Homegrown Comics" special, and has been a writer for the sketch comedy series "TallBoyz".

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Dionne Brand Dionne Brand (born 7 January 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award. Biography. Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago. She graduated from Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando, Trinidad, in 1970, and emigrated to Canada. She attended the University of Toronto and earned a BA degree (English and Philosophy) in 1975 and later attained an MA (1989) from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Brand currently resides in Toronto. She identifies openly as a lesbian. Career. Her first book, "Fore Day Morning: Poems", came out in 1978, since then Brand has published numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as editing anthologies and working on documentary films with the National Film Board of Canada. She has held a number of academic positions, including: In 2017 she was appointed as poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. Brand is also a co-editor of Toronto-based literary journal "Brick". Writing. Brand explores themes of gender, race, sexuality and feminism, white male domination, injustices and "the moral hypocrisies of Canada" Despite being often characterized as a Caribbean writer, Brand identifies as a "black Canadian". She has contributed to many anthologies opposing the violent killings of Black men and women, the massacre of 14 women in Montreal, and racism and inequality as experienced by Aboriginal women of Canada, particularly Helen Betty Osborne's death in the Pas. "A Map to the Door of No Return". In Dionne Brand's piece, "A Map to A Door of No Return", she explores intergenerational trauma and post memory. Brand, using a variety of different elements, explores her own experiences through an autobiographical perspective as well as diving into explain a concept she calls "The Door of No Return." The Door is the space in which the history of black people is lost, specifically when slaves from Africa were transported through the Atlantic slave trade. Brand defines the Door of No Return as "that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New." It is a place that is as metaphorical as it is psychological, as imaginary as it is real. It is not a physical door, in the sense that it be found at a single location, but rather a collection of locations. At the same time, however, the Door can bring profound grief and pain to many in the Diaspora when they visit it—for example, at the slave caves in Ghana or Gorée Island—or encounter it, as Brand does when she flies over it and feels overwhelmed, tense, consumed with thoughts and feelings and images. The Door is a site of traceable beginnings that are left at the doorsteps, eventually forgotten and lost in historical and familial memory, as demonstrated when Brand's grandfather can no longer remember the name of the ancestral people they belong to. When passing through The Door, people lost their history, their humanity, and their ancestry. This trauma is still felt by black people today, which is the perspective from which Brand explores the concept. She gives examples of this through sports. she writes: "I hear my neighbour downstairs enter Shaquille O'Neal's body every night of the NBA Championships this year" Brand also describes how her interactions with her grandfather eventually became "mutually disappointing" and led to estrangement, as he could not remember the name of their tribe, the people they came from, and could not, thus, remember their family history. Essentially, Brand's short anecdote is about the insufficiency of memory and how incredibly limiting that is. The "fissure" that developed between her grandfather and herself parallels the "fissure between the past and the present," that gap in memory, as represented by the Door of No Return. There's a sort of historical, intergenerational trauma that's associated with this loss of memory, as those in the Diaspora can feel profound grief and pain from their interactions with the Door of No Return ("one does not return to the Diaspora with good news from the door" ). Brand begins "A Map to the Door of No Return" by recounting her long standing struggle with her Grandfather to remember where their ancestors were from. She marks this as being the first time she felt a burning desire to know her ancestry, stating that "a small space opened in [her]" (Brand 4) and that not knowing was "profoundly disturbing" (Brand 5). She describes this moment of recognition as reaching the door of no return; a place where our ancestors departed one world for another (Brand 5). In this moment, she is confronted with the reality that her life will consist of a never ending battle to complete her identity. Brand is intentional to note that her desire only came into full effect when she was denied knowledge of her ancestry. Contrary to Franz Fanon's theory that the pivotal moment in a Black child's life is the moment when they come in contact with the white world and are confronted with the full weight of their blackness, Brand's awakening was not dependent on the white world. The onset of her inner struggle to find belonging and self-assuredness occurred in an entirely black space. This feeling of being incomplete is common amongst Black people throughout the diaspora and, as Brand demonstrates, and is one of the driving forces in her desire to know her ancestry. Like Dionne Brand's struggle to remember her ancestors, she suggests that black individuals experience the sort of "double consciousness" that DuBois discusses in "The Souls of Black Folk." This idea of having to understand to different approaches as they go through life. Another theme that Brand explores in "A Map to the Door of No Return" is the theory and praxis of geography. In the text, Brand references several maps, geographers, and ideas related to geography and navigation (e.g. the Babylonian map, David Turnbull and "way-finding," Charles Bricker, the North Star and the Big Dipper, etc.) Juxtaposing these references to her analyses and reflections, she begins to deconstruct and challenge the systems of logic that constitute geography and borders, the way geography has been constructed and hailed as truth, and the emphasis we place on origins when we shouldn't, as origins are not only arbitrary, but they also reproduce the violence of the nation-state. As seen in her explanation, analysis, and subsequent application of Charles Bricker's notes on Ludolf and how asinine he (Ludolf) was, it's apparent that geography and the knowledge that is produced from this discipline is flawed. Brand uses figurative language in the text. Water, doors, the radio and memory figure boldly and lyrically. Through this figurative language, Brand links form and content where the figurativeness of her language, mimics the literal images of slavery that Brand witnessed on her journey to Africa. Her metaphors also help elaborate and emphasize her thoughts, and the understanding of the door. As she puts it, "The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora." "Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots". In "Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots" (1986), Brand and co-author Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta interviewed a hundred people from the Canadian Native, Black, Chinese, and South Asian communities about their perceptions of racism and its impact on their lives. The authors critiqued the existence and ubiquity of racism, disparities and resistance, arguing that two themes exist where racism prevails in their interviewees' lives: through "the culture of racism" and through structural and institutional ways. "Rivers" gives each individual an opportunity to speak about his or her personal and migration story. The interviewees speak of their anger, resentments, and complaints of being treated as different and inferior. Brand sees racism as a powerful tool to censor oppositional voices and disagrees with the conception of racism as isolated or unusual. "No Language Is Neutral". "No Language is Neutral" was originally published in 1990 by Coach House Press. It is a 50-page tour-de-force which tackles issues of immigration, environmentalism, slavery, lesbian love, identity, place and the female body, all from a no-holds-barred Black feminist perspective. The title of the book indicates that Brand is in conversation with writers of the Black Diaspora, namely Derek Walcott. Susan Gingell goes as far as to call him her "antithetical literary ancestor" whose views Brand fights against and rewrites in "No Language is Neutral". She is calling out Walcott, who in her opinion plays to the belief that "colonization brought civilization, brought culture." She confidently posits herself as the antidote to Walcott: he is the "Black colonial" who through literature dances with oppression instead of fighting it. In the Caribbean context, Brand's literary forbearers had almost been exclusively male so her take in "No Language is Neutral" is of utmost importance and her calling out of Walcott even more revolutionary. Coach House Press contracted Grace Channer to do the cover art of the book. Cohesive with Brand's vision, Channer produced a cover which depicts the bare breasts of a woman caressed by a hardened fist. The cover plays with the softness of themes such as love and desire but the hardened fist is there as a reminder of the difficult politics Brand is confronting in this volume. In her acknowledgements Brand thanks Ted Chamberlin, Michael Ondaatje and The Sisterhood to the Toronto Black Women's Collective. "No Language is Neutral" is blurbed by Michelle Cliff, Dorothy Livesay, Nicole Brossard and Betsy Warland. Critics such as Winfried Siemerling have hailed "No Language is Neutral" as a "breakthrough volume" for its uninhibitedness. In 1991, however, critics such as Ronald B. Hatch sung a different tune. He claimed that the "highly provocative material" in "No Language Is Neutral" coupled with "the Trinidadian English" was "monotonous" and lacked "imagistic representation". He claimed that the fault in "No Language is Neutral" was that it was "highly formal" and "highly rationalist" as if expecting Brand to write the opposite because of her 'other'/ 'exotic' status. Brand, however, did not conform to any of these expectations as can be seen in her later work too. Her incorporation of Patois in her prose-like poems for example continued way past "No Language is Neutral". ""No Language Is Neutral", sold over 6,000 copies, a remarkable number, even with a Governor General's Award nomination." Today, it has been adopted into school curricula Canada-wide. "St. Mary Estate". Personal experience and ancestral memory inform her short story "St. Mary Estate", from "Sans Souci and Other Stories", pp. 360–366. The narrator, accompanied by her sister, revisits the cocoa estate of their birth and childhood, recalling past experiences of racism and shame. She focuses on the summer beach house belonging to "rich whites" that was cleaned by their father, the overseer slave. Her anger over discrimination and poverty is triggered by the recollection of living quarters made of thin cardboard with newspapers walls - barracks that depict the physical, social and psychological degradation endured by the slaves who were denied the basic human rights and freedom. "This Body For Itself". In "This Body For Itself" (1994), in "Bread Out of Stone", Brand discusses the way the black female body is represented. She asserts that in male authored texts, the black female body is often portrayed as motherly or virginal. In female authored texts, the black female body is often portrayed as protector and/or resistor to rape. Brand states that it is understandable why this happens. The avoidance of portraying black female bodies as sexual is out of self-preservation, as black female bodies are often overly sexualized in their portrayal. However, Brand argues that this self-preservation is a trap, because desire and sexuality can be a great source of power, and suppressing this only further suppresses female power to own their own desire. She writes, "The most radical strategy of the female body for itself is the lesbian body confessing all the desire and fascination for itself" (p. 108). "Chronicles of the Hostile Sun". Brand wrote many of the poems in her fifth book of poetry, "Chronicles of the Hostile Sun", in response to the United States military occupation of Grenada. Brand had been living in Grenada and working for a Canadian non-profit organization when the United States invasion of the island took place. The Reagan Administration sanctioned the military invasion in response to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political party, the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, who became Prime Minister of the island after a coup in 1979. He was arrested and assassinated in the days leading up to the invasion in 1983. Brand's "Chronicles of the Hostile Sun," published one year later in 1984, is divided into three sections: Languages, Sieges, and Military Occupations. Poems in the lattermost section refer directly to Grenada, including mentions of Bishop and other prominent political leaders, the island's socio-political landscape, and scenes during and after the harrowing invasion. Titles in this section are often dates of significant events during the occupation, including "October 19th, 1983," the day Bishop was assassinated and "October 25th, 1983," the day the U.S. military began the invasion. The poem "On American numeracy and literacy in the war against Grenada" places the occupation in the broader context of revolution and U.S. military action in Cuba and El Salvador. Other themes. Other topics addressed in Brand's writing include the sexual exploitation of African women. Brand says, "We are born thinking of travelling back." She writes: "Listen, I am a Black woman whose ancestors were brought to a new world laying tightly packed in ships. Fifteen million of them survived the voyage, five million of them women; millions among them died, were killed, committed suicide in the middle passage." Brand has received numerous awards. Writer Myriam Chancy says Brand found "it possible ...to engage in personal/critical work which uncovers the connections between us as Black women at the same time as re-discovering that which has been kept from us: our cultural heritage, the language of our grandmothers, ourselves." Filmmaking. Dionne Brand made a number of documentaries with NFB's feminist-film production unit, Studio D, from 1989 to 1996. When Studio D was criticized for its lack of diversity, Rina Fraticelli, the executive producer at the time, created a program called New Initiatives in Film (NIF). It was out of this program that Brand partnered with Ginny Stikeman to create the award-winning "Sisters in the Struggle" (1991), a "look at Black women in community, labour and feminist organizing". This was part of the Women at the Well trilogy that also included "Older, Stronger, Wiser" (1989) and "Long Time Comin"' (1991). Brand's collaboration with producer Stikeman also became the "model for the Internship Component of NIF", which offered production experience at various regional studios across Canada and at Studio D in Montreal. Brand's film, "Older, Stronger, Wiser" (1989), which "features five black women talking about their lives in urban and rural Canada between the 1920s and 1950s", and "Sisters in the Struggle", were both distinct films in that they broke away from the mid-1980s survey films and instead focused on local issues to Canadian women. Brand did not have pointed interest in filmmaking until an opportunity arose to consult on a documentary about racism at Studio D. A white filmmaker was the lead on the project and after meeting with her for several days, Brand decided she did not want to be a part of the film. She told the Studio that she would be willing to "do something about Black women from their point of view," which resulted in "Long Time Comin"'. Brand directed "Listening for Something… Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation" (1996), a filmic reading and discussion between herself and the American elder lesbian writer. "Listening for Something" was being made during turbulent times as Studio D was being dismantled. Brand has also written the script and text for "Under One Sky… Arab Women in North America Talk About the Hijab". Brand's documentary work frequently focuses on multiculturalism and sexual pluralism in Canada. She warns against state-sponsored images of multiculturalism, stating that true diversity means people having "equal access to equal justice, equal jobs, equal education". Having critiqued the concept of 'nation' as the notion of "leaving out" Black women, Brand has focused much of her work on representation for her communities. Critical reception. Critics of Brand's early work focused on Caribbean national and cultural identity and Caribbean literary theory. Barbadian poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite referred to Brand as "our first major exile female poet." Academic J. Edward Chamberlain called her "a final witness to the experience of migration and exile" whose "literary inheritance is in some genuine measure West Indian, a legacy of [Derek] Walcott, Brathwaite and others." They cite her own and others' shifting locations, both literal and theoretical. Peter Dickinson argues that "Brand 'reterritorializes' … boundaries in her writing, (dis)placing or (dis)locating the national narrative of subjectivity … into the diaspora of cross-cultural, -racial, -gender, -class, and –erotic identifications." Dickinson calls these shifts in her conceptualization of national and personal affiliations "the politics of location [which] cannot be separated from the politics of 'production and reception.'" Critic Leslie Sanders argues that, in Brand's ongoing exploration of the notions of "here" and "there" she uses her own "statelessness" as a vehicle for entering "'other people's experience'" and "'other places.'" In Sanders' words, "by becoming a Canadian writer, Brand is extending the Canadian identity in a way [Marshall] McLuhan would recognize and applaud." But, Dickinson says, "Because Brand's 'here' is necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word 'unlocatable' – her work remains marginal/marginalizable in academic discussions of Canadian literary canons." In "Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women's Writing", Charlotte Sturgess suggests that Brand employs a language "through which identity emerges as a mobile, thus discursive, construct." Sturgess argues that Brand's "work uses language strategically, as a wedge to split European traditions, forms and aesthetics apart; to drive them onto their own borders and contradictions." Sturgess says Brand's work is at least two-pronged: it "underline[s] the enduring ties of colonialism within contemporary society;" and it "investigates the very possibilities of Black, female self-representation in Canadian cultural space." Italian academic and theorist Franca Bernabei writes in the preamble to "Luce ostinata/Tenacious Light" (2007), the Italian-English selected anthology of Brand's poetry, that "Brand's poetic production reveals a remarkable variety of formal-stylistic strategies and semantic richness as well as the ongoing pursuit of a voice and a language that embody her political, affective, and aesthetic engagement with the human condition of the black woman—and, more exactly, all those oppressed by the hegemonic program of modernity." The editor and critic Constance Rooke calls Brand "one of the very best [poets] in the world today", and "compare[s] her to Pablo Neruda or—in fiction—to José Saramago." The Thames Art Gallery in Chatham called Brand's documentary "Sisters in the Struggle" "radical in its amplifications of the voices of black Canadian women, who reflect on the legacy of the intersection of racism and sexism, alongside their personal battles in community, labour and feminist organizing". Activism. In addition to being a writer, Brand is a social activist. She is a founder of the newspaper "Our Lives", is past chair of the Women's Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and does work with immigrant organizations around Toronto. Awards and honours. Brand's awards include: Archives. There is a Dionne Brand fond at Library and Archives Canada, containing multiple media including 4.89 meters of textual records, 78 audio cassettes and 2 posters.

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Cheril N. Clarke Cheril N. Clarke (born September 24, 1980) is a Canadian-born contemporary author and playwright of gay and lesbian romance, drama and comedy. Life. Though born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Clarke's family moved to Miami, Florida when she was six months old.She has lived in the United States for the majority of her life. She is the last of three children born to Hyacinth and Thaddius Clarke. Creative writing. Books. Clarke is the author of many books, including novels, collections of erotic vignettes and poetry. Nonfiction. Poetry Plays. Her novel, "Intimate Chaos", has been adapted into a play of the same name and has been mounted in Bordentown, New Jersey, Plainfield, New Jersey and twice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Intimate Chaos" was translated to Spanish and performed at the Tercer Amor festival in Puerto Rico under the name Caos Intimo. Clarke's most recent play, "Asylum", was the recipient of the Audience Award of the 2012 Downtown Urban Theater Festival (now known as Downtown Urban Arts Festival) New York and runner-up for best play. Business and other contributions. Clarke later founded Phenomenal Writing, LLC, a communications consulting agency that provides ghost and speech writing services for executives around the worlds. Notable clients include General Electric and Cisco Systems. Clarke has also provided commentary for features on NPR. and WPEB 88.1FM Philadelphia.

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Alix Renaud Alix Renaud (30 August 1945 – 11 April 2021) was a Haitian-born Canadian writer. He was the son of Joseph M. Renaud and Béatrix Black. He was a professor of oral expression and diction, and he was the inventor of the word "pompion", meaning firefighter and stemming from the French word "pompier" of the same meaning. He became a member of the in 2010.

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Knowmadic Ahmed Ali, better known by the pseudonym Knowmadic, is an internationally recognized award-winning Somali-Canadian poet, writer, actor, musician, and youth activist. Biography. Knowmadic was born November 28, 1984, in Mogadishu, to a nomadic father and a mother whose family were farmers. His name is a portmanteau of "knowledge" and "nomadic". His family immigrated first to Italy in 1989, then to Canada. While in Italy, Knowmadic and his 3 older brothers stayed in boarding schools. Upon graduating, he attended Humber College in Toronto, Ontario for Comedy writing and performance. He was introduced to spoken word in 2009 by Titilope Sonuga who curated a regular poetry night called Rouge Poetry where she invited Knowmadic and others to help her found the Breath in Poetry Collective. He is serving a two-year term as Edmonton's Poet Laureate, from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2019, as its seventh Poet Laureate. Knowmadic is married and has two daughters. Career. In 2011, Knowmadic and team Edmonton won the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word championship. In 2013, Knowmadic received an opportunity to be Artist in residence at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in Seattle, Washington, initiating his career as a full-time artist. In 2017, he was runner up for public school board trustee in Ward A in Edmonton. In January 2018, he hosted the APAP Annual Awards Ceremony, honoring Martin Luther King. Knowmadic sits on community boards like the Edmonton Arts Council where he chairs the equity committee. Amongst youth, he promotes Empathy healthy lifestyles and actively supports the community through collaborative efforts. He has participated in vigils against violence and has also worked in attempting to integrate refugee children. Knowmadic works with the provincial government to make Alberta a more inclusive province.

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Ayesha Curry Ayesha Disa Curry (née Alexander; born March 23, 1989) is a Canadian-American actress, cookbook author, and cooking television personality. After guest roles in several television shows and movies, she began hosting her own show, "Ayesha's Homemade" ( "Ayesha's Home Kitchen"), on Food Network. Despite not having any professional chef training, her culinary career started in 2014, when she prepared her first meal as a YouTube demonstration on her channel "Little Lights of Mine". Curry is the author of several videos on her channel Little Lights of Mine and has written one cookbook, "The Seasoned Life", published in 2016. Career. At age 12, Curry acted as the love interest in the music video for "Too Young for Love" by Suga Prince (now known as Sevn Thomas). After graduating from Weddington High School, Curry moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, appearing in mostly in bit parts. She was in a film short "Underground Street Flippers" (2009), The TV movie "Dan's Detour of Life" (2008), was Girl #1 in the direct to DVD movie "Love for Sale" (2008). After her marriage she started a food blog, and then a YouTube channel. This led to a short lived Food Network show "Ayesha's Homemade" that was canceled after 13 episodes. Her company Little Lights of Mine sells its own brand of extra virgin olive oil, and 10% of all proceeds are donated to the charity No Kid Hungry. In addition to her written recipes, Curry often posts instructional cooking videos on her YouTube channel. In 2016, Curry collaborated with chef Michael Mina in The Mina Test Kitchen of International Smoke, a Bay Area pop-up restaurant, and released her cookbook "The Seasoned Life." She also began starring in "Ayesha's Homemade", which follows her professional and personal life with cameos from her husband and two daughters. The first season ran for six episodes. A second season of six episodes, named "Ayesha's Home Kitchen" premiered on Food Network on April 30, 2017. On September 20, 2017, Curry was named as a spokesperson for CoverGirl, becoming the first spokesperson for the brand who is not an actress or singer. She was announced on September 21, 2017 as one of the new hosts of "The Great American Baking Show", an American adaptation of "The Great British Bake Off", on ABC. She also revealed to Deidre Behar, from Entertainment Tonight, that she was approached to join the next season of "Dancing With The Stars." Only two episodes of the third season of "Baking Show", however, aired on television due to sexual harassment allegations against one of the show's judges outside the series. While the show was renewed for a fourth season, Curry did not return as a host and was succeeded by former Spice Girls member Emma Bunton. The Mina/Curry International Smoke restaurant is to open another location in 2019 at One Paseo in Carmel Valley, San Diego. More recently, she launched Sweet July Productions with a first-look deal at Entertainment One. Personal life. Ayesha is the daughter of John and Carol Alexander (née Chin) and has four siblings: Maria, Janiece, Jaz and Chad. Her mother is of Afro-Jamaican and Chinese-Jamaican descent while her father is of mixed African-American and Polish descent. She was born and raised in Toronto until the age of 14, when she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. She first gained an interest in cooking at a young age. With her mother operating a salon in the basement of their home, Ayesha would watch as her babysitter cooked Trinidadian curry and roti and brought it down to customers. On Jul 30, 2011, she married NBA player Stephen Curry. The two met in a church youth group in Charlotte when they were 15 and 14 years old. It wasn't until years later when Ayesha was pursuing her acting career in Hollywood and Stephen was visiting for an awards show, that the two started dating. Ayesha soon moved back to Charlotte close to where Stephen was playing college basketball at Davidson College. Together, they have three children. As of 2019, they reside in Atherton, California. Curry is a Christian; of her faith, she said: "It's the foundation for everything that I do, really. … With my relationship with my husband, it's what it's founded on." She added that "[W]hen Steph decided to play basketball, I had the same conversation with him that he had with me. 'Whatever you do, do it well, but do it for God.' I think that's what has kept us grounded. When I started my blog called 'Little Lights of Mine,' my whole goal was to do the things I wanted to do, but all while being a light for Him."

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Fil Fraser Felix Blache-Fraser (August 19, 1932 – December 3, 2017) was a Black Canadian broadcaster, non-fiction author, film producer, film festival founder, public servant, and educator in Alberta. Broadcasting and journalism. Born in Montreal in 1932, Fraser began his career in broadcasting in 1951, when hired at the age of nineteen by Foster Hewitt for his radio station CKFH in Toronto. In 1952, he worked as a radio announcer in Timmins, Ontario, for six months before being hired as assistant news editor at CKBB radio in Barrie, where he would become the station's sports director and play-by-play announcer, calling games for the Barrie Flyers. In 1955, Fraser moved back to Montreal, where he attended McGill University and hosted an all-night show at CKVL in Verdun. In 1956, he worked as a news editor at CFCF radio, eventually becoming chief writer. Fraser moved to western Canada in 1958, and initially worked in public relations for Saskatchewan Government Insurance. However, he also remained involved in radio broadcasting, hosting between-period hot stove league discussions on junior hockey broadcasts and sometimes doing play-by-play announcing. In 1960, he founded a newspaper called the "Regina Weekly Mirror". He moved to Edmonton in 1965, where he became program manager and senior producer of the Metropolitan Edmonton Educational Television Association (MEETA), Canada's first educational television channel, which aired on CBXFT. Fraser subsequently became producer/host of "Newsmakers", a weekly public affairs program on ITV Global Edmonton, and then served as president and CEO of VisionTV, Toronto. In 1974, Fil moved over to the ‘opposition', to host a one-year run of his own eponymous talk show on Dr. Charles Allard's newly-launched CITV private television station, and also began what would become a five-year stint as host of a talk show on CJCA-AM radio Edmonton. In 1980 he took his talk-show host talents across town to CKXM-FM Edmonton, which had just changed its call-sign from CFRN, to avoid confusion with the AM station that used the same call letters. This series ran for three years; in 1983 he became host of Alberta Morning, the daily program that ran on CKUA-AM, then operated by Access Alberta. Later, in 1987, he became Director of Development for Access Alberta, in Edmonton. Fraser served on the Alberta Task Force on Film and the Federal Task Force on Broadcasting Policy (Caplan/Savageau) and was the Governor of the Canadian Journalism Foundation as well as a member of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists. Death. Fil Fraser died in Edmonton on December 3, 2017 of heart failure, aged 85. He was survived by his wife, Gladys Odegard; his four children, three siblings and extended family. He was predeceased by his parents, Felix and Marguerite Blache-Fraser, and three siblings. Film. In the 1970s, Fraser formed a production company to produce educational television films. He then went on to produce four feature films, from 1977–82, including "Why Shoot the Teacher?" (executive producer), "Marie-Anne", "The Hounds of Notre Dame" (producer), and "Latitude 55°" (executive producer). He was a founding member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. He organized the first Alberta Film Festival in 1974, which later became the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association, and founded the Banff International Television Festival in 1979. Writing. Fraser's published non-fiction works include "Alberta's Camelot: Culture and the Arts in the Lougheed Years" (2003), which looked at how programs by the government of former premier Peter Lougheed helped the provincial arts sector to flourish from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. His 2006 book, "Running Uphill: The Fast, Short Life of Canadian Champion Harry Jerome", looked at the pioneering Black Canadian track star Harry Jerome. In 2009, he completed the book "How the Blacks Created Canada", part of a series of books from publisher Dragon Hill about how different cultural groups have contributed to the development of Canada. Public service and academia. Fraser served as Chief Commissioner for the Alberta Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1992 and served on the Spicer Commission. A writer and educator in the field of alcoholism and addictions, he served as head of alcoholism prevention programs for both Alberta and Saskatchewan. He was an adjunct professor in State and Legal Studies at Athabasca University. Honours. Fraser was a member of the Order of Canada and received the Alberta Achievement Award. In 2015, he was made a member of the Alberta Order of Excellence.

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Jennifer Holness Jennifer Holness is a Canadian film and television producer and screenwriter, who is the business partner of Sudz Sutherland, also her husband, in Hungry Eyes Film & Television. Her production and writing credits include the film "Love, Sex and Eating the Bones" and the television series "Guns", "She's the Mayor" and "Shoot the Messenger". Holness also directed the documentary film "Speakers for the Dead", and produced Catherine Annau's documentary film "Brick by Brick". Biography. Jennifer Holness was born in 1969 in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She moved to Toronto, Canada, at a young age with her mother. She attended York University, where she studied political science. This is also where she met her husband David "Sudz" Sutherland. The two were married after finishing their degrees at York University and have three daughters. Career. Holness has mentioned that growing up in a housing project helped shape her view of the city and how she crafts her work. The aim of her work has been a steady understanding of the stories that most people do not want to direct; touching subjects about gun violence, homophobia and deportation of immigrants in the city of Toronto. Holness' professional career started with a documentary in which she co-directed, "Speakers for the Dead" (2000) with her husband, Sutherland. Following the success from "Love, Sex And Eating the Bones", Holness produced and co-wrote a miniseries for CBC titled "Guns" (2009). She then went on to produce a documentary, "Badge of Pride" (2010), which looked at the struggles that gay police officers faced in the force. Holness went on to produce and co-write another feature film titled "Home Again" (2012), in which follows Jamaican deportees from Canada. Holness mentions that she obtained the inspiration for this film from a classmate in high school who was deported back to Jamaica- and killed in a shooting. It was in an attempt to challenge the bill C-43 which stated that immigrants with criminal records could be deported back to native countries. Her largest work to date with husband David Sutherland with a production value of over 4 million. She produced and co-wrote the TV crime drama, "Shoot the Messenger" (2016), a drama that follows a journalist who gets tied up with various third-parties (such as gangs and politicians) while she uncovers her first murder case. The idea was loosely based on the controversies of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. In 2021, her documentary film "Subjects of Desire" (2021) premiered at SXSW competing in the Documentary Feature Competition.

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Amatoritsero Ede Amatoritsero Ede is a Nigerian-Canadian poet. He had written under the name "Godwin Ede" but he stopped bearing his Christian first name as a way to protest the xenophobia and racism he noted in Germany, a 'Christian' country, and to an extent, to protest Western colonialism in general. Ede has lived in Canada since 2002, sponsored as a writer-in-exile by PEN Canada. He was a Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, and has worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian trade publisher, Spectrum Books. Ede is the publisher and managing editor of Maple Tree Literary Supplement (MTLS). Between 2005 and 2007 he edited an international online poetry journal, Sentinel Poetry Online. He was the 2005-2006 Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, under the auspices of PEN Canada's Writer-in-Exile network. He was also a SSHRC Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in English literature at Carleton University, from which he received in his PhD in 2013. His doctoral thesis was titled "The Global Literary Canon and Minor African Literatures," a cultural materialist analysis of the subordination of contemporary African literature to the metropolitan canon. He has a BA and MA in Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures and German Linguistics from the University of Hannover, Germany. Prizes. 1993 Runner-up prize of the Association of Nigerian Authors' (ANA) Poetry Competition with the manuscript of "A Writer's Pains." 1998 Won the "All-Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature" with his first collection of poems 1998 Won the ANA All Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature (endowed by Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel Laureate for literature) with his first collection of poems 2004 Won second prize in the first May Ayim Award: International Black German Literary Prize. 2013 Nigerian Literature Prize Longlist Publications. Research Articles. 2015 "Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse." "Research in African Literatures". Vol. 46.3. (2015): 112-129. 2016 "The Politics of Afropolitanism." "Journal of African Cultural Studies". Special Issue on Afropolitanism. 28.1(Jan 20, 2016): 88-100. Poetry Collections. 2009 "Globetrotter & Hitler's Children" (New York: Akaschic Books, 2009). 1998 "Collected Poems: A Writer's Pains & Caribbean Blues". (Bremen, Germany: Yeti Press, 1998; Lagos, Nigeria: Oracle Books, 2002). Poems in Anthologies. 2014 "Pro-rogue.""Poems for a Century: An Anthology on Nigeria". Tope Omoniyi ed. Dakar, Senegal: Amalion, 2014: 83. 2014 "Winter Morning" in "On Broken Wings: An anthology of Best Contemporary Nigerian Poetry". Unoma Azuah ed. USA: DeLite Press, 2014: 88. 2014 "Mother and Child" in "Onomonresoa: An Anthology of Nigerian Poets on Mothers and Motherhood". Obari Gomba ed. Lagos: Hornbill, 2014: 162-164. 2010 "Pro-rogue." "Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament". Toronto: Mansfield, 2010:45 2007 "Exile." "Songs for Wonodi". Dike Okoro ed. London: Malthouse, 2007:61. 2006 "Globetrotter." "TOK 1: Writing the New Toronto" Helen Walsh ed. (Toronto: Zephyr Press, 2006): 102. 2006 "Not in Love." "Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Nigerian Writing" Nduka Otiono & Diego Okonyedo eds. (Yenogoa, Nigeria: Treasure Books, 2006): 122-126. 2004 "The Skinhead's Lords Prayer." "May Ayim Award Anthology" Peggy Piesche et al. eds. (Berlin, Germany: Orlanda Verlag, 2004): 69. 1996 "Beside the Lagoon & "Rhythm." "Und auf den Strassen eine Pest" Uche Nduka ed. (Bad Honnef, Germany: Horlemann Verlag, 1996): 39-40. 1988 "Song" in "Voices from the Fringe: An ANA Anthology of New Nigerian Poetry". Harry Garuba ed. (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 1988):2. 1989 "A writer's Pains." "The Fate of Vultures: BBC Prize-Winning Poetry". Peter Porter et al. eds. (Oxford: Heinemann International, 1989):31. Poems in Journals. 2003 Poems in "Versal 1". Amsterdam 2006 Poems in "Drum Voices Revue". Vol. 14, # 1 & 2: 2006. Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, USA 2011-2012 Poems in African Writing. Issues 2, 3, 4, 7 & 8 Interviews (by George Elliott Clarke). 2010 "The Poet as Witness" in "Arc Poetry Magazine". Issue # 64 Literary Nonfiction in Anthologies. 2014 "The Peaceful "Trouble!" in "Mandela: Tributes to a Global Icon". Toyin Falola ed. North Carolina: Carolina Academic P., 2014: 137 Literary Nonfiction in Journals. 2015 "Wit and Witticisms." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 20. 2015 "Charlie Hebdo’s Ghost." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 19. 2014 "Ullie Biere: A pagan Yoruba Man in Christian Bayreuth." Maple Tree Literary Supplement issue 18. 2014 "The Example of Mandela." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 17. 2013 "Experience; Inexperience and (Un)Canadian Poetics." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 16. 2013 "The Ree, the Roo, the Raa!; or Bene Bene Pendentes!" Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 15. 2013 "World without End." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 14. 2012 "Sirens Knuckles Boots." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 13. 2012 " 'Easing’ the Arab Spring" in Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 12. 2011 "Face Me; I Book You: The Arts and Asocial Media." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 10. 2011 "The Middle East is a Fiction." Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 9. 2011 "How (Alfred) Noble is the Nobel Prize?" Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue 8. 2010 "Bakhtin the Poet" in Maple Tree Literary Supplement, issue 7. 2010 "Of Grammatology and Writing" in Maple Tree Literary Supplement, issue 5. External links. https://ub-bs.academia.edu/AmatoritseroEde/CurriculumVitae https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=6ijfgfcAAAAJ&hl=en https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/193252/1/ASM_35_183.pdf

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Desmond Cole Desmond Cole (born 9 April 1982) is a Canadian journalist, activist, author, and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was previously a columnist for the "Toronto Star" and has written for "The Walrus", "NOW Magazine", "Torontoist", "The Tyee", "Toronto Life", and "BuzzFeed". Cole's activism has received national attention, specifically on the issues of police carding, racial discrimination, and dismantling systemic racism. Cole was the subject of a 2017 CBC Television documentary, "The Skin We're In" and also hosted a radio show on Newstalk 1010 from 2015 to 2020. His first book, "The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power," was released in January 2020 and became the bestselling Canadian book that year. Early life. Cole was born in Red Deer, Alberta, grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, and went to secondary school in Whitby. He attended Queen's University for two years before dropping out, stating that "University is now job training, and I think that’s nonsense." After teaching French in the Durham region for two years, he moved to Toronto at age 22, where he began working with at-risk youth. In the spring of 2006, Cole competed in Toronto's City Idol competition and was the winner for Toronto-East York. The winners of the competition were assisted in running for city council in the fall of 2006, and Cole placed third in Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina in the 2006 Toronto municipal election, at age 24. Career. "The Skin I'm In" and tenure as "Toronto Star" columnist (2015–2017). Cole's 2015 essay for "Toronto Life" "The Skin I'm In", explored anti-Black racism in Toronto and across the province of Ontario. The piece chronicled how Cole was carded over 50 times by police in Toronto. The piece was the seventh most read article of the decade on "Toronto Life" and won three awards at the 2015 National Magazine Awards. The essay was subsequently the basis of a 2017 CBC Television documentary film, "The Skin We're In", directed by Charles Officer. During his time as a columnist for the "Toronto Star", beginning in September 2015, Cole rose to prominence covering issues of race in Toronto. Resignation from column. In May 2017, Cole resigned from his bi-monthly column at the "Toronto Star" after being told by his editor he had violated the newspaper's rules on journalism and activism by protesting a Toronto Police Services Board meeting over the Toronto police practice of carding and racial profiling. Commentators pointed to contradictions in the "Star" admonishment of Cole, and cited the "Star" long history of employing and supporting columnists who engage in activism. Michele Landsberg, a former "Star" columnist, called the "Star" treatment of Cole a blunder. She wrote that Cole felt bound by his promise to black children he had addressed during a presentation during Black History Month. Landsberg contrasted the support the "Star" had provided for the feminist activism she advocated during her 25 years as a "Star" columnist, with its lack of support for Cole. Continued activism (2018–2019). On 14 December 2017, PEN Canada picked Cole for its Ken Filkow Prize, for freedom of expression. Towards the end of 2017, speculation arose that Cole was thinking about running for mayor of Toronto; however, Cole later announced that we would not enter the race. On 10 July 2018, Cole criticized mayor of Toronto John Tory for referring to two black men who injured two children with gunfire as "sewer rats". Cole pointed out that he had not used animal terms to refer to Alek Minassian, who had recently perpetrated the Toronto Van Attack. Cole asserted Tory's language was a trigger for general racial discrimination and that dehumanizing offenders made rehabilitation more difficult. On 21 October 2018, the eve of the election for mayor of Toronto, the "Toronto Star" reported that Cole claimed candidate Saron Gebresellassi had accepted a list of contact numbers from incumbent mayor John Tory of which Cole felt the public should have been informed. "The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power" (2020). Cole's first book, "The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power", was announced in 2019 and released on 28 January 2020. The books focuses on 2017 and chronicles a year "in the struggle against racism in Canada." "CBC Books" placed the title on its 2020 winter reading list, and it became the bestselling Canadian nonfiction book for the week of February 9–15, 2020. The book saw a surge in sales in late May to early June 2020, corresponding to protests across the United States and Canada against anti-black racism and police brutality. It later became the bestselling Canadian book of 2020 and was also named one of the ten best Canadian nonfiction books of the year. In the aftermath of the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Cole argued for the defunding of the Toronto Police and the redistribution of funds to mental health services and initiatives to address poverty and systemic racism. In July 2020, Cole was named one of CBC Books' "Writers to Watch".

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Francesca Ekwuyasi Francesca Ekwuyasi is a Canadian writer and artist. She is most noted for her debut novel "Butter Honey Pig Bread", which was published in 2020. Originally from Lagos, Nigeria, she is currently based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to her writing, she had an exhibition of paper cutout art at Halifax's The Khyber in 2019, and has directed short documentary films including "Reconcile" and "Black & Belonging". "Butter Honey Pig Bread" was selected for the 2021 edition of "Canada Reads", where it was defended by celebrity chef Roger Mooking. The book was longlisted for the 2020 Giller Prize, and shortlisted for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the 2021 ReLit Award for fiction and the 2020 Governor General's Award for English fiction. She identifies as queer.

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Valerie Mason-John Valerie Mason-John (born 22 November 1962) is the co-founder of "Eight Step Recovery - Using The Buddha's Teaching to Overcome Addiction", an alternative to the 12-step programs for addiction. Thesis. Since the publication of the book by Windhorse Publications in 2013, it has been the recipient of a Best USA Book Award 2014 and Best International Book Award 2015 in the self-motivational and self-help category. Eight Step Meetings now take place in the UK, USA, Canada, India and Finland. Mason-John also is the co-creator of Mindfulness Based Addiction Recovery (MBAR), which was inspired by "Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression" book by John D. Teasdale, Mark Williams, and Zindal Seagal. She is the author of eight books and works as a public speaker in Mindfulness for Addiction and Emotional Well Being and is a trainer in anti-bullying and conflict resolution. She is also the chairperson of Triratna Vancouver Buddhist Centre. Her Buddhist name is Vimalasara, which means "she whose essence is stainless and pure". She used to be a freelance feature writer for "The Voice" newspaper and was also a performer and spoken-word poet using the stage name "Queenie". Black British by birth, she has now become a Canadian. Biography. Born in Cambridge, England, Mason-John spent her childhood "in care" — in foster homes and childcare facilities, including the Barnardo's Orphanages in Britain with the exception of a short time spent living with her mother in her early teens. She dropped out before receiving her undergraduate degree in the 1980s, but has continued to pursue post-graduate education and training into the present. Since the early 1990s, she has worked as a writer, performing artist and lecturer. She received a teaching certificate from South Bank University, and currently conducts seminars in anger management and conflict resolution. After 18 months of studying philosophy and politics at Leeds University during the 1980s, Mason-John studied post-graduate journalism, earned an MFA in creative writing and diploma in theatrical performance at Sussex University and The Desmond Jones School. By 2003, her interest in counseling and her ordination into the Western Buddhist Order led her into writing and performing, and on training herself and others in anger management and conflict resolution. In December 2007, Mason-John was named Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of East London. Mason John continues to write, work as a self-awareness trainer; she performs and lectures internationally. Publication, broadcasting, and academic work. Mason-John's work has appeared in UK and international journalistic and scholarly publications such as "The Guardian", "The Voice", "Curve Magazine", "The Morning Star", "Pink Paper", "Girl Friend Magazine" and "Wasafiri". She has also contributed to "Half the Earth: Women's Experience of Travel Worldwide" (second edition, Pandora Rough Guide, 1990), "Frauen Zimmerim Haus Europa" (Papyrosa, 1991), "Assaults on Convention" (Cassell, 1995), "Words from Word Up Café" (Centerprise Publications, 1993), and "Tell Tales" (Tell Tales/Flipped Eye Publications, 2005). Mason-John was the editor of "Feminist Arts News" from 1992 to 1997. Additionally, she was the artistic director of the London Mardi Gras from 1997 to 2000, and spent four years as the director of the Pride Arts Festival. Her television credits include freelance work for the BBC, Channel 4 and Vis International TV; she has also been featured on British radio broadcasts for the BBC World Service and the regional programmes "Midweek", "Woman's Hour" and "The Shelagh Rogers Show Next Chapter" on CBC Radio. In addition to her work in broadcasting and journalism, Mason-John embarked on a career in theatre, having studied at the Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theatre, she began performing and writing for the stage by 1998. Focusing on one-woman plays, she developed a body of work including "Sin Dykes, Brown Girl in the Ring", "The Adventures of Snow Black and Rose Red" and "You Got Me" among other plays. Her first novel "Borrowed Body" (2005), which was later relaunched as "The Banana Kid" (2007), received the Mind Book of the Year Award. Since, Mason-John has authored six books including her spiritual non-fiction "Detox Your Heart" (2006), which is slated for revision in 2017. "The Great Black North". In 2012, Mason-John alongside spoken-word artist Kevan Anthony Cameron co-edited the anthology "The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry", published by Frontenac House, featuring more than 90 poets. "The Great Black North" was one of the first complete poetry collections of contemporary Black Canadian poets. Notable poets in the anthology include George Elliot Clarke, M. Nourbese Philip, Wayde Compton, Sylvia Hamilton, Olive Senior, Fredrick Ward and d'bi Young. The anthology is unique in the way it categorizes "page" and "stage" poetry, as a means to honour both the written and oral traditions of poets from the African Diaspora.

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Whylah Falls Whylah Falls is a long narrative poem (or "verse novel") by George Elliott Clarke, published in book form in 1990. As with much of Clarke's work, the poem is inspired by the history and culture of the Black Canadian community in Nova Scotia, which he refers to as the "Africadian" community (a combination of the words "African" and "Acadian"). Clarke himself describes the work as a "blues spiritual about love and the pain of love". "Whylah Falls" tells the story of several pairs of black lovers in southwestern Nova Scotia in the 1930s, through dramatic monologues, songs, sermons, sonnets, newspaper snippets, recipes, haiku and free verse. It has also been released in audiobook form, with an original jazz score performed by Joe Sealy, Jamie Gattie and Steve Macdonald to accompany the reading. Clarke also adapted the poem into a stage play, which premiered in 1999. "Whylah Falls" was a winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for poetry. The book was also chosen for the CBC's inaugural "Canada Reads" competition in 2002, where it was championed by author Nalo Hopkinson.

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George and Rue George and Rue ( / ) is a novel by George Elliott Clarke, published in 2005 by HarperCollins Canada. The novel is based on the true story of George and Rufus Hamilton, two Black Canadian brothers who murdered a taxicab driver in Barker's Point, New Brunswick in 1949. Later the same year, both of the brothers were convicted of murder and executed. Clarke, whose mother was the Hamilton brothers' cousin, uses a mixture of historical record and creativity to imagine the brothers' lives and to seek understanding of what led them to commit murder. Clarke's earlier poetry book, "Execution Poems" (2001), contains poetry inspired by the same case, much of which was originally intended for publication in "George and Rue".

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Reproduction (novel) Reproduction is the debut novel by Canadian writer Ian Williams, published in 2019 by Penguin Random House Canada. The novel centres on the unconventional family life of Army, a biracial man from Brampton, Ontario, from the time of his conception as the child of a brief affair between a white father and a Black Canadian mother who met in a hospital room while tending to their own dying parents, through to his adulthood when his parents are themselves dying. The novel won the 2019 Giller Prize. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the 2019 Toronto Book Awards.

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House of Whispers (comics)

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Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root "Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction" is an anthology of speculative fiction by Caribbean authors, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and published by Invisible Cities Press in 2000. It was nominated for the 2001 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The book is out-of-print. Reviewing it in 2002, James Schellenberg wrote: ""Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root" is recommended to anyone interested in Caribbean culture. Hopkinson has done wonderful work at organizing and presenting the stories." Stories. The stories are grouped in seven sections:

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Falling in Love With Hominids Falling in Love With Hominids is a collection of short stories by Nalo Hopkinson. One of the stories in this collection, "Flying Lessons" is a new story, while other stories had been written and published in the decade proceeding publication of the collection. In the introduction to the collection, Hopkinson explains the double meaning behind its title. Partially derived from a phrase written by science fiction author Cordwainer Smith, "falling in love with hominids" also describes her own feelings about the human race. When she was younger, Hopkinson writes that she hated human beings, but has grown to love and be fascinated by the human race over the intervening years. The paradox of people who are "capable simultaneously of such great good and such horrifying evil" runs throughout the stories brought together in the collection. This collection includes "The Easthound," a post-apocalyptic tale of humans turning into monsters that are hungry for flesh when they become adults. "Old Habits" tells the story of ghosts residing in a mall, brought together in the place where they died, who relive the moment of their deaths every day. One of the stories in this collection, "Blushing" is adaptation of the French folktale, Bluebeard. Hopkinson has another short storie about Blue beard,"The Glass Bottle Trick"; it's published in "Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root" Hopkinson draws on inspiration from many places for these stories, including classic literature, folklore, and Afro-Caribbean culture. "Shift" retells stories of Caliban and Ariel from The Tempest from Caliban's conflicted point of view, while "Flying Lessons" is about a small girl in Trinidad who draw parallels of her own life to the novella The Little Prince. "Men Sell Not Such in Any Town" is a salute to Goblin Market, a poem by Christina Rossetti.

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So Long Been Dreaming So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of short stories by African, Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous authors, as well as North American and British writers of colour, edited by the writer Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Hopkinson provides the introduction, although it is usually misattributed to Samuel R. Delany (whose recommendation of the book is quoted on the book's cover).

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Skin Folk Skin Folk is a story collection by writer Nalo Hopkinson, published in 2001. Winner of the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Story Collection. It was also selected in 2002 for the "New York Times" Summer Reading List and was one of the "New York Times" Best Books of the Year.

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Da Kink in My Hair Da Kink in My Hair is a play by Trey Anthony, which debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2001. The play's central character is Novelette, the Caribbean Canadian owner of Letty's, a Toronto hair salon. Novelette is forced to confront her goals and ideals in life when she receives news that her onetime boyfriend Cedric, who loaned her the money to open the salon, has died and his daughter Verena is demanding repayment of the loan. The play subsequently expanded to Theatre Passe-Muraille in 2003, and was nominated for four Dora Awards. Mirvish Productions then underwrote a larger production at the Princess of Wales Theatre in 2005. The show has also been produced at the San Diego Repertory Theatre in San Diego, and at the Hackney Empire in London. Television adaptations. A one-hour television pilot based on the play was produced in 2004 by VisionTV's Cultural Diversity Drama Competition. The pilot starred Sheryl Lee Ralph as Novelette, Shakira Harper as her daughter Michelle, Kim Roberts as Verena, Mimi Kuzyk as Novelette's friend and client Iris, Trey Anthony as Novelette's sister Joy, and Ngozi Paul, James Codrington and Richard Chevolleau as stylists working at Letty's. TV series. A half-hour weekly series adaptation began aired for two seasons Global Television Network beginning in the 2007–08 television season. A total of 26 episodes were produced. The series cast includes Ordena Stephens-Thompson, Trey Anthony, Ngozi Paul, Richard Fagon, and Conroy Stewart.

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Basodee Basodee: An Anthology Dedicated to Black Youth (2012), edited by Fiona Raye Clarke, is a youth-created and youth-centred anthology created by a Black writing collective in honour of Black History Month, and authentic diversity in Canada. It highlights the Black Canadian experience and to promote awareness about the complexities of contemporary Black youth experience in Ontario. The book consists of a foreword by the President of the Ontario Black History Society, Rosemary Sadlier, OOnt and work by various youth on issues of identity, belonging, and Canadian Black History. The anthology was created in partnership with the Office of the Provincial Advocate of Children and Youth in Ontario a commission of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario which puts youth at its centre and uses rights to improve the lives and conditions of youth in systems of care in Ontario. The anthology was started in January 2012 and was published by General Store Publishing House in July 2012. The title "Basodee" comes from the Trinidadian creole word of the same name meaning "half-conscious" and "disoriented." The term was chosen as the title of the book to express the confusion and identity crisis of Black Canadian youth. The book consists of photography, essays, short stories and poetry by 13 youth expressing what it is to be young, Black and Canadian. Many are immigrants to the country or first-generation Canadians. Some have had experience with the mental health or criminal justice system and some are in care. Each shares their personal stories and views on what it means to be Black and Canadian today. Context. "Basodee" makes its debut at a time when concern about escalating gun violence in the City of Toronto such as the shooting at the Toronto Eaton Centre on June 2, 2012 and in Scarborough on July 16, 2012 has resulted in statements by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford that he wishes to force individuals convicted of a gun charge out of the city and more money from the province during a 'gun summit' for "anti-crime" initiatives such as the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) which places increased police presence in priority neighbourhoods. In response to the July 16 shooting, the Toronto Star published a cartoon by Michael de Adder cartoon depicting a little black girl's alleged "expected" injuries before the age of two -"boo boo from highchair, mark from tricycle, and head laceration from a medium-caliber bullet." After numerous complaints the Star apologized for the cartoon's insensitivity to the complex issues at play in gun violence. It is media sanctioned expressions of negative stereotypes like these that "Basodee" tries to fight, using the voices of many of the youth these stereotypes and top-down solutions attempt to silence. When many expressions of a voice other than the mainstream Canadian voice are being squelched and co-opted, such as "Sway Magazine" or Caribana due to economic considerations and a clear climate of devaluation of diversity, the Basodee collective comes together to bring true diversity back to the Canadian cultural milieu and show youth commitment to celebrations such as Black History Month, which are often seen as outdated and unnecessary in a post-racial "multicultural" society such as Toronto. Michael de Adder and Rob Ford's comments and many of the pieces in "Basodee", however, prove that Toronto is very much a race conscious city and is no where near embracing multiculturalism as many have been publicly threatened by the chief city official with exile. Major themes. Some of the major themes in "Basodee" include identity, struggle and belonging. The book argues that part of the "basodeeness" of Black youth stems from "mis-education" about their history. The term "mis-education" is borrowed from Carter G. Woodson's book The Mis-Education of the Negro. "Basodee" contains essays outlining the history of discrimination in the Canadian education system against Blacks and the present struggle for solutions to this ongoing discrimination such as the establishment of the Africentric Alternative School. The book also contains an essay tracing a history of Canadian human rights abuses against Blacks extending into the present day. "Basodee" argues that this history which is seldom spoken about form a major part of Black youth's basodeness. When many Black youth feel that dropping out of school and turning to a life of crime are the only way to protect themselves from discrimination and secure against mainstream attempts to erode their identity. Given this real struggle of Black youth to safeguard their identity, the main thesis of "Basodee" is that Black youth in Canada have not been given a place of belonging in Canadian society, despite being here for generations and even since the time of slavery. Thus, the book presents examples from its contributors of how to find that identity – such as remembering where you came from, the struggles you have gone through, and undergoing negrescence. Purpose. The collective hopes that "Basodee" will one day become a resource to Black youth struggling to find themselves in the midst of media stereotypes, threats of exile, and stigmatization. In partnering with the Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, the collective hopes to get the book in the hands of youth in the system who need the ideas it explores the most – Crown wards, youth in detention centres, and youth in care. The collective is currently looking for more organizations that work with Black youth as part of their mandate to share the book and also partner with in the future. See also. Black Canadians

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Beyond a Boundary Beyond a Boundary (1963) is a memoir on cricket written by the Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C. L. R. James, which he described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography". It mixes social commentary, particularly on the place of cricket in the West Indies and England, with commentary on the game, arguing that what happened inside the "Boundary Line" in cricket affected life beyond it, as well as the converse. The book is in a sense a response to a quote from Rudyard Kipling's poem "The English Flag": "What should they know of England who only England know?", which James in his Preface revised to: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" Content. James recounts the role cricket played in his family's history, and his meetings with such early West Indian players as George John, Wilton St Hill, the great batsman George Headley and the all-rounder Learie Constantine, but focuses on the importance of the game and its players to society, specifically to colonial era Trinidad. James argues for the importance of sport in history, and refers to its roots in the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece. He documents the primacy of W. G. Grace in the development of modern cricket, and the values embraced by cricket in the development of the cultures of the British Empire. He approaches cricket as an art form, as well as discussing its political impact – particularly the role of race and class in early West Indian cricket. "Cricket", he writes, "had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics, I did not have too much to learn." Cricket is approached as a method of examining the formation of national culture, society in the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and Trinidad. Education, family, national culture, class, race, colonialism, and the process of decolonisation are all examined through the prism of contemporary West Indian cricket, the history of cricket, and James's life as a player of—and commentator and writer on—the sport of cricket. James was born and educated in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He recounts the importance of cricket to himself and his community, the role it played in his education, and the disapproval from his family of his attempt to follow a sporting life along with his academic career, whom he describes as "Puritan". This too, he relates to cricket. James returns to the values imbued with cricket, first into the 19th-century English bourgeois culture of the British public school, and then out into the colonies. He contrasts this with American culture, his own growing radicalism, and the fact that the values of fair play and acceptance of arbitration without complaint rarely applies in the world beyond the cricket pitch. After university, he played first-class cricket for a year in the Trinidad league. Having to choose from clubs divided by class, race and skin-tone, James writes of his recruitment as a dark-skinned university-educated player to Maple, a club of the light-skinned lower middle class. He writes, in a chapter entitled "The Light and the Dark": "...faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years." In 1932, James travelled to Britain to join Learie Constantine (a much more successful cricketer, who played as a professional in the Lancashire League), and was able to earn a living as cricket correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian", also helping Constantine to write his memoir "Cricket and I" (1933). James recounts the lessons he learned from cricket about race and class in Britain, and the perspective that cricket gave him on the independence struggle in Trinidad, and the short-lived West Indies Federation, which he witnessed after his return in 1958. An advocate of Pan-Africanism, James examines the relationships of the unified West Indies cricket team through independence, nationalism of particular islands, and in interaction with other colonial and post-colonial national teams (such as West Indian tours of Australia and England). Reputation and legacy. James initially had difficulty finding a publisher, according to his widow Selma James, but on its publication by Hutchinson "Beyond a Boundary" was well received, and John Arlott wrote in "Wisden":"1963 has been marked by the publication of a cricket book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need … in the opinion of the reviewer, it is the finest book written about the game of cricket." The book is widely recognised as one of the best and most important books on cricket. V. S. Naipaul wrote that it was "one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies." In 2005, "The Observer" ranked the book as the third best book on sport ever written, and Nicholas Lezard reviewing an earlier re-issue for "The Guardian" wrote: "To say 'the best cricket book ever written' is pifflingly inadequate praise." Another appraisal of the book (by historian Dave Renton, who calls it "by common consent, the greatest book about cricket ever written") observes: "The genius of "Beyond a Boundary" lies in its strong literary quality: almost unique among those who write about sport James had a theory of cricket, one that took in history and politics as well as memoir." In 1976 Mike Dibb made a film about C. L. R. James entitled "Beyond a Boundary" for the BBC television series "Omnibus". In August 1996, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part abridgement (by Margaret Busby) of "Beyond a Boundary", read by Trevor McDonald, and produced by Pam Fraser Solomon. A conference at the University of Glasgow to mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication took place in May 2013. Some of the proceedings of this conference, including contributions from Selma James and Mike Brearley together with other contributions such as those from Hilary Beckles, have been edited for publication in the first edited collection solely to be devoted to the study of James's work, "Marxism, Colonialism and Cricket: C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary", published in 2018 by Duke University Press. This volume includes a previously unpublished first draft of "Beyond a Boundary"s conclusion. Other cricket writings by James. "For his non-cricket writing, see main entry for C. L. R. James"

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Philo Ikonya Philo Ikonya is a writer, journalist and human rights activist from Kenya. Her articles and books often cover the current political situation in Kenya. She was the president of Kenya's branch of PEN, the international association of writers. After several arrests for her activism and a severe beating in 2009 while in police custody, she left Kenya in political exile. Professional life. In addition to journal and magazine articles, Ikonya has published books of poetry and a novel, "Kenya, Will You Marry Me?" She also translated a book of poetry by Chinese poet Jidi Majia into the Kiswahili language. Ikonya attended the University of Nairobi, where she earned a master's degree in literature. She has taught semiotics at Tangaza College of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. Activism. While in Kenya, Ikonya was active in the work of human rights and nonviolent activism and was arrested two separate times in 2007. At a 2008 protest against Kenya's then-president Mwai Kibaki, she said, "Every day something is happening that is just showing insensitivity on the part of the leaders so there is general discontent." In 2009, she learned of British journalist Michela Wrong's book "It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower," which was available internationally but censored in Kenya. Ikonya and other members of Kenyan PEN acquired copies and brought them back to Kenya for more widespread distribution. On 18 February 2009, Ikonya and two others were arrested outside the Parliament of Kenya at a protest against hyperinflation. While in police custody, she was severely beaten by a male police officer. Later that year, she left Kenya and went to an International City of Refuge in Oslo, Norway. She continued to be involved with PEN, including with their Writers in Prison Committee.

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C. L. R. James Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989), who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work "World Revolution" outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins". Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was known for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting and fiction – his 1936 book "Minty Alley" was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain — and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer on cricket, and his 1963 book "Beyond a Boundary", which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography", is commonly named as the best single book on cricket, and even the best book about sports ever written. Biography. Early life in Trinidad. Born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, C. L. R. James was the first child of Elizabeth James and Robert Alexander James, a schoolteacher. In 1910 he won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer and distinguished himself as an athlete (he would hold the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), as well as beginning to write fiction. After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who would become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist "Beacon Group", a circle of writers associated with "The Beacon" magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. British years. In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his help writing his autobiography "Cricket and I" (published in 1933). James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932. During this time James took a job as cricket correspondent with the "Manchester Guardian". In 1933 he moved to London. The following year he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled: "We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading." James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. An abridged version of his "Life of Captain Cipriani" was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet "The Case for West-Indian Self Government". He became a champion of Pan-Africanism, and was named Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) – a group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia (the Second Italo-Abyssinian War). Leading members included Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Braithwaite. When the IAFE was transformed into the International African Service Bureau in 1937, James edited its newsletter, "Africa and the World", and its journal, "International African Opinion". The Bureau was led by his childhood friend George Padmore, who would be a driving force for socialist Pan-Africanism for several decades. Both Padmore and James wrote for the "New Leader", published by the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which James had joined in 1934 (when Fenner Brockway was its General Secretary). In 1934, James wrote a three-act play about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture (entitled Toussaint Louverture - The story of the only successful slave revolt in history), which was staged in London's West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson, Orlando Martins, Robert Adams and Harry Andrews. The play had been presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. In 1967 James went on to write a second play about the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins", which went on to become the first production from Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, coinciding with the overthrow of Baby Doc Duvalier. Also in 1936, Secker & Warburg in London published James's novel, "Minty Alley", which he had brought with him in manuscript from Trinidad. (Fenner Brockway had introduced him to Fredric Warburg, co-owner of the press.) It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK. Amid his frenetic political activity, James wrote what are perhaps his best known works of non-fiction: "World Revolution" (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, E. H. Carr and Fenner Brockway; and "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian Revolution, which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. James went to Paris to research this work, where he met Haitian military historian Alfred Auguste Nemours. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the ILP to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation. Speaking tour in the United States. At the urging of Trotsky and James P. Cannon, in October 1938, James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), then the US section of the Fourth International, to facilitate its work among black workers. Following several meetings in New York, which garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events," James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia. He gave lectures in cities including New Haven, Youngstown, Rochester, and Boston, before finishing the tour with two lectures in Los Angeles and another in Pasadena in March 1939. He spoke on topics such as "Twilight of the British Empire" and "The Negro and World Imperialism." Constance Webb, who would later become James' second wife, attended one of his 1939 lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now I was hearing a third. The three men were masters of the English language, a skill that gave them extraordinary power." One Trotskyist, John Archer, encouraged him to leave in the hope of removing a rival. James's relationship with Louise Cripps had broken up after her second abortion, so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England. Meeting Trotsky. In April 1939, James visited Trotsky in Coyoacán, México. James stayed there about a month and also met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, before returning to the United States in May 1939. A key topic that James and Trotsky discussed was the "Negro Question". Parts of their conversation were transcribed, with James sometimes referred to by his pen-name, J. R. Johnson. Whereas Trotsky saw the Trotskyist Party as providing leadership to the Black community, in the general manner that the Bolsheviks provided guidance to ethnic minorities in Russia, James suggested that the self-organised struggle of African Americans would precipitate a much broader radical social movement. U.S. and the Johnson–Forest Tendency. James stayed in the United States until he was deported in 1953. By 1940, he had begun to doubt Trotsky's view of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. He left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party (WP). Within the WP, James formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym was "Johnson" and Dunayevskaya's was "Forest") and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) to spread their views within the new party. While within the WP, the views of the Johnson–Forest Tendency underwent considerable development. By the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. Instead, they classified it as state capitalist, a political evolution shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, the Johnson–Forest Tendency was focusing increasingly on the liberation movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James's thought in his 1939 discussions with Trotsky. Such liberation struggles came to take centre stage for the Johnson–Forest Tendency. After the Second World War, the WP witnessed a downturn in revolutionary sentiment. The Tendency, on the other hand, was encouraged by the prospects for revolutionary change for oppressed peoples. After a few short months as an independent group, during which they published a great deal of material, in 1947, the Johnson–Forest Tendency joined the SWP, which it regarded as more proletarian than the WP. James would still describe himself as a Leninist despite his rejection of Vladimir Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party. He argued for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, James rejected the idea of a vanguard party. This led the Johnson–Forest Tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955 after James had left for Britain, about half the membership of the Committee withdrew, under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya, to form a separate tendency of Marxist-humanism and found the organisation News and Letters Committees. Whether Dunayevskaya's faction had constituted a majority or a minority in the Correspondence Publishing Committee remains a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester says that Dunayevskaya's supporters formed a majority, but Martin Glaberman says in "New Politics" that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962, as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman, reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality. James advised the group from Great Britain until it dissolved in 1970, against his urging. James's writings were also influential in the development of Autonomist Marxism as a current within Marxist thought. He himself saw his life's work as developing the theory and practice of Leninism. Return to Britain. In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa. In his attempt to remain in America, he wrote a study of Herman Melville, "Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In", and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book while being detained at the immigration station on Ellis Island. In an impassioned letter to his old friend George Padmore, James said that in "Mariners" that he was using "Moby Dick" as a parable for the anticommunism sweeping the United States, a consequence, he thought, of Americans' uncritical faith in capitalism. Returning to Britain, James appeared to Padmore and his partner Dorothy Pizer to be a man adrift. After James started reporting on cricket for the "Manchester Guardian", Padmore wrote to American novelist Richard Wright: "That will take him out of his ivory tower and making his paper revolution..." Grace Lee Boggs, a colleague from the Detroit group, came to London in 1954 to work with James, but she too, saw him "at loose ends, trying to find his way after fifteen years out of the country." In 1957, James travelled to Ghana for the celebration of its independence from British rule in March that year. He had met Ghana's new head of state, Kwame Nkrumah, in the United States when Nkrumah was studying there and sent him on to work with George Padmore in London after the Second World War; Padmore was by this point a close Nkrumah advisor and had written "The Gold Coast Revolution" (1953). In correspondence sent from Ghana in 1957, James told American friends that Nkrumah thought he too ought to write a book on the Convention People's Party, which under Nkrumah's leadership had brought the country to independence. The book would show how the party's strategies could be used to build a new African future. James invited Grace Lee Boggs, his colleague from Detroit, to join in the work, though in the end, James wrote "Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution" on his own. The book was not published until 1977 (by Allison & Busby), years after Nkrumah's overthrow, exile and subsequent death. Trinidad and afterwards. In 1958 James went back to Trinidad, where he edited "The Nation" newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also became active again in the Pan-African movement. He believed that the Ghana revolution greatly encouraged the anticolonialist revolutionary struggle. James also advocated the West Indies Federation. It was over this issue that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Great Britain, where he joined Calvin Hernton, Obi Egbuna and others on the faculty of the Antiuniversity of London, which had been set up by a group of left-wing thinkers led by American academic Joseph Berke. In 1968 James was invited to the US, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately returning to Britain, he spent his last years in Brixton, London. In the 1980s, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from South Bank Polytechnic (later to become the University of the South Bank, in London) for his body of socio-political work, including that relating to race and sport. James died in London from a chest infection on 19 May 1989, aged 88. His funeral took place on Monday, 12 June in Trinidad, where he was buried at Tunapuna. A state memorial service was held for him at the National Stadium, Port of Spain, on 28 June 1989. Personal life. James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later to Britain led to their estrangement. He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress and author, after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in California. James and Webb married in 1946 and their son, C. L. R. James Jr, familiarly known as Nobbie, was born in 1949. Separated forcibly in 1952, by James's arrest and detention on Ellis Island, the couple divorced in 1953, when James was deported to Britain, while Webb remained in New York with Nobbie. A collection of James's letters to Webb was posthumously published as "Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948", edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Stories written by James for his son were published in 2006 as "The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults", edited and introduced by Constance Webb. In 1956 James married Selma Weinstein ("née" Deitch), who had been a young member of the Johnson–Forest Tendency; they remained close political colleagues for more than 25 years, but divorced in 1980. She is best known as one of the founders of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Archives. Collections of C. L. R. James papers are held at the University of the West Indies Alma Jordan Library, St Augustine, Trinidad, and at Columbia University Libraries. Duke University Press publish the series "The C. L. R. James Archives", edited by Robert A. Hill, literary executor of the estate of C. L. R. James, producing new editions of books by James, as well as scholarly explorations of his oeuvre. Writings on cricket. He is widely known as a writer on cricket, especially for his autobiographical 1963 book, "Beyond a Boundary", which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography". It is considered a seminal work on the game, and is often named as the best single book on cricket (or even the best book on any sport) ever written. John Arlott called it "so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need … in the opinion of the reviewer, it is the finest book written about the game of cricket." A conference to mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication was held 10–11 May 2013. The book's key question, frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists, is inspired by a line in Rudyard Kipling's poem "English Flag" – "What do they know of England who only England know?" James asks in the Preface: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" Acknowledging that "To answer involves ideas as well as facts", James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how it meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. The literary quality of the writing attracts cricketers of all political views. While editor of "The Nation", he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team. James believed that the relationship between players and the public was a prominent reason behind the West Indies' achieving so much with so little.

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Barabajan Poems This book is a collection of various types of writing, entitled Barabajan Poems, 1492-1992 authored by the Barbados postcolonial author Kamau Brathwaite and published by Savacou Publications in 1994. In this collection, readers experience a number of Brathwaite's overwhelming ordeals in his recent life, shared honestly and sincerely. It is not only autobiographical but also represents a community defined by a Caribbean culture in transition from colonialism to a modernized independent economic state within the "new world order". It is fictionally and spiritually a magic book, serving as a counterweight to Prospero's books of magic in Shakespeare's play"The Tempest", and is a foil for the bygone landlords Christopher Columbus and the fictional Prospero. Sycorax the muse. In an attempt to give voice to unspoken indigenous cultures, Brathwaite's postcolonial poems outline the history of the Caribbean through Sycorax's eyes. Sycorax is presented as Brathwaite's muse, possessing him and his computer to give full voice to the history of the silenced, who in Brathwaite's philosophy are not only Caribbean natives, but any culture under-represented during the colonial period. According to Brathwaite, "[W]hat happened to Caliban in "The Tempest" was that his alliances were laughable, his alliances were fatal, his alliances were ridiculous. He chose the wrong people to make God." Brathwaite "considered Sycorax, Caliban's mother, 'a paradigm for all women of the Third World, who have not yet, despite all the effort, reached that trigger of visibility which is necessary for a whole society.'" About the author. Kamau Brathwaite (May 11, 1930 – February 4, 2020) was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry "Born to Slow Horses". He was a recipient of the Order of Barbados. Brathwaite held a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and was a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite was noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.

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So Long Been Dreaming So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of short stories by African, Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous authors, as well as North American and British writers of colour, edited by the writer Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Hopkinson provides the introduction, although it is usually misattributed to Samuel R. Delany (whose recommendation of the book is quoted on the book's cover).

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George Padmore George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Trinidad and Tobago, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party. From there he moved to the Soviet Union, where he was active in the party, and working on African independence movements. He also worked for the party in Germany but left after the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. In 1935, the USSR made a decisive shift in foreign policy: Britain and France, colonial powers with active occupations in Africa, were classified as "democratic-imperialisms" — a lower priority than the category of "fascist-imperialist" powers, in which Japan and Germany fell. This shift fell into direct contradiction with Padmore's prioritization of African liberation, as Germany and Japan had no colonies in Africa. Padmore broke instantly with the Kremlin, but continued to support socialism. Padmore lived for a time in France, before settling in London. Toward the end of his life he moved to Accra, Ghana, where he helped shape the politics of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party. Biography. Early years. Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, better known by his pseudonym George Padmore, was born on 28 June 1903 in Arouca District, Tacarigua, Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies. His paternal great-grandfather was an Asante warrior who was taken prisoner and sold into slavery at Barbados, where his grandfather was born. His father, James Hubert Alfonso Nurse, was a local schoolmaster who had married Anna Susanna Symister of Antigua, a naturalist. Nurse attended Tranquillity School in Port of Spain, before going to St Mary's College for two years (1914 and 1915). He transferred to the Pamphylian High School, graduating from there in 1918. After that he worked for several years as a reporter with the Trinidad Publishing Company. In late 1924, he travelled to the United States to take up medical studies at Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee. He had recently married, on 10 September that year, and his wife Julia Semper would later join him in America. She left behind their daughter Blyden, who was born in 1925 (and died in 2012). According to Nurse's instruction, she was named in honour of the African nationalist Edward Blyden of Liberia. Nurse subsequently registered at New York University but soon transferred to Howard University. Communist Party. During his college years in the US, Nurse became involved with the Workers (Communist) Party (CPUSA). When engaged in party business, he adopted the name George Padmore (compounding the Christian name of his father-in-law, Constabulary Sergeant-Major George Semper, and the surname of the friend who had been his best man, Errol Padmore). Padmore officially joined the Communist Party in 1927 (when he was in Washington, DC) and was active in its mass organization targeted to black Americans, the American Negro Labor Congress. In March 1929 he was a fraternal (non-voting) delegate to the 6th National Convention of the CPUSA, held in New York City. Padmore, an energetic worker and prolific writer, was tapped by Communist Party trade union leader William Z. Foster as a rising star. He was taken to Moscow to deliver a report on the formation of the Trade Union Unity League to the Communist International (Comintern) later in 1929. Following his presentation, Padmore was asked to stay on in Moscow to head the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). He was elected to the Moscow City Soviet, the Soviet (council) of the capital city. It was a workers' council. As head of the Profintern's Negro Bureau, Padmore helped to produce pamphlet literature and contributed articles to Moscow's English-language newspaper, the "Moscow Daily News." He was also used periodically as a courier of funds from Moscow to various foreign Communist Parties. In July 1930, Padmore was instrumental in organizing an international conference in Hamburg, Germany. It launched a Comintern-backed international organization of black labour organizations called the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Padmore lived in Vienna, Austria, during this time, where he edited the monthly publication of the new group, "The Negro Worker." In 1931, Padmore moved to Hamburg and accelerated his writing output, continuing to produce the ITUCNW magazine and writing more than 20 pamphlets in a single year. This German interlude came to an abrupt close by the middle of 1933, however, as the offices of the "Negro Worker" were ransacked by ultra-nationalist gangs following the Nazi seizure of power. Padmore was deported to England by the German government, while the Comintern placed the ITUCNW and its "Negro Worker" on hiatus in August 1933. Disillusioned by what he perceived as the Comintern's flagging support for the cause of the independence of colonial peoples in favour of the Soviet Union's pursuit of diplomatic alliances with the colonial powers, Padmore abruptly severed his connection with the ITUCNW late in the summer of 1933. The Comintern's disciplinary body, the International Control Commission (ICC), asked him to explain his unauthorized action. When he refused to do so, the ICC expelled him from the Communist movement on 23 February 1934. A phase of Padmore's political journey was at an end. As a result of his membership in the Communist Party and working for it in the Soviet Union and Germany, Padmore was barred from re-entry into the United States. He was a non-citizen and the government did not want to admit known communists. Pan-Africanist. Although alienated from Stalinism, Padmore remained a socialist. He sought new ways to work for African independence from imperial rule. Relocating to France, where Garan Kouyaté was an ally from his Comintern days, Padmore began to write a book: "How Britain Rules Africa." With the help of former American heiress Nancy Cunard, he found a London agent and, eventually, a publisher (Wishart). It published the book in 1936, the year the publisher became Lawrence and Wishart, known to be sympathetic to communists. Publication of books by black men at that time was rare in the United Kingdom. A Swiss publisher distributed a German translation in Germany. In 1934 Padmore moved to London, where he became the centre of a community of writers dedicated to pan-Africanism and African independence. His boyhood friend C. L. R. James, also from Trinidad, was already there, writing and publishing. James had started International African Friends of Ethiopia in response to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. That organization developed into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), which became a centre for African and Caribbean intellectuals' anti-colonial activity. Padmore was chair, the Barbadian trade unionist Chris Braithwaite was its organising secretary, and James edited its periodical, "International African Opinion." Ras Makonnen from British Guiana handled the business end. Other key members included Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya and Amy Ashwood Garvey. As Carol Polsgrove has shown in "Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause," Padmore and his allies in the 1930s and 1940s—among them C. L. R. James, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, the Gold Coast's Kwame Nkrumah and South Africa's Peter Abrahams—saw publishing as a strategy for political change. They published small periodicals, which were sometimes seized by authorities when they reached the colonies. They published articles in other people's periodicals, for instance, the Independent Labour Party's "New Leader". They published pamphlets. They wrote letters to the editor; and, thanks to the support of publisher Fredric Warburg (of Secker & Warburg), they published books. Warburg brought out Padmore's "Africa and World Peace" (1937), as well as books by both Kenyatta and James. In a Foreword to "Africa and World Peace", Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps wrote: "George Padmore has performed another great service of enlightenment in this book. The facts he discloses so ruthlessly are undoubtedly unpleasant facts, the story which he tells of the colonization of Africa is sordid in the extreme, but both the facts and the story are true. We have, so many of us, been brought up in the atmosphere of 'the white man's burden', and have had our minds clouded and confused by the continued propaganda for imperialism that we may be almost shocked by this bare and courageous exposure of the great myth of the civilizing mission of western democracies in Africa." The Biographical Note on the cover describes Padmore as European correspondent for the "Pittsburgh Courier", "Gold Coast Spectator", "African Morning Post", "Panama Tribune", "Belize Independent" and "The Bantu World". Before World War II, James left for the United States, where he met Kwame Nkrumah, a student from the Gold Coast who studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. James gave Nkrumah a letter of introduction to Padmore. When Nkrumah arrived in London in May 1945 intending to study law, Padmore met him at the station. It was the start of a long alliance. Padmore was then organizing the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress (designated the Fifth Pan-African Congress), attended not only by the inner circle of the IASB but also by W. E. B. Du Bois, the American organizer of earlier Pan-African conferences. The Manchester conference helped set the agenda for decolonisation in the post-war period. Padmore used London as his base for more than two decades. He and Dorothy Pizer, a white English writer and his domestic partner and co-worker, shared a flat that became a center for African nationalists. Padmore maintained connections across the world, sending articles to international newspapers and keeping up a correspondence with American writers and activists W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright. The latter was then living in Paris. At Padmore's urging, Wright travelled to the Gold Coast in 1953 to explore the buildup to independence; he wrote "Black Power" (1954). Before Wright left the Gold Coast, he gave a confidential report on Nkrumah to the American consul; later he reported on Padmore to the American Embassy in Paris. According to the embassy's account, Wright said that Nkrumah was relying heavily on Padmore as he made plans for independence. When Wright published "Black Power" in 1954, Padmore was finishing a book that he hoped would be both a history and blueprint for African independence: "Pan-Africanism or Communism?" It was his attempt to counter Cold War suspicions in Western nations that the African independence movements were fundamentally communist-inspired. As independence neared for the Gold Coast, the London community had splintered. In 1956 James had returned from the United States, but Padmore and Pizer referred to him with condescension in letters to Wright. Meanwhile, former Padmore ally Peter Abrahams published a "roman à clef" entitled "A Wreath for Udomo" (1956), which contained unflattering portrayals of the members of this London political community. George Padmore was identified by many as the model for the character "Tom Lanwood". But Padmore's alliance with Nkrumah held firm. From the time of Nkrumah's return to the Gold Coast in 1947 to lead its independence movement, Padmore advised him in long detailed letters. He also wrote dozens of articles for Nkrumah's newspaper, the "Accra Evening News," and wrote a history of "The Gold Coast Revolution" (1953). With Dorothy Pizer (who was a writer and secretary), Padmore encouraged the leader to write his autobiography. Nkrumah published his autobiography in 1957, the year the Gold Coast became independent Ghana. Padmore deputized for Nkrumah as best man when Sir Stafford Cripps' daughter Peggy married the anti-colonialist Joe Appiah, who was one of Nkrumah's closest allies at the time. Padmore accepted Nkrumah's invitation to move to Ghana, but his time there as Nkrumah's advisor on African affairs was difficult. He was talking with friends about leaving Ghana to settle elsewhere when he returned to London for treatment of cirrhosis of the liver. Padmore died on 23 September 1959, aged 56, at University College Hospital in London. A few days later, responding to rumours that the activist had been poisoned, his companion Pizer typed out a detailed statement about his death. She said that his liver condition had worsened in the previous nine months, before he sought treatment from a longtime physician friend. Due to his failing liver, he suffered haemorrhages that resulted in his death. Legacy. "...eight countries sent delegations to his funeral in London. But it was in Ghana that his ashes were interred and everyone says that in this country, famous for its political demonstrations, never had there been such a turnout as that caused by the death of Padmore. Peasants from far-flung regions who, one might think, had never even heard his name, managed to find their way to Accra to pay a final tribute to the West Indian who spent his life in their service." Staying on in Accra, Dorothy Pizer wrote a preface for a French edition of Padmore's "Pan-Africanism or Communism." She began research for a biography of Padmore. However, as she told Nancy Cunard, she was frustrated by his habit of having destroyed his personal papers and not having talked about his past.

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Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout (11 July 1910 – 23 July 1992) was a Surinamese poet and an eminent community leader who fought for acknowledgement of Sranan and of the Afro-Surinamese culture. Life. Schouten-Elsenhout was born in Paramaribo in 1910. She started writing in the notebooks. She is known for poetry that is written without verses. The poems are written in Sranan Tongo and they contain no punctuation. These love poems include lesbian love which is not taboo in the Afro-creole culture. It is said that she had been composing and writing down proverbial phrases for a long time before she and others recognised that she was composing poetry. She has been called the Grandma Moses of Sranan by Hugo Pos. In 1987 she was awarded the Knight of the Order of the Yellow Star. Erwin de Vries, the Surinam sculptor in Paramaribo, made a bronze bust commissioned by the National Women's Movement, de Nationale Vrouwen Beweging (NVB) for the commemoration of the poet's one hundredth birthday. Work. In 1963 Johanna published her first poetry book called "Tide ete" "(Done Today/ Vandaag nog"). In 1965 her second book was published: "Awese" (Healing Spirit). An Awese is a healing spirit in W"inti", the Afro-Surinam religion. Both books are "milestones in the emancipation of the language and culture of the Creole peoples of Surinam and of the Surinam Women's Rights movement." In 2010 a reprint was published to commemorate her one hundredth birthday with translations by D. France Oliveira. About the creole language Sranantongo Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout said; "Your language is your culture and that is the most precious possession of a human being. If you have lost it, then you have lost your life force, your kra. Your kra is your own personality. You may be poor, but you have a precious spirit that holds you up." One of Schouten-Elsenhout's most famous poem is "Uma" (Woman) of which the first lines are: Noti no hei so Lek’ a sten D’ e bari In’ dyugudyugu f’ a dei (Uma/Woman) "Nothing is so glorious/ As a voice/ That calls out/ In the chaos of a day." According to Oerdigitaalvrouwenblad, a Dutch literary publication (Feminist, anti-racist), Hillary Clinton read this poem in 1999 at the UNESCO Conference in The Hague, The Netherlands.

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Caribbean literature Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles. The literature of Caribbean is exceptional, both in language and subject. Through themes of innocence, exile and return to motherland, resistance and endurance, engagement and alienation, self determination, Caribbean literature provides a powerful platform for Post-Colonial studies and to Caribbean literatures in importance the context of all literature. "Caribbean literature" vs. "West Indian literature". As scholarship expands, there is debate about the correct term to use for literature that comes from the region. Both terms are often used interchangeably despite having different origins and referring to slightly different groups of people. Since so much of Caribbean identity is linked to "insidious racism" and "the justification of slave labor", it is usual to refer to the author of the piece for their identity preference. West Indian is defined as coming from the "West Indies", which includes "the islands of the Caribbean" and was "used first [for] indigenous population, and subsequently both [for] settlers of European origin and of people of African origin brought to the area as slaves." West Indian can also refer to things that can be "traced back" to the West Indies but the creators "live elsewhere". West Indian "was a term coined by colonising European powers." Caribbean, on the other hand, is defined as "of the Caribbean...its people, and their cultures" only. Further issues include language classifications like Creole Caribbean literature and Anglophone Caribbean literature. Different languages also make different references to the texts. While there is no terminology that is obsolete, the issue requires acknowledgement due to it being literature of historically oppressed people. The Spanish Caribbean islands include Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Panama as well as the islands of Venezuela and the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Territories included in the category West Indian. The literature of Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Curaçao, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Martin, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos and the U.S. Virgin Islands would normally be considered to belong to the wider category of West Indian literature. Development of the concept of West Indian literature. The term "West Indies" first began to achieve wide currency in the 1950s, when writers such as Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Edgar Mittelholzer, V. S. Naipaul, and George Lamming began to be published in the United Kingdom. A sense of a single literature developing across the islands was also encouraged in the 1940s by the BBC radio programme "Caribbean Voices", which featured stories and poems written by West Indian authors, recorded in London under the direction of founding producer Una Marson and later Henry Swanzy, and broadcast back to the islands. Magazines such as "Kyk-Over-Al" in Guyana, "Bim" in Barbados, and "Focus" in Jamaica, which published work by writers from across the region, also encouraged links and helped build an audience. Many—perhaps most—West Indian writers have found it necessary to leave their home territories and base themselves in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada in order to make a living from their work—in some cases spending the greater parts of their careers away from the territories of their birth. Critics in their adopted territories might argue that, for instance, V. S. Naipaul ought to be considered a British writer instead of a Trinidadian writer, or Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall American writers, but most West Indian readers and critics still consider these writers "West Indian". West Indian literature ranges over subjects and themes as wide as those of any other "national" literature, but in general many West Indian writers share a special concern with questions of identity, ethnicity, and language that rise out of the Caribbean historical experience. One unique and pervasive characteristic of Caribbean literature is the use of "dialect" forms of the national language, often termed creole. The various local variations in the language adopted from the colonial powers such as Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands, have been modified over the years within each country and each has developed a blend that is unique to their country. Many Caribbean authors in their writing switch liberally between the local variation—now commonly termed nation language—and the standard form of the language. Two West Indian writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Derek Walcott (1992), born in St. Lucia, resident mostly in Trinidad during the 1960s and '70s, and partly in the United States since then; and V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad and resident in the United Kingdom since 1950. (Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960, was born in the French territory of Guadeloupe.) Other notable names in (anglophone) Caribbean literature have included Una Marson, Earl Lovelace, Austin Clarke, Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, Orlando Patterson, Andrew Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (who was born in Barbados and has lived in Ghana and Jamaica), Linton Kwesi Johnson, Velma Pollard and Michelle Cliff, to name only a few. In more recent times, a number of literary voices have emerged from the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora, including Kittitian Caryl Phillips (who has lived in the UK since one month of age); Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian immigrant to the United States; Anthony Kellman from Barbados, who divides his time between Barbados and the United States; Andrea Levy of the United Kingdom; Jamaicans Alecia McKenzie, who has lived in Belgium, Singapore and France, and Colin Channer and Marlon James, the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel "A Brief History of Seven Killings" (2014) (as well as "John Crow's Devil", "The Book of Night Women", the unpublished screenplay "Dead Men", and the short story "Under Cover of Darkness"), Antiguan Marie-Elena John, and Lasana M. Sekou from Saint Martin (island). Themes of migration, landscape, nature. Caribbean lands and seas have been depicted as a paradise on earth by foreign artists and writers. Scholars and writers in Postcolonial Studies have research and published on this cultural phenomenon of an empty island, and the racist implications of a fantasy void of local people and their cultures. Caribbean classic novels such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) have inspired films, stories, and poems by other artists who seek to decolonize the relationship of people and landscapes. Caribbean novelists imbue island landscape with bustling life of the locals and migrants. The migration of Caribbean workers to the Panama Canal is often used as a narrative foundation. Maryse Condé’s novel "Tree of Life" (1992) discusses the involvement of family ties and how people seek to improve their lot in life by working to build the Panama Canal. Another contemporary classic about migrant cultures isRamabai Espinet’s novel "The Swinging Bridge" (2003), which explores trauma of displacement, Indian indentureship, and the phenomena of invisibility relating to women. Caribbean stories and poems are ripe with references to storms, hurricanes, and natural disasters. Derek Walcott's wrote "The Sea is History," and dramatized the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes on the locals. Caribbean writing deploys agricultural symbolism to represent the complexities of colonial rule and the intrinsic values of the lands. Native fruits and vegetables appear in colonized and decolonizing discourse. Derek Walcott describes the complications of colonialism using local fruit metaphors, such as star apples, in his poetry to connote the complexity of acidity and the sweetness. Giannina Braschi's postcolonial work United States of Banana imagines a political and economic deal between China and Puerto Rico as the exchange of a bowl of rice for a bowl of beans, and a Lychee for a Quenepa. Poetry. Caribbean poetry is vast and rapidly evolving field of poetry written by people from the Caribbean region and the diaspora. Caribbean poetry generally refers to a myriad of poetic forms, spanning epic, lyrical verse, prose poems, dramatic poetry and oral poetry, composed in Caribbean territories regardless of language. It is most often, however, written in English, Spanish, Spanglish, French, Hindustani, Dutch, or any number of creoles. Poetry in English from the former British West Indies has been referred to as Anglo-Caribbean poetry or West Indian poetry. Since the mid-1970s, Caribbean poetry has gained increasing visibility with the publication in Britain and North America of several anthologies. Over the decades the canon has shifted and expanded, drawing both on oral and literary traditions and including more women poets and politically charged works. Caribbean writers, performance poets, newspaper poets, singer-songwriters have created a popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. Caribbean oral poetry shares the vigour of the written tradition. Among the most prominent Caribbean poets whose works are widely studied (and translated into other languages) are: Derek Walcott (who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature), Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Giannina Braschi, Lorna Goodinson, Aimé Fernand Césaire, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes, and Claudia Rankine. Common themes include: exile and return to the motherland; the relationship of language to nation; colonialism and postcolonialism; self-determination and liberty; racial identity. Women writers. There is great abundance of talent, styles, and subjected covered by Caribbean women writers spanning the genres of poetry, theater, short stories, essays, and novels. There is also a burgeoning field of scholarship on how women authors address women's lives under dictatorships, eroticism and the body, history and identity, migration, Afro Caribbean history, decolonization, revolution, queer theory, among countless other topics. Major novelists include Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe), Merle Hodge (Trinidad), Paul Marshall, Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad-American ), Tiphanie Yanique (Virgin Islands), Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rico), and Michelle Cliff (Jamaica). Poets include Mahadai Das (Guyana), Lenelle Moïse (Haiti), Pamela Mordecai (Jamaica), Lorna Goodison (Jamaica), Julia de Burgos (Puerto Rico), Giannina Braschi (Puerto Rico), Merle Collins (Greneda), Shara McCallum (Jamaica), and Oliver Senior (Jamaica). Playwrights include Una Marson who wrote in English, and Ina Césaire (Martinique) and Simone Schwarz-Bart (France/Guadeloupe) who write in French. Epics. There are many epic stories, plays, and poems written in and about the Caribbean. Dating to the 16th century, Juan de Castellanos's "Elegy to the Illustrious Gentlemen of the Indies (1589)" is an epic in verse that traces Columbus's arrival to the conquest of Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Margarita. The work relates Juan Ponce de Leon's colonization of Puerto Rico in search for the mythic fountain of youth. Later epics of the Spanish West Indies include Manuel de Jesus Galvan's national epic "The Sword and the Cross" (1954) that relates the myths and histories of the colony of Hispaniola. In the 20th Century epics approach subjects such racist legacies, economic terrorism, and the decolonization of Caribbean culture and politics. Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott pens one of greatest modern epic written in the English language, Omeros (1990). This epic poem is divided into seven books containing sixty-four chapters. Most of the poem is composed in a three-line form that is reminiscent of the terza rima form that Dante used for "The Divine Comedy". The work uses local island folklore and ancient Greek myths such as Homer' "Iliad" to address legacies of Greek, Roman, and American culture including racism and slavery. Parts of the story occur on Walcott's native island St. Lucia, but there are also time travels to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as travels to modern day Lisbon, London, Dublin, Toronto. Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (1988) is a postmodern epic composed of six books of poetry that blend elements of eclogues, epigrams, lyrics, prose poem, diary, jingles, Puerto Rican folklore, and political manifesto. The work traces the history of the Spanish language from medieval times to contemporary Puerto Rico, Cuban, Chicano, and Nuyorican culture. Braschi's later epic, written in English, is United States of Banana (2011), a geopolitical tragic-comedy about the fall of the American empire, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and the realignment of powers among Caribbean nations. Mixing elements of poetry, lyric essay, Caribbean songs, and socratic dialogues, this epic tackles the subjects of global debt, financial terrorism, and decolonization. Trinidadian playwright and novelist Earl Lovelace's work has been described as performative epics that mix the rhythms of steelband and calypso with complex narratives about black power and the political, spiritual, and psychic struggles for decolonization. His best known works are "The Dragon Can’t Dance" (1979) and "Salt" (1996) which won the Commonwealth Book Prize. Literary festivals. Many parts of the Caribbean have begun in recent years to host literary festivals, including in Anguilla, the Anguilla Lit Fest, in Trinidad and Tobago the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, in Jamaica the Calabash International Literary Festival, in Saint Martin/Sint Maarten the St. Martin Book Fair, in Barbados Bim Literary Festival, in Dominica the Nature Island Literary Festival and Book Fair, Alliouagana Festival of the word in Montserrat, and the Antigua and Barbuda Literary Festival.

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One out of Many (V.S. Naipaul) One out of Many is a short story within an unconventionally formatted novel entitled "In a Free State", written by V.S. Naipaul and originally published by André Deutsch in 1971. The protagonist, Santosh, is forced to give up his familiar life inside the stratified castes of India to move with his employer, now an Indian ambassador, to Washington D.C during the civil rights protests and commensurate "hippie era". Themes developed in the story reflect Santosh's abrupt displacement from a comfortable, life-long acclimation in India, to an alien environment in the United States, where his beliefs, perceptions, and sense of belonging are upended. About the author. V.S. Naipaul was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian British. He wrote of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel "In a Free State". In 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and in 2001, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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The Urban Legend (comics) The Urban Legend is an ongoing Eritrean/Norwegian comic book series created by Josef Tzegai Yohannes and Steve Baker. "The Urban Legend" refers to Malcolm Tzegai Madiba, an Eritrean-Norwegian 29-year-old high school teacher in the fictional city of Capital City (also known as the City of God). After the murder of his cousin Justin, Malcolm adopts the alter-ego of The Urban Legend, a crime-fighting superhero committed to justice and protecting the innocent. Publication history. Series background. "The Urban Legend" was created by Josef Tzegai Yohannes, a comic book creator of Eritrean heritage. Yohannes was inspired to create the series after taking a trip to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. While in Africa, he saw poor children playing and was motivated to create a hero for children of African descent all over the world to look up to. Yohannes named the character Malcolm Tzegai Madiba, after his father Tzegai, and the human rights activists Malcolm X and Madiba (better known as Nelson Mandela). Publication and debut at Comic Con. The series debuted in Norway in January 2012, with "The Birth of a True Superhero". The series had its international debut at Comic Con International in San Diego in July 2012. In 2013, the first eight issues of "The Urban Legend" season 1 were released through Gyldendals Forlag. Gyldendals Forlag published "A Real Superhero in the Making", a hardcover compilation of season 1, which was released in October 2014. Norwegian publisher Bestselgerforlaget took over as publisher of the series in 2015, and published the six-issue run of season 2 as well as the season 2 compilation book, "No Way Back". "The Urban Legend" collaborated with Malala Fund and 20th Century Fox for the release of the 2015 documentary movie "He Named Me Malala". Malala was featured in a one-page comic strip with "The Urban Legend", which was released with the movie and is part of school curriculum select schools in Norway, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya and Eritrea. "The Urban Legend" also appeared in USA Today throughout 2013 and 2014 as part of a limited digital publishing deal. Season 3 is said to be published by Cappelen Damm, the largest publishing house in Norway. The third season is eight issues long, and is expected to be released in March 2020. In addition to the regular series, "The Urban Legend" also releases special edition issues, including issues about education, ebola, and bullying. Synopsis. Season 1. When Malcolm's friend, a local business owner, is robbed and assaulted, Malcolm is troubled that the assailant has not been arrested or charged. That night, the assailant, Young Evil, discusses a money laundering plan with nightclub owner Sugar Bear. They are interrupted by Justin, one of Sugar Bear's employees. Worried that Justin knows too much, Young Evil and his gang of thugs kill him in an alley near the club later that night. The next day, Malcolm learns that Justin – his cousin – has been murdered. Overcome with grief and burning with a desire for revenge, Malcolm swears that the criminals will pay. Shortly after, a young female newspaper journalist who's been covering the crimes is cornered by Young Evil and his gang on the street. Before he can assault her, Malcolm, as the Urban Legend in a yellow and black costume, jumps in to fight Young Evil and his thugs using martial arts. When police sirens are heard, the injured criminals run off, leaving the journalist unhurt and alone as Malcolm slips away, covering his suit with a long coat. Subsequently, a bounty is put on Malcolm's head, leading to the kidnapping of his friend Matin. After besting Young Evil in a showdown and saving Matin, a young reporter named Sarah Parks makes Malcolm into a hero of the people. In revenge, Young Evil lures him to a showdown with the monster Manchild, who nearly kills him. After recovering in the care of his friend Mr. Fong, he faces Manchild again. When Fong is captured, Malcolm travels to China, then Japan, to rescue him. After a successful showdown with the Seven Deadly Assassins, Malcolm returns to Capital City. After Malcolm's return, he is homeless and has lost his job as a teacher because he has been away from work too long. The city is in worse turmoil than ever. A female villain by the name La Madrina ("Godmother" in Spanish) has her eye on ruling the criminal underworld, so is killing powerful men in the criminal underworld by seducing them. She also gets Malcolm's job as a teacher by flirting with the school principal Mannerheim. On Malcolm's first day back at school, there is an explosion. Shortly after, the Mayor is assassinated while giving a speech assuring the people that everything is under control, leading to riots in the streets of Capital City. It's all a conspiracy led by crooked cops and the Nationalist Citizen Council to trap TUL and get rid of him once and for all. Season 2. After being set up by the crime bosses, Malcolm is sent to Bush Penitentiary as riots fill Capital City and Sarah Parks is kidnapped. After his escape from the penitentiary, Malcolm faces new enemies, La Madrina and “The Suburban Myth.” Thinking Malcolm is dead after he fell for their trap, The Suburban Myth goes on a rampage. Malcolm goes to Norway with his new girlfriend, Lise, where he gets pulled into a war between the police and the gang B-Gjengen. When Malcolm is framed for murder, Oslo goes into full mayhem. The city is saved by The Urban Legend, but not before Lise is killed. A grieving Malcolm escapes to a rural village, where he finds that he is connected to the town's mysterious folklore. The Suburban Myth and La Madrina think they have killed The Urban Legend after they set him up in a trap. La Madrina leaves town believing her job is done, but he isn't dead. The Suburban Myth goes on a rampage and The Urban Legend must use everything in his power to stop him. Season 3. The Urban Legend has received mythical status. Stories of his heroism are reported all over the world, although not all are true. Malcolm returns to his teaching job hoping finally to return to peace and quiet. Soon he is confronted by a new gang that has moved into Capital City. Notably, this gang speaks Eritrean, the language of Malcolm's home country. Malcolm begins to investigate the gang and realizes they may hold the key to important information about his own past. As The Urban Legend, he tracks down the gang and confronts them about why they've appeared in Capital City and what they want from him. What they reveal only leaves Malcolm with more questions and he becomes determined to seek out the answers wherever they lead him. In his classroom, Malcolm must deal with bullying among his students. After an incident at school, one of his students, a son of a gangster, attempts a school shooting, Malcolm must stop the violence as The Urban Legend. Problems with the Eritrean gang don't let up and lead to a new confrontation. Meanwhile, Detective Fletcher is released from prison and tries to kill The Urban Legend, but winds up killing a copycat instead. Malcolm witnesses this murder and seeks to enact vengeance for the fallen. Detective Fletcher goes to Malcolm’s room to attempt any attack, but is scared off by a strange woman waiting at the door. The woman's name is Eden, an old friend of Malcolm’s from Eritrea. As youth, they trained to fight together. When Malcolm returns they reunite and reminisce about their shared past. They also discuss Malcolm’s father’s disappearance and how they protected the village from gangs until Malcolm went after a warlord. They still have deep feelings for each other and when Eden is kidnapped by La Madrina, Malcolm believes she has been lost for good. Despite his devastation Malcolm cannot shirk his duties as a superhero and protector of the city. However, Malcolm is given reason to believe not all is as it seems with Eden and her disappearance and it is not long before Malcolm has another violent confrontation with the forces of evil. Special issues. The Urban Legend has released several special focused editions of the comic that deal with major problems facing the planet and global youth. These special editions are often done in conjunction with non-profits and educational organizations. Previous partners have been the Mandela Family Foundation, the Malala Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund. Mandela Edition, February 2014 A little kid named Biko has turned homeless after losing his parents to HIV/Aids. Malcolm is in Africa to work as a volunteer at an orphanage home, when he suddenly spots Biko and hears his story. Malcolm is deeply touched by Biko's story and takes him to the orphanage home. The orphanage home has had a lot of threats from an evil businessman who wants to remove the orphanage so he can build luxury apartments for the rich. Malcolm turns into The Urban Legend and confronts the evil businessman and teaches him a lesson he won't forget. Ebola Edition, June 2015 Memuna and Augustine has lost their parents to Ebola and now the village they live in has banished them from living there. Homeless and with nowhere to go, The Urban Legend takes Memuna and Augustine to an orphanage home where they can live and have a home. The other kids at the orphanage teases Memuna and Augustine because their parents died of Ebola, so The Urban Legend decides to teach the kids what Ebola really is, how they can protect themselves against it and how they can fight it. Eidsvoll Edition, February 2016 Malcolm is taking his school class to the Eidsvoll 1814 museum as part of history class, to teach the kids how Norway got their own constitution in 1814. On that same day the real constitution is being exhibited and an international crime organization are there dressed up as the police and ready to steal the constitution and The Urban Legend must use all his force to stop the crime gang from stealing the constitution. Anti-Bullying, February 2017 Daniella has changed schools 3 times the last 2 years because of bullying. She has now started a new school and she is optimist that everything will better from now on, but the bullying is actually a lot worse than she has ever experienced. Leon is a jovial kid who loves music and football, but he struggles to make new friends because he is always made fun of in class by the school bully Mike. Daniella and Leon meets each other by fate and they see they have a lot in common and decide to band together and stand up against bullying with the help of The Urban Legend. Climate Change, January 2020 Malcolm brings his class to a local conference happening on climate change. Together, they learn about the threats facing the natural environment, wild animals, and even human civilization from a rapidly shifting climate. At the conference they discuss the politics surrounding climate change and how reporting on climate issues can be a dangerous profession for environmentalists. Indigenous communities are also discussed as they are among the human cultures most affected by a warming planet. On his way home, Malcolm is contacted by his friend Matin, an activist, who is currently in the Brazilian rainforest. Matin has run into trouble with a local gang that has also been terrorizing a local tribe and destroying their ancestral lands. As The Urban Legend, Malcolm befriends the tribespeople and together they rescue Matin and run the gang off from their home. The Urban Legend's time with the indigenous community inspires him to take action against climate change once he returns home. Legacy. The initial run of the premiere issue of "The Urban Legend", “The Birth of a True Superhero,” sold out in Norway. In June 2015, The Urban Legend did a collaboration with the Nobel Peace Center for their 10 year anniversary. In 2014, the Nelson Mandela Foundation named Josef Tzegai Yohannes as a "Mandela Ambassador" for Norway, in recognition of his work on The Urban Legend. As part of the Norwegian premiere of "Black Panther", Josef Yohannes presented on "The Urban Legend" at the US embassy in Norway in February 2018. Reception. Awards. 2018 - "Best Entrepreneurial Artist" award at the Nordic Startup Awards 2018. 2018 - "“The Outstanding Young Person" from JCI Norway.

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Literature about intersex Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies". Intersex people and themes appear in numerous books, comics and magazines. Morgan Holmes describes common representations of intersex people as monsters or ciphers for discussions about sex and gender, while Phoebe Hart contrasts a small number of examples of well-rounded characters with the creation of "objects of ridicule". Fiction. Intersex representations in fiction. Intersex people have been portrayed in literature as monsters, murderers and medical dilemmas. Characters in award-winning literature include Cal Stephanides in the novel "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides and Max Walker in the novel "Golden Boy" by Abigail Tarttelin. Morgan Holmes, Canadian sociologist and a former activist with the (now defunct) Intersex Society of North America, comments on constructions of intersex people as monsters or ciphers for discussions about sex and gender. Holmes describes her weariness "of writers who had contacted me for a number of years during my intersex-activist days, trying to determine if their proposed ‘hermaphrodites’ could do things like impregnate or have sex with themselves", and how depictions of intersex people are "stalled", reifying "the proper place of traditional visions and modes of masculinity in opposition to femininity" or "beyond and outside the realm of gender altogether"; the character of Annabel/Wayne, in the Canadian novel "Annabel" by Kathleen Winter, provides an example of monstrous auto-impregnation, while science fiction representations of intersex may also reflect monstrous interpretations of a hermaphrodite. Phoebe Hart describes a range of media representations, from a small number of examples of well-rounded characters such as Cal Stephanides in the novel "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides to the creation of "objects of ridicule". Books. The list is organised by the author's surname. "The Queen's Tiara" – Carl Jonas Love Almquist. "The Queen's Tiara" () is a classic Swedish novel by Carl Jonas Love Almquist about a beautiful androgyne, Tintomara. "Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years" – N.O. Body. "Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years" describes a childhood and youth of Karl M. Baer "The World Wreckers" – Marion Zimmer Bradley. "The World Wreckers" is a 1971 science fiction novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Darkover series. The book contains a complex sub-plot involving the sexual interactions between a hermaphrodite native species known as the "chieri" and humans. The "Vorkosigan Saga" – Lois McMaster Bujold. The "Vorkosigan Saga" is a series of science fiction novels and short stories set in a common fictional universe by American author Lois McMaster Bujold. Many novels in the series contain an intersex character, Bel Thorne. "Jack and his Extra Y" – Arlie Colvin. "Jack and his Extra Y" is a children's book for kids with XYY syndrome. "Kyle and His Extra X and Y" – Arlie Colvin. "Kyle and His Extra X and Y" is a children's book for kids with 48, XXYY. "Gregory and his Extra X" – Arlie Colvin. "Gregory and his Extra X" is a children's book for kids with Klinefelter syndrome. "Elizabeth and her Extra X" – Arlie Colvin. "Elizabeth and her Extra X" is a children's book for kids with Triple X syndrome. "Rokitansky – Alice Darwin". The novel by Alice Darwin, published in 2014. The story is about three women with MRKH. "The Looming Fog – Rosemary Esehagu". The 2006 debut novel by the Nigerian writer, Rosemary Esehagu. The story follows the life of an intersex child as they struggle to live in a pre-colonial village in Nigeria that considers the anomaly an abomination. "Middlesex" – Jeffrey Eugenides. "Middlesex" (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by an intersex character who discusses the societal experience of an intersex person. The novel's interrelationship between intersex and incest gave the book a controversial reception from intersex commentators. "Hermaphrodeity" – Alan H. Friedman. "Hermaphrodeity" by Alan H. Friedman was originally published in 1972 and has been republished many times again. "Hermaphrodeity" is a grand comedy of gender surprises. Millie, a hermaphrodite, must make a decision in the novel. Boy or girl—choose one. Millie or Willie. The "Ilario" series – Mary Gentle. Mary Gentle used an intersex narrator in ' and its sequel ', published in 2007. "None of the Above" – I. W. Gregorio. A homecoming queen and champion hurdler finds her life turned upside-down after a diagnosis with androgen insensitivity syndrome in "None of the Above" by I. W. Gregorio, a young adult book published in 2015. "All You Zombies" – Robert A. Heinlein. "—All You Zombies—" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein, recently adapted in the movie "Predestination". "Us Girls: My Life Without a Uterus" – Rachael J. Hughes. "Us Girls: My Life Without a Uterus" is a book about a girl with MRKH. "The Hermaphrodite" – Julia Ward Howe. "The Hermaphrodite" is an incomplete novel by Julia Ward Howe about Laurence, an intersex character raised as a male but whose underlying gender ambiguity often creates havoc in his life. It was probably written between 1846 and 1847. "Raptor" – Gary Jennings. "Raptor" is an historical novel by Gary Jennings set in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. It purports to be the memoirs of an Ostrogoth, Thorn. "Pantomime" – Laura Lam. Laura Lam's young adult fantasy novel "Pantomime" and its sequel "Shadowplay" feature an intersex protagonist named Micah Grey. "The Left Hand of Darkness" – Ursula K. Le Guin. "The Left Hand of Darkness" is a multiple award-winning 1969 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin's introduction to the 1976 publication of the book identifies "Left Hand of Darkness" as a thought experiment to explore society without men or women, where individuals share the biological and emotional makeup of both genders. "Le saut de l'ange" – Maud Marin. Autobiographical drama by a French author, Maud Marin. Tells the story of a person with intersex traits who was assigned male at birth and made a transition in later life. " Changed" – T.S. Murphy. Changed is young adult novel about a girl with MRKH. " Elizabeth, Just Sixteen" – Cecilia Paul. " Elizabeth, Just Sixteen" is a book about a girl with MRKH. " Der Bibelkiller / Natural Red 4" – Valeska Réon. " Natural Red 4" is a thriller about a intersexual coroner. "2313" – Kim Stanley Robinson. "2313" is a science fiction novel written by Kim Stanley Robinson. It includes two lead characters, Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram, with intersex characteristics. "Edna's Gift: How My Broken Sister Taught Me to Be Whole" – Susan Rudnick. "Edna's Gift: How My Broken Sister Taught Me to Be Whole" is a book about a girl with MRKH. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy". The novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, published in 2017. Roy's characters run the gamut of Indian society and include an intersex woman ("hijra"), a rebellious architect, and her landlord who is a supervisor in the intelligence service. "Golden Boy" – Abigail Tarttelin. Abigail Tarttelin's 2013 novel "Golden Boy" is about an intersex teenager. The book has won multiple awards, including a 2014 Alex Award, which recognize the book's appeal to young adult readers. "Annabel" – Kathleen Winter. Kathleen Winter's 2010 novel "Annabel" is a fictional account of an intersex person growing up in Labrador, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. "Intersexion" – P.D. Workman. P.D. Workman's 2016 novel "Intersexion" tells the story of Taylor, an intersex teen who is disowned by his family, living on the street, and battling abuse and prejudice. "XOXY, A Memoir: Intersex Woman, Mother, Activist" – Kimberly Zieselman. "XOXY, A Memoir: Intersex Woman, Mother, Activist" is an autobiographical book by Kimberly Zieselman Non-fiction. Books. "Herculine Barbin" – Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault. "" is a 1980 English-language translation of Herculine Barbin's nineteenth-century memoirs, which were originally written in French. The book contains an introduction by Michel Foucault. Foucault discovered Barbin's memoirs during his research about hermaphroditism for "The History of Sexuality". "Interdicciones" – Mauro Cabral (editor). "Interdicciones. Escrituras de la intersexualidad en castellano" (Interdictions. Writings on intersex in Spanish) is a 2009 collection of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry edited by Mauro Cabral. "Intersex: Stories and Statistics from Australia" – Tiffany Jones, Bonnie Hart, Morgan Carpenter, Gavi Ansara, William Leonard and Jayne Lucke (authors). "Intersex: Stories and Statistics from Australia" is a 2016 book of statistical findings and stories from an Australian national study led by Tiffany Jones. "Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis" - Georgiann Davis. "Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis" by Georgiann Davis examines the history of the U.S. intersex movement with a focus on the medicalization of intersex bodies and a contested shift in clinical language from intersex to "disorders of sex development". "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex" - Alice Dreger. A collection of essays on intersex as a social phenomenon, living with intersex traits, and medical management. The book was published in 1999 by University Publishing Group, Maryland by Alice Domurat Dreger. "Galileo's Middle Finger" - Alice Dreger. "Galileo's Middle Finger" is a 2015 book on the ethics of medical research by bioethicist and author Alice Dreger. The book recounts Dreger's activism against surgical "correction" of intersex individuals' genitalia and the use of prenatal hormone treatments. The book also reviews research on transsexualism and the treatment of the Yanomamo people. "Sexing the Body" – Anne Fausto-Sterling. "Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality" is a 2000 book by Brown University Professor of Biology and Gender Studies Anne Fausto-Sterling in which she explores the social construction of gender and the social and medical treatment of intersex people. "Human Rights between the Sexes" – Dan Christian Ghattas. "Human Rights between the Sexes" is an analysis of the human rights of intersex people in twelve countries. It was written by Dan Christian Ghattas of IVIM (OII-Germany) and published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in October 2013. "Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)" – Thea Hillman. Intersex author Thea Hillman's memoir "Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)" was published by Manic D Press in 2008 and won a Lambda Literary Award. "Critical Intersex" – Morgan Holmes (editor). "Critical Intersex" is a collection of essays on intersex issues, including theoretical and empirical research. Edited by intersex professor of sociology Morgan Holmes, "Critical Intersex" has been described as "an important book" (Anne Fausto-Sterling), "the 'go to source' for a contemporary, international representation of intersex studies," and as making "contributions that are precise, plainly written and very illuminating... the detail is fascinating and somewhat unnerving... beautifully clear and compassionate" ("Contemporary Sociology"). "Fixing Sex" – Katrina Karkazis. "Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience" by Stanford anthropologist and bioethicist Katrina Karkazis was published in 2008. Described as "thoughtful", "meticulous", and an "authoritative treatise on intersex", the book examines the perspectives of intersex people, their families, and clinicians to offer a compassionate look at the treatment of people born with atypical sex characteristics. "Born Both: An Intersex Life" – Hida Viloria. An intimate memoir by Hida Viloria, a writer and intersex activist, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening perspective of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people. The book was published in 2017 and is a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Journals. "Hermaphrodites with Attitude". The former Intersex Society of North America published the journal "Hermaphrodites with Attitude" between 1994 and 2005. Poetry. "Dear Herculine" – Aaron Apps. A 2015 hybrid/poetry collection by Aaron Apps won the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. The book recalls and interacts with portions of the memoirs of 19th Century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin. "Intersex: A Memoir" - Aaron Apps. A 2015 poetry collection and memoir by Aaron Apps explores gender and what happens when a body is normalized. A section of the book, "Barbecue Catharsis", appeared in the 2014 edition of "The Best American Essays". Comics. "I.S.". The Japanese manga series "I.S.", first published in 2003, features intersex characters and how they deal with intersex-related issues and influence the lives of people around them. It was complimented by "intersexinitiative.org" as "groundbreaking" and the "world's first serial comics based on the real lives of intersex people". "Demon Knights". In 2012, the character Shining Knight was revealed as DC Comics's first intersex character in "Demon Knights" #14.

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Schell Bullet is a series by Kunihiko Ikuhara. It is composed of a two-volume novel by Ikuhara with artwork by Mamoru Nagano, and , a concept album composed by Tenpei Sato with vocals from Ikuhara and Maria Kawamura. Synopsis. As a result of gene manipulation, society is segregated by genes into "Majors" – intersex humans who maintain a monopoly on stronger genetic material – and lesser dual-sex "Minors". (Ikuhara stated that he chose to make the Majors intersex because he wished to create "a race which combines the good parts of both women and men.") Protagonist Ors Break is hired by the intergalactic trading company Balt Liner Corporation to pilot a schell, a bio-organic mecha, by claiming to be a Major. When the truth of his Minor status is revealed, he comes to an agreement with his superior, a Major named Delbee Ibus, to continue working for the organization. Production. "Schell Bullet" was published by Ikuhara following the release of "Adolescence of Utena", the film sequel to the anime series "Revolutionary Girl Utena", and shortly prior to his relocation from Tokyo to Los Angeles. The novel was Ikuhara's first project released during his twelve-year hiatus from directing anime, which spanned from the conclusion of "Utena" in 1999 to the release of "Penguindrum" in 2011. Ikuhara and Nagano promoted the novel at an event held by "Newtype" by cosplaying as characters Sailor Mars and Sailor Venus from the TV series "Sailor Moon", of which Ikuhara was a director and series director. Though Ikuhara stated that he received offers to adapt the novel into an anime, an anime adaptation never transpired. Media. Novel. "Schell Bullet" was published by Kadokawa Shoten. The novel was released in two volumes: "Aden Arabie", published in 1999, and "Abraxas", published in 2000. The novels include illustrations by Nakano of the novel's characters and settings, as well as diagrams of the schells. Album. A concept album for the novel, , was composed by Tenpei Sato, and features vocals from Ikuhara and Maria Kawamura. The liner notes for the album famously feature a photograph of Ikuhara wearing a leather bodysuit with a spiked corset.

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Fixing Sex Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience, a book by Stanford anthropologist and bioethicist Katrina Karkazis, was published in 2008. Described as "thoughtful", "meticulous", and an "authoritative treatise on intersex", the book examines the perspectives of intersex people, their families, and clinicians to offer compassionate look at the treatment of people born with atypical sex characteristics. Synopsis. In a scholarly work, Karkazis draws heavily on interviews with intersex adults, parents, and physicians to explore how intersex is understood and treated. In part 1, she reviews the history of treatment for intersex traits, highlighting the work of John Money and the introduction of the, then new, terms "gender", "gender role" and "gender identity". She explores the events following publication of Milton Diamond's study of the David Reimer or "John/Joan" case, and the ways in which public opinion impacted on medical treatment. In part 2, Karkazis presents an analysis of current medical approaches to intersex, and the risks involved, in the wake of a 2006 "consensus statement on the management of intersex disorders". She also reviews the methods utilised to assign a sex of rearing to intersex infants, such as genitals and penis size, chromosomes, fertility, "sexing of the brain", and parental wishes; these impact upon determination whether or not to proceed with early genital surgery. Part 3 interviews parents of children with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and adults with intersex experiences. Part 3 also looks at activism by intersex organizations. Reception. The book has been well received by both clinicians and intersex groups. Gary Berkovitz, writing in the "New England Journal of Medicine" states that Karkazis's analysis is fair, compelling, and eloquent; "Current consensus guidelines recommend early separation of the vagina and urethra for female subjects with abnormalities in the formation of the sex organs... Karkazis presents a compelling argument for the deferment of subsequent surgery until the patient is able to decide." Elizabeth Reis, reviewing the book in the "American Journal of Bioethics", states that the book identifies risk of incontinence, fistulas, scarring and lack of physical sensation arising from surgical intervention, and the psychological harm caused by the knowledge that "one's genitals are 'wrong,' requiring constant medical scrutiny and 'fixing'. It "masterfully examines the concerns and fears of all those with a stake in the intersex debate: physicians, parents, intersex adults, and activists. ... Karkazis’s honest, multi-pronged approach poses critical questions." Mijeon in the "American Journal of Human Genetics" writes that the "conclusion is quite fitting", "the history of thinking about the body ... can be highly politicized and controversial". Kenneth Copeland, former president of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, describes the book as "Masterfully balancing all aspects of one of the most polarizing, contentious topics in medicine... the most recent authoritative treatise on intersex." Gayle Rubin describes the book as "meticulous, sensitive, and brilliantly executed". Arlene Baratz (Accord Alliance) describes the book as "a velvet-gloved punch to the gut", "astonishing, a tale told straight from the mouths of affected adults, parents, and physicians in tender and lyrical prose." Intersex community organization Organisation Intersex International Australia regards the book as "approachable," "compelling and recommended reading". The book was referenced by "Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people in Australia," a 2013 report of a committee of the Senate of Australia in 2013. Awards and recognition. The book was nominated for the Margaret Mead Award, 2010, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2009.

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Undoing Gender Undoing Gender is a 2004 book by the philosopher Judith Butler. Summary. Butler examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and the way medicine and the law treat intersex and transgender people. Focusing on the case of David Reimer who was medically reassigned from male to female after a botched circumcision, Butler reexamines the theory of performativity that she originally explored in "Gender Trouble" (1990). David, then renamed as a girl- Brenda, rediscovers his masculinity and goes on to live his life as a male again. While many of Butler's books are intended for a highly academic audience, "Undoing Gender" reaches out to a much broader readership. Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". She argues that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The philosopher also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if their desires differ from normality. She states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.

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Gender Trouble Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; second edition 1999) is a book by the philosopher Judith Butler, in which the author argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. The work is influential in feminism, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, and has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles. Butler's ideas about gender came to be seen as foundational to queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s. Summary. Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory: that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women" and "woman" are categories complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy, and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender. She challenges assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender, according to which sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed. Butler argues that this false distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse and cultural imposition is only an effect of the functioning of gender. Sex and gender are both constructed. Examining the work of the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For de Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. Both assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all. Butler argues instead that gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute, rather than express, the illusion of the stable gender identity. If the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification". In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance. Discussing the patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. Butler revisits three of the most popular: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "womanliness as a masquerade" that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in which cathexis becomes identification. Butler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, she suggests that incest is "a pervasive cultural fantasy" and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, she states that mimicry and masquerade form the "essence" of gender; with Freud, she asserts that "gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition" (63) and therefore that "same-sexed gender identification" depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, "heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities" (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, she points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and regulates approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law. In response to the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic"—was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternal logos. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity are the sole culturally permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female homosexuality is an impossibility, a near psychosis. Butler criticizes Kristeva, claiming that her insistence on a "maternal" that precedes culture and on poetry as a return to the maternal body is essentialist: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to the paternal law, but she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction, and invokes Michel Foucault's arguments in "The History of Sexuality" (1976) to posit that the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product of discourse. Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when she was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals, Foucault writes of Barbin's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in "The History of Sexuality", in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early days not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. She suggests finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment", or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed. Butler traces the feminist theorist Monique Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex", cannot escape carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even the naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the features themselves, fragmenting what was really once "whole". Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts'" (115). Butler questions the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy", a usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, outlined in her "Purity and Danger" (1966), Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the pollution of the body that AIDS brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed. Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. She claims that even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices—"we, 'women,' must become subjects and not objects"—is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion of a subject is for her formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification" (144). Butler offers parody (for example, the practice of drag) as a way to destabilize and make apparent the invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inhabitability of such "ontological locales" (146) as gender. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, she believes that a positive, transformative politics can emerge. All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (New York, Routledge, 1990). Publication history. "Gender Trouble" was first published by Routledge in 1990. Later that year, a second edition was published by Routledge. In 2006, a Routledge Classics edition was published. Reception. "Gender Trouble" was reviewed by Shane Phelan in "Women & Politics". The work has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring a fanzine, "Judy!" Butler, in a preface to the second edition of the book, writes that she was surprised by the size of the book's audience and its eventual status as a founding text of queer theory. Anthony Elliott writes that with the publication of "Gender Trouble", Butler established herself at the forefront of feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory. According to Elliott, the core idea expounded in "Gender Trouble", that "gender is a kind of improvised performance, a form of theatricality that constitutes a sense of identity", came to be seen as "foundational to the project of queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s." On November 23, 2018, the playwright Jordan Tannahill read the entirety of "Gender Trouble" outside the Hungarian Parliament Building in protest of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's decision to revoke accreditation and funding for gender studies programs in the country. Criticism. See the Judith Butler page for criticisms of "Gender Trouble" by Susan Bordo (gender as language; evading the body); Martha Nussbaum (elitism; pre-cultural agency; social justice); Nancy Fraser (self-distancing idiom); Alice Schwarzer (intellectual games).

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Sexing the Body Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality is a 2000 book by the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, in which the author explores the social construction of gender, and the social and medical treatment of intersex people. She stated that in it she sets out to "convince readers of the need for theories that allow for a good deal of human variation and that integrate the analytical powers of the biological and the social into the systematic analysis of human development." Synopsis. Fausto-Sterling mentions the most common types of intersex, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), gonadal dysgenesis, hypospadias, and unusual chromosome compositions such as XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) or X0 (Turner Syndrome). She gives John Money's view of intersexuality by stating,Intersexuality, in Money's view, resulted from fundamentally ab-normal processes. Their patients required medical treatment because they ought to have become either a male or a female. The goal of treatment was to assure proper psychosexual development by assigning the young mixed-sex child to the proper gender.Money declared, "From the sum total of hermaphroditic evidence, the conclusion that emerges is that sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis." Money is disproved in chapter 3 of "Sexing the Body" when it is stated that girls with CAH tend to manufacture larger amounts of masculine hormones until birth and the production of these male hormones raises the question among scientist of whether or not the excess male hormones that a CAH girl produces has an effect on her brain development. Fausto-Sterling argues surgery on intersex babies should wait until the child can make an informed decision, and label surgery without consent as genital mutilation. In "Sexing the Body", Fausto-Sterling describes the grueling process of transforming an intersex person into the desired sex, and the appearance of a "densely scarred and immobile penis" or "extensive suturing [or] skin transplants in such a way that it seems difficult for anyone to endure". Although the decision should be made strictly by the parents without any coercion or influence presented by the doctor, it is ultimately the "physicians who decide how to manage intersexuality". No matter how impartial they attempt to be, physicians simply "act out of, and perpetuate, deeply held beliefs about male and female sexuality, gender roles, and the (im)proper place of homosexuality in normal development" when performing the necessary surgery for the chosen gender. Fausto-Sterling's article titled "Of Gender and Genitals: The Use and Abuse of the Modern Intersexual" criticizes the standard model of sex and gender by using the case of intersex individuals by explaining how those individuals are neither male nor female so they do not fit in the sex binary. "It is suggested that bodies ... only live within the productive constrains of certain highly regulatory schemas." People must be "culturally intelligible as males or females". While the standard model says that sex is biologically determined, Fausto-Sterling challenges this by stating "From the sum total of hermaphroditic evidence, the conclusion that emerges is that sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis." Oftentimes, doctors decide the sex of an intersex infant immediately after birth, choosing the sex based on what they believe a male or a female should look like. In essence, society decides what is male or female. Fausto-Sterling portrays how our society puts a great deal of trust in doctors because they are seen as the experts and those who decide what nature tells us. Doctors for decades past have felt the need to immediately "correct" intersex children after birth. Fausto-Sterling states, "The attending physician, realizing that the newborn's genitalia are either/or, neither/both, consults a pediatric endocrinologist (children's hormone specialist) and a surgeon. They declare a state of medical emergency. According to current treatment standards, there is no time to waste in quiet reflection or open-ended consultations with the parents". Doctors felt that this was a medical emergency because intersex children were seen as abnormal, and because we live in a society based on heternormativity, physicians were pressured to make anything abnormal, normal. Fausto-Sterling mentions that "no masculine women or effeminate men need apply." These individuals are considered to be "unthinkable, abject, unlivable." As this belief is deeply rooted in people's mind, it is essential and imperative for "surgeons, psychologists, and endocrinologists, through their surgical skills, [to] try to make good facsimiles of culturally intelligible bodies." Contrary to the belief that physicians thought it was vital to immediately decide a sex for an intersex child, evidence shows that just because science chooses a sex for a child that does not guarantee that the child will grow up to "fit" that gender role. For example, the article states, "These individuals seemed to be listening to some inner voice that said that everyone in authority surrounding h/her was wrong. Doctors and parents might have insisted that they were female, removed their testes, injected them with estrogen, and surgically provided them with a vagina, but still, they knew they were really males". These individuals are the exception to the standard model and a prime example of why the standard model is not relevant. These types of people do not properly fit the sexual dimorphism so a more acceptable categorization would be the alternative model. The alternative model a spectrum with completely male on one side and completely female on the other, leaving room for sexually ambiguous humans to be categorized somewhere in between. In "Of Gender and Genitals", Fausto-Sterling illustrates how the standard model of the difference between sex and gender can be at times damaging and how it necessitates that doctors’ uphold to certain protocol in order to maintain it. She informs the reader that the extensive surgeries intersex children undergo soon after birth are both "unnecessary and sexually damaging". Infants, if born intersex, are subjected to a number of considerable surgeries as soon as they are born merely to uphold to society's standard model. If society's view changed to that of a gender-sex spectrum, these babies would be given the freedom to choose their own gender when they become of age. Unfortunately that was not the case in the past. Instead, for example, intersex babies, who were chosen to function as a male, experienced multiple surgeries "on their penises during the first couple of years of their lives". When dealing with the parents of intersex children, doctors must follow certain guidelines so as not to dishearten the parents’ of their children's normality. Fausto-Sterling specifically references some doctors’ endeavor towards "discouraging any feeling of sexual ambiguity" for their children. Fausto-Sterling says, "[o]ur conceptions of the nature of gender difference shape, even as they reflect, the ways we structure our social system and polity; they also shape and reflect our understanding of our physical bodies." Fausto-Sterling also gives a history of transgender and transsexual people and discusses the philosophical challenge they present, "rendering the sex/gender divide virtually unintelligible."

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Herculine Barbin (memoir) Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite is a 1980 English-language translation of Herculine Barbin's nineteenth-century memoirs, which were originally written in French. The book contains an introduction by Michel Foucault, which only appears in the English-language translation of the memoirs. Foucault discovered Barbin's memoirs during his research about hermaphroditism for "The History of Sexuality". Background. Herculine Barbin was an intersex woman born in 1838. Unlawfully in love with another woman, she was forced to live as a man because of a judge's orders, after a doctor found her to be intersex, and her homosexual behaviors were brought forth. Upon this legal change of her sex, Barbin's name was also changed, and she was referred as either Camille or Abel. In 1868, Barbin committed suicide due to her poverty, gender and sexuality troubles and the false persona she was forced to maintain. Foucault explained in his introduction that the objective of social institutions was to restrict "the free choice of indeterminate individuals". He noted that the legal efforts in the 1860s and 1870s to control gender identity occurred despite centuries of comparative acceptance of hermaphroditism. During the Middle Ages, Foucault wrote, hermaphrodites were viewed as people who had an amalgamation of masculine and feminine traits. When they reached adulthood, hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages were allowed to decide whether they wanted to be male or female. However, this procedure was abandoned in later times, when scientists decided that each person only had one real gender. When a person demonstrated the physical or mental traits of the opposite sex, such aberrations were deemed random or inconsequential. Scholars Elizabeth A. Meese and Alice Parker noted that the memoir's lessons are applicable to the contemporary world in that the lack of a clear gender identity transgresses the truth. Responses. In his critical introduction, Foucault calls Barbin's pre-masculine upbringing a "happy limbo of non-identity" (xiii). Judith Butler, in her book "Gender Trouble", takes this as an opportunity to read Foucault against himself, especially in "History of Sexuality, Volume I". She calls Foucault's introduction a "romanticized appropriation" of Barbin's experience; rather, Butler understands Barbin's upbringing not as an intersex body exposing and refuting the regulative strategies of sexual categorization (à la Foucault) but as an example of how the law maintains an "'outside' within itself". She argues that Barbin's sexual disposition—"one of ambivalence from the outset"—represents a recapitulation of the ambivalence inherent within the religious law that produces her. Specifically, Butler cites the "institutional injunction to pursue the love of the various 'sisters' and 'mothers' of the extended convent family and the absolute prohibition against carrying that love too far". Intersex scholar Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that she saw herself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless. The collection of memoirs inspired Jeffrey Eugenides to write "Middlesex". Believing that the memoir evaded discussion about intersex individuals' anatomy and emotions, Eugenides concluded that he would "write the story that I wasn't getting from the memoir". Commemoration. The birthday of Herculine Barbin is marked in Intersex Day of Remembrance on 8 November.

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Human Rights between the Sexes Human Rights between the Sexes is an analysis of the human rights of intersex people in 12 countries. It was written by Dan Christian Ghattas of the "Internationalen Vereinigung Intergeschlechtlicher Menschen" (the Organisation Intersex International (OII) in Germany) and published in October 2013 by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The countries studied were Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uruguay. Synopsis. The report is believed to be the first comparative international analysis of the human rights of intersex people. It found that intersex people are discriminated against worldwide. Ghattas states: Ghattas found that: Ghattas makes five conclusions for human rights organisations: The book is published in German as "Menschenrechte zwischen den Geschlechtern". The book can be downloaded for free in either English or German.

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Hermaphrodites with Attitude Hermaphrodites with Attitude was a newsletter edited by Cheryl Chase and published by the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) between 1994 and 2005. The full archives are available online. In 2008, ISNA transferred its remaining funds, assets, and copyrights to Accord Alliance and then closed. History. "Hermaphrodites with Attitude" was published on thirteen occasions over an eleven-year period. The first issue appeared in Winter 1994, comprising 6 pages of articles, analysis and case studies, including articles by people with lived experience, activists, physicianss, and academics. It was distributed to subscribers in five countries and 14 States of the United States. The newsletter provided a voice for intersex activists for the first time, becoming a resource for intersex people and academics. The title of the newsletter appears in the title of multiple articles describing the intersex movement, and was also displayed on banners at the first public demonstration by intersex people and allies, outside a pediatric conference in Boston, on October 26, 1996. In the early part of the 21st-century, Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) took on staff for the first time and began to engage closely with the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, establishing a North American Task Force on Intersex. These developments were stated in the newsletter's first issue of the 21st-century, in February 2001, which also marked a change in name to "ISNA News". Shifting attitudes. This shift in name of the newsletter reflected a significant shift in the goals of ISNA. Initially, Emi Koyama states that "not only did intersex activists appropriate the medical label "intersex" as part of their identities, they also liberally used the word "hermaphrodite", which is now considered offensive, for example by naming the newsletter of Intersex Society of North America "Hermaphrodites With Attitude" and demonstrating under that name." Koyama argues that the intersex movement could not succeed with that label in addressing peer support needs, while identity politics drew in a different set of goals and interests. ISNA goals shifted to eradicate nomenclature based on hermaphroditism that was stated to be stigmatizing to intersex individuals, as well as potentially panic-inducing to parents of intersex children. The suggested solution put forth by ISNA was to restructure the system of intersex taxonomy and nomenclature to not include the words 'hermaphrodite', 'hermaphroditism', 'sex reversal', or other similar terms.<ref name="http://www.isna.org/node/979"></ref> This "standard division of many intersex types into true hermaphroditism, male pseudohermaphroditism, and female pseudohermaphroditism" was described by ISNA and its advocates as confusing and clinically problematic, and a replacement term, disorders of sex development was proposed by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase and others in 2005. ISNA itself folded in 2008, following publication of a clinical paper and new clinical standards that adopted the term disorders of sex development to replace not only hermaphroditism and associated terms, but also the term intersex, in medical settings. ISNA gave a statement saying that "at present, the new standard of care exists as little more than ideals on paper, thus falling short of its aim[s]" to fulfill its goals. The ISNA decided its best course of action was to "support a new organization with a mission to promote integrated, comprehensive approaches to care that enhance the overall health and well-being of persons [who are intersex] and their families." The ISNA transferred all of its remaining funds, assets, and copyrights to Accord Alliance and then closed. ISNA has been survived or succeeded by several intersex civil society organizations, including the AIS Support Group USA (now called AISDSD), the Intersex Initiative, Bodies Like Ours, Organisation Intersex International, (now the Intersex Campaign for Equality) and Advocates for Informed Choice (now interACT).

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Intersex human rights reports Intersex people are born with sex characteristics, such as chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies". Such variations may involve genital ambiguity, and combinations of chromosomal genotype and sexual phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female. Intersex infants and children may be subject to stigma, discrimination and human rights violations, including in education, employment and medical settings. Human rights violations in medical settings are increasingly recognized as human rights abuses. Other human rights and legal issues include the right to life, access to have standing to file compensation claims, access to information, and legal recognition. Community statements. Malta declaration, 2013. The "Malta declaration" is the statement of the Third International Intersex Forum, which took place in Valletta, Malta, in 2013. The declaration was made by 34 people representing 30 organisations from multiple regions of the world. The declaration affirmed the existence of intersex people and demanded an end to "discrimination against intersex people and to ensure the right of bodily integrity, physical autonomy and self-determination". For the first time, participants made a statement on birth registrations, in addition to other human rights issues. Darlington Statement (Australia/New Zealand), 2017. In March 2017, a consensus "Darlington Statement" was published by Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand intersex community organizations and others. The statement calls for legal reform, including the criminalization of deferrable intersex medical interventions on children, an end to legal classification of sex, and improved access to peer support. Vienna Statement (Europe), 2017. A statement was published after a conference in Vienna in March 2017. It called for an end to human rights violations, and recognition of rights to bodily integrity, physical autonomy and self-determination. The statement included calls to action by governments, educational institutions, medical and health care providers, media, and allies. International and regional reports and statements. Yogyakarta Principles, 2006. The 2006 "Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" is a set of principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity, intended to apply international human rights law standards to address the abuse of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. It briefly mentions intersex, influenced by the Declaration of Montreal which first demanded prohibition of unnecessary post-birth surgery to reinforce gender assignment until a child is old enough to understand and give informed consent. The Yogyakarta Principles detail this in the context of existing UN declarations and conventions under Principle 18, which called on states to: Report of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, 2013. On 1 February 2013, Juan E. Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, issued a statement condemning non-consensual surgical intervention on intersex people. His report states: Resolution by the Council of Europe, 2013. In October 2013, the Council of Europe adopted a resolution 1952, 'Children's right to physical integrity'. It calls on member states to World Health Organization and UN interagency report, 2014. In May 2014, the World Health Organization issued a joint statement on Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization, An interagency statement with the OHCHR, UN Women, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNFPA and UNICEF. The report references the involuntary surgical "sex-normalising or other procedures" on "intersex persons". It questions the medical necessity of such treatments, patients' ability to consent, and a weak evidence base. The report recommends a range of guiding principles for medical treatment, including ensuring patient autonomy in decision-making, ensuring non-discrimination, accountability and access to remedies. Council of Europe Issue Paper, 2015. In a wide-ranging first detailed analysis on intersex health and human rights issues by an international institution, the Council of Europe published an "Issue Paper" entitled "Human rights and intersex people" in May 2015. The document highlighted an historic lack of attention to intersex human rights, stating that current social and biomedical understandings of sex and gender make intersex people "especially vulnerable" to human rights breaches. The report cited previous reports from San Franscisco, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics and the Australian Senate. The Commissioner for Human Rights made eight recommendations. For this first time, these recognized a right to "not" undergo sex assignment treatment. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report, 2015. In 2015, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) described human rights violations against intersex people: The OHCHR acknowledged Australia and Malta as "the first countries to expressly prohibit discrimination against intersex persons," and Malta as "the first State to prohibit sex-assignment surgery or treatment on intersex minors without their informed consent." It called on UN member states to protect intersex persons from discrimination, and address violence by: WHO report, "Sexual health, human rights and the law", 2015. In June 2015, the World Health Organization published a major report on sexual and reproductive rights and the law. Section 3.4.9, on intersex people, identifies discrimination and stigma within health systems (citations omitted): The report stated that intersex persons are entitled "to access health services on the same basis as others, free from coercion, discrimination and violence", with the ability offer free and informed consent. The report also called for the education and training of medical and psychological professionals on "physical, biological and sexual diversity and integrity". Asia Pacific Forum of NHRIs manual, 2016. In 2016, the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (AFP) manual on Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics. The document provides an analysis of human rights issues, including the rights to physical integrity, non-discrimination, effective remedies and redress, and recognition before the law. The report states: UN and regional experts statement, 2016. For Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, UN experts including the Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, along with the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and United Nations Special Rapporteurs called for an urgent end to human rights violations against intersex persons, including in medical settings. The experts also called for the investigation of human rights abuses, access to standing to file compensation claims, and the implementation of anti-discrimination measures. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also launched a website, "United Nations for Intersex Awareness". Committee on Bioethics of the Council of Europe, 2017. In January 2017, the Committee on Bioethics of the Council of Europe published a report on children's rights entitled, "The Rights of Children in Biomedicine: Challenges posed by scientific advances and uncertainties". The report was critical of the lack of evidence for early intersex medical interventions, stating that, on "the scientific question of whether intervention is necessary, only three medical procedures have been identified as meeting that criteria in some infants: (1) administration of endocrine treatment to prevent fatal salt-loss in some infants, (2) early removal of streak gonads in children with gonadal dysgenesis, and (3) surgery in rare cases to allow exstrophic conditions in which organs protrude from the abdominal wall or impair excretion". National and State reports and statements. San Francisco Human Rights Investigation, 2005. The 2005 "Human Rights Investigation into the Medical "Normalization" of Intersex People", by the Human Rights Commission of the City and County of San Francisco is thought "likely to be the first human rights report into the treatment of intersex people, certainly in the English language." Report of Swiss National Advisory Council on Biomedical Ethics, 2012. In late 2012, the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics reported on intersex. The Commission report makes a strong case against medical intervention for "psychosocial" reasons: The report is notable for making a clear apology for damage done to intersex people in the past, and up until the present. It recommends deferring all "non-trivial" surgeries which have "irreversible consequences". The report also recommended criminal sanction for non-medically necessary genital surgeries. Senate Committee inquiry, Australia, 2013. In October 2013, the Australian Senate published a report entitled "Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people in Australia". The Senate found that "normalising" surgeries are taking place in Australia, often on infants and young children, with preconceptions that it described as "disturbing": "Normalising appearance goes hand in hand with the stigmatisation of difference". They commented: "...normalisation surgery is more than physical reconstruction. The surgery is intended to deconstruct an intersex physiology and, in turn, construct an identity that conforms with stereotypical male and female gender categories" and: "Enormous effort has gone into assigning and 'normalising' sex: none has gone into asking whether this is necessary or beneficial. Given the extremely complex and risky medical treatments that are sometimes involved, this appears extremely unfortunate." The report makes 15 recommendations, including ending cosmetic genital surgeries on infants and children and providing for legal oversight of individual cases. Organisation Intersex International Australia welcomed the report, saying that, Reports by human rights NGOs. Amnesty International report on Denmark and Germany, 2017. In 2017, Amnesty International published a report condemning "non-emergency, invasive and irreversible medical treatment with harmful effects" on children born with variations of sex characteristics in Germany and Denmark. It found that surgeries take place with limited psychosocial support, based on gender stereotypes, but without firm evidence. Amnesty International reported that "there are no binding guidelines for the treatment of intersex children". Human Rights Watch/interACT report on U.S. children, 2017. In July 2017, Human Rights Watch and interACT published a report on medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex children, “I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me”, based on interviews with intersex persons, families and physicians. The report states that: The report found that intersex medical interventions persist as default advice from doctors to parents, despite some change in some regions of the U.S. and claims of improved surgical techniques, resulting in an uneven situation where care differs and a lack of standards of care, but paradigms for care are still based on socio-cultural factors including expectations of "normality" and evidence in support of surgeries remains lacking. "Nearly every parent" in the study reported pressure for their children to undergo surgery, and many reported misinformation. The report calls for a ban on "surgical procedures that seek to alter the gonads, genitals, or internal sex organs of children with atypical sex characteristics too young to participate in the decision, when those procedures both carry a meaningful risk of harm and can be safely deferred." The report was acknowledged as an important contribution to research by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Associated Press reported on the report and opposition to a ban by CARES Foundation.

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Dalit literature Dalit literature is literature written by Dalits about their lives. Dalit literature emerged in the 1960s in the Marathi language, and it soon appeared in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, sindhi, and Tamil languages, through narratives such as poems, short stories, and autobiographies, which stood out due to their stark portrayal of reality and the Dalit political scene. Dalit literature denounced the then-prevailing portrayal of life by mainstream Marathi literature. Early Dalit literature. One of the first Dalit writers was Madara Chennaiah, an 11th-century cobbler-saint who lived during the reign of the Western Chalukyas and who is also regarded by some scholars as the "father of Vachana poetry". Another poet who finds mention is Dohara Kakkaiah, a Dalit by birth, whose six confessional poems survive. The origins of Dalit writing can also be traced back to Buddhist literature, or to mainly Marathi Dalit Bhakti poets like Gora, Chokha Mela and Karmamela, and to the Tamil Siddhas, or Chittars — many of whose hagiographies, in accounts such as the 12th-century "Periyapuranam", suggest that they may have been Dalits. Modern Dalit writing only emerged as a distinct genre after the democratic and egalitarian thinkers such as Sree Narayana Guru, Jyotiba Phule, B.R. Ambedkar, Iyothee Thass, Sahodaran Ayyappan, Ayyankali, Poykayil Appachan, and others began to articulate the sources and modes of caste oppression. Modern Dalit Literature. According to Satyanarayana and Tharu, "although it is possible to identify a few Dalit writers from earlier times, the real originality and force of Dalit writing, which today comprises a substantial and growing body of work, can be traced to the decades following the late 1960s. Those are the years when the Dalit Panthers revisit and embrace the ideas of Babasaheb Ambedkar, and elaborate his disagreements with the essentially Gandhian mode of Indian nationalism, to begin a new social movement.In the following decades, Dalit writing becomes an all-India phenomenon. This writing reformulates the caste question and reassesses the significance of colonialism and of missionary activity. It resists the reduction of caste to class or to non-Brahminism and vividly describes and analyzes the contemporary workings of caste power." Asserting the importance of Dalit literature, Arundhati Roy has observed: "I do believe that in India we practice a form of apartheid that goes unnoticed by the rest of the world. And it is as important for Dalits to tell their stories as it has been for colonized peoples to write their own histories. When Dalit literature has blossomed and is in full stride, then contemporary (upper caste?) Indian literature's amazing ability to ignore the true brutality and ugliness of the society in which we live, will be seen for what it is: bad literature." Jaydeep Sarangi, in his 2018 introduction to "Dalit Voice," writes that Dalit literature is a culture-specific upheaval in India giving importance to Dalit realization, aesthetics and resistance. Dalit literature in Marathi language. In 1958, the term "Dalit literature" was used at the first conference of "Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangha" (Maharashtra Dalit Literature Society) in Mumbai Baburao Bagul (1930–2008) wrote in Marathi. His first collection of stories, "Jevha Mi Jat Chorali" (English "When I had Concealed My Caste"), published in 1963, depicted a cruel society and thus brought in new momentum to Dalit literature in Marathi; today it is seen by many critics as an epic portraying lives of the Dalits, and was later made into a film by actor-director Vinay Apte. Gradually with other writers like, Namdeo Dhasal (who founded Dalit Panther), these Dalit writings paved way for the strengthening of Dalit movement. Notable Dalit authors writing in Marathi include Arun Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Raja Dhale, Namdev Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Annabhau Sathe, Laxman Mane, Laxman Gaikwad, Sharankumar Limbale, Bhau Panchbhai, Kishor Shantabai Kale, Narendra Jadhav, Shankar Rao Kharat, and Urmila Pawar.Kharat served as president of the 1984 session of Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (Marathi literary conference) held in Jalgaon. Although the first Dalit literature conference was held in 1958 by newly converted buddhist writers, Annabhau Sathe, a communist, who turned to Ambedkarite movement in the later part of his life, is credited as the founding father of Dalit literature. Dalit literature started being mainstream in India with the appearance of the English translations of Marathi Dalit writing. "An Anthology of Dalit Literature", edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot, and "Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature", originally published in three volumes and later collected in a single volume, edited by Arjun Dangle, both published in 1992, were perhaps the first books that popularised the genre throughout India . In 1993, Ambedkari Sahitya Parishad organized the first "Akhil Bharatiya Ambedkari Sahitya Sammelan" (All India Ambedkarite Literature Convention) in Wardha, Maharashtra] to re-conceptualize and transform Dalit literature into "Ambedkari Sahitya", after the name of the Dalit modern-age hero, scholar and inspiration B.R. Ambedkar, who had successfully campaigned against caste-discrimination and was a strong advocate of Dalit rights. "Ambedkari Sahitya Parishad" then successfully organized the Third Akhil Bharatiya Ambedkari Sahitya Sammelan in 1996 and became a voice of advocacy for awareness and transformation. Since then ten similar literary gatherings, were held in various places. References. Manohar, D.Murali. Priesthood: Theorizing Mala/Vaishnava Dasari's Life, Culture and History. New Delhi: Serials, 2016. ____. Dalit Literature: A Pedagogic Discourse. New Delhi: Serials, 2016.

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Chicago literature Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city. Themes and movements. James Atlas, in his biography of Chicago writer Saul Bellow, suggests that "the city's reputation for nurturing literary and intellectual talent can be traced to the same geographical centrality that made it a great industrial power." When Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it was a frontier outpost with about 4,000 people. The population rose rapidly to approximately 100,000 in 1860. By 1890, the city had over 1 million people. Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this growth, can be seen in the works of writers like Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber. Due to these rapid changes, Chicago writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced the challenge of how to depict this potentially disorienting new urban reality. Narrative fiction of that time, much of it in the style of "high-flown romance" and "genteel realism", needed a new approach to describe Chicago's social, political, and economic conditions. Chicagoans worked hard to create a literary tradition that would stand the test of time, and create a "city of feeling" out of concrete, steel, vast lake, and open prairie. Among the new techniques and styles embraced by Chicago writers were "naturalism," "imagism," and "free verse." Themes often centered on an exciting but dirty urbanism, as well as the quaint but dark and sometimes stultifying small town. Chicago's early twentieth-century writers and publishers were seen as producing innovative work that broke with the literary traditions of Europe and the Eastern United States. In 1920, the critic H.L. Mencken wrote in a London magazine, the "Nation," that Chicago was the "Literary Capital of the United States." Expressing the attitude that Chicago writers were creating a distinctive, new, and far from genteel literary idiom, he wrote, "Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort, and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan." While Chicago produced much realist and naturalist fiction, its literary institutions also played a crucial role in promoting international modernism. The avant-garde "Little Review" (founded 1914 by Margaret Anderson) began in Chicago, though it later moved elsewhere. The "Little Review" provided an important platform for experimental literature, famously it was the first to publish James Joyce's novel "Ulysses," in serial form until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges. Similarly, the publication that became "Poetry" magazine (founded 1912 by Harriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared in "Poetry". Contributors have included Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg, among others. The magazine also discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. "Poetry" and the "Little Review" were "daring" in their editorial championship of the modernist movement. Later editors also made substantial contributions in poetry, as did Chicago's university and performance venues. Chicago's universities also have a strong reputation for developing literary talent. In the second half of the 20th century, the University of Chicago served as a hub for many emerging postmodern writers such as Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, and Robert Coover. Bellow received his Bachelor's from nearby Northwestern University, which has also produced acclaimed authors such as George R.R. Martin, Tina Rosenberg and Kate Walbert. Today, Chicago is home to the world's largest youth poetry festival, Louder Than a Bomb. Since its founding in 2001, Louder Than a Bomb has grown into a multi-week celebration that includes competitions, workshops, and other poetry-related events. By 2018, the festival was drawing over 100 teams for a total of more than 1000 young poets competing in spoken word tournaments. The festival is credited with influencing contemporary Chicago poets like Nate Marshall and José Olivarez. According to Bill Savage in "The Encyclopedia of Chicago", today's Chicago writers are still interested in the same social themes and urban landscapes that compelled earlier Chicago writers: "the fundamental dilemmas presented by city life in general and by the specifics of Chicago's urban spaces, history, and relentless change." Periodization. "The Encyclopedia of Chicago" identifies three periods of works from Chicago which had a major influence on American Literature: Literature scholar Robert Bone argues for the existence of a fourth period: Works about Chicago or set in Chicago. Much notable Chicago writing focuses on the city itself, with social criticism keeping exultation in check. Here is a selection of Chicago's most famous works about itself: Alternate realities. Alternative versions of Chicago sometimes appear in fantasy and science fiction novels. Other. Other noted writers, who were from Chicago or who spent a significant amount of their careers in Chicago include, David Mamet, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, John Dos Passos, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene Field, and Hamlin Garland.

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New Italian Epic New Italian Epic is a definition suggested by the Italian literary group Wu Ming Foundation to describe a body of literary works written in Italy by various authors starting in 1993, at the end of the so called ‘First Republic’. This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature. They are a particular kind of metahistorical fiction, with peculiar features that derive from the Italian context. Origin of the definition. The definition was made by Italian writers collectively known as Wu Ming in March 2008, during the work on ‘Up Close & Personal’, a seminar on contemporary Italian literature held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Over the next few days the writers proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins. From these interventions the author drew the essay "New Italian Epic. Memorandum 1993-2008: narrative, oblique gaze, return to the future", published online in the spring of the same year. During the whole of 2008 the expression found a vast echo online, in conferences and conventions, in newspapers, in the specialist press and in radio broadcasts. In Italy, too, Wu Ming 1 put forward the expression ‘New Italian Epic’ [NIE] in English. In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the Memorandum marked ‘2.0’, or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points. In January 2009 the series Stile Libero of the Einaudi publishing house published a further enriched and updated version of the Memorandum (‘3.0’), entitled "New Italian Epic. Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future". The "memorandum". The Memorandum was intended as an "open suggestion of comparative reading, an album of notes to be borne in mind, remembered, used" and suggests that attention should be paid to a group of works written in Italy over the past fifteen years (1993–2008), seeking unexpected similarities or, conversely, dissolving connections too often taken for granted The Memorandum has also been described as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification. According to the author and other participants in the debate, the term ‘manifesto’ is misleading, because this is a document in the form of a pamphlet that does not herald a movement of authors or prescribe anything, but describes "a posteriori" a dialogue between already existing books, delineating the characteristics of a series of works that go beyond post-modernism, ‘NIE is only one of the many, good and different things that are happening today in Italian literature’, as the preface to edition 2.0 puts it. Characteristics. The characteristics of NIE listed in the memorandum are seven in number, preceded by some premisses seen as a conceptual framework. These premisses concern historical and geographical specificities: this part of the memorandum describes in broad brushstrokes the social and cultural context in which the works are born, and to which explicit or allegorical references are made. The seven characteristics identified by Wu Ming 1 are: To this list, with version 2.0 of the memorandum and interventions by other writers and academics, were added thematic constants that may be found in NIE texts, for example the ‘death of the founder’: many books in the ‘nebula’ describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendants to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia ‘the old man’. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase. In the memorandum, the catalogue of NIE characteristics is followed by a reflection on allegory, which flows into an exhortation to imagine the future and the extinction of the human species with an approach that the author defines as ‘ecocentric’, and describes as a ‘systematic recourse’ to the rhetorical figure of the pathetic fallacy, i.e. the attribution to inanimate objects and creatures without consciousness of thoughts and emotions equal to those of human beings. The debate in the Italian media and in the cultural world. Contributions and interventions by other writers. The appearance of the memorandum has unleashed, from April 2008, a vast discussion amongst writers, as well as among writers and readers. Online or in the pages of some newspapers (such as L'Unità, La Repubblica, Liberazione and Il Manifesto) almost all the authors mentioned by Wu Ming 1 have taken a position on the subject. In "La Repubblica", Carlo Lucarelli has interpreted the memorandum as an invitation to Italian authors to take a greater interest in the dark sides of the country's national history, and has in turn exhorted them to move towards a ‘new frontier that is not only physical (new environments, new worlds to create and explore) and it is not only narrative (new plots, new adventures, different montage techniques, themes and extreme emotions), but also stylistic (new words, new constructions) in [...] mutating novels. Massimo Carlotto, in Il "Manifesto", established a connection between crises in Italian crime writing and attempt to define a new narrative. Valerio Evangelisti, in a long article in "L'Unità", described the various ways in which it is possible to achieve a poetic outcome that he has called ‘maximalist’. ‘Speaking through systems, historico-geographical frameworks, visions of entire societies, cosmic impulses. One can resort to forms of adventure narrative, as long as the outcome is achieved: making people think, in a realistic or metaphorical way, about the collective perception of an alienated everyday. This is what the authors of the New Italian Epic are trying to do [...]’. Marcello Fois (prominent novelist of a Sardinian Literary Spring), presenting his own works in France, defined the New Italian Epic as the last development in a trend to recover popular literature, ignoring the diktats and prescriptions of the critics, a tendency begun in the nineties by certain authors (including those brought together in Group 13). According to Fois, the first phase consisted in ‘freeing oneself from the shame of making genre literature, without paying any attention to the critics; the second – more recent – phase concerns subject-matter. People have rid themselves of the shame of talking about the Italy of today. They have referred to the contemporary situation of our country through the historical novel.’ The author of noirs and historian of philosophy Girolamo De Michele has intervented several times, online and in the pages of "Liberazione", with articles arguing parallels between noir poetics, the New Italian Epic, Neo-realism and the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze. Intervening in "Il Manifesto", Tommaso Pincio voiced his perplexity about the expression ‘unidentified narrative objects’, at the same time interpreting the NIE memorandum as the signal of a conquered centrality of the novel form in Italian cultural production, after a long period during which critics had viewed it with suspicion. Later, interventions have been made in various forms and in various media by other writers, including Giuseppe Genna, Michela Murgia, Giulio Angioni, Antonio Scurati, Vanni Santoni, Gregorio Magini and many more. Critical replies and controversies. Historian and literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa writes on "La Repubblica": In a review of titles published in the computer edition of "La Repubblica", the journalist Dario Olivero writes: «First came "Petrolio" by Pasolini. The first organic attempt to write a novel about [Italian] darkness: Mattei, ENI, Cefis, the strategy of tension. Now we’ve gotten Saviano, with an impressive acceleration over the past few years. Lucarelli, Siti, De Cataldo, Evangelisti, Wu Ming. Many started out with noir, following the idea of Leonardo Sciascia and the American thriller: using crime as a grid for reality. They have come much further, to the most important cultural current that Italy remembers since the days of Neo-realism.» Reviewing the book in the daily paper "Il Riformista", Luca Mastrantonio writes: «‘a book which... traces an important vector of contemporary Italian literature. "New Italian Epic" is a curious cultural hybrid. More like a GMO than a product with denomination of origin... it is an interesting cyberbook of literary theory [...] in this essay you can hear, palpitating, the need to draw mental maps between the books, pair up authors with greater or lesser amounts of judgement, create remarkable points to survey positions and routes in Italian publishing. [26]» Amongst the detractors is the literary critic Carla Benedetti, columnist in the weekly L’Espresso and lecturer at Pisa University. In January 2009 the Wu Ming collective used a phrase by Benedetti reported in the daily newspaper Libero ("[Il New Italian Epic] is nonsense. It is nothing but self-propaganda") as an endorsement for the publication of "New Italian Epic". After "New Italian Epic" appeared in bookshops (January 2009), various polemical articles signed by critics appeared in the daily press. In February–March 2009 Wu Ming 1 published online a two-point analysis of the ‘rhetorical strategies’ employed by detractors, entitled: "New Italian Epic: gut reactions". The debate in the international academic world. The term ‘New Italian Epic’ and the body of works to which it refers were first discussed in March 2008 during ‘Up Close & Personal’, a seminar on contemporary Italian literature organised by McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in which Italianists from all over North America took part. In October 2008, at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies of the University of London a round table was held on NIE, in which the writers Wu Ming 1, Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini of the group Scrittura Industriale Collettiva took part, along with researchers and academics from various countries (including Monica Jansen, lecturer at Antwerp University and author of the book "The Debate on Postmodernism in Italy"), who went on to form a research group into NIE. This group, called ‘PolifoNIE’, examined the subject in greater detail for the Biennial Conference of the Society for Italian Studies, at which it organised two sessions. In May 2010, IGRS published the minutes of the London conferences in the form of a monographic issue of the "Journal of Romance Studies""Journal of Romance Studies" entitled "Overcoming Postmodernism", which was the first scholarly overview of the New Italian Epic. A round table entitled ‘Le roman épique italien’ was also organised by the Université de Provence at Aix-en-Provence and by the journal "Cahiers d'Études Romanes". The Memorandum on the New Italian Epic has also been included within academic studies in audio-visual and new media, with particular reference to the non-typology of ‘unidentified narrative objects’, applicable to the ‘hybrid’ products emerging from the world of garage media. In March 2009 the PhD programme Planetary Collegium M-Node, along with the School of Media Design and Multimedia Arts of the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan organised the symposium ‘New Italian (Media) Epic’, with the presence of Wu Ming 1, Derrick De Kerckhove, Pier Luigi Capucci, Francesco Monico, and many others including film-makers, artists and media theorists. This symposium gave rise to a permanent laboratory. In November 2009, scholars from many countries met in Warsaw, Poland, at the conference "Fiction, Faction and Reality in Italian Literature after 1990", organized by the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Warsaw. Several panels were devoted to the debate on the New Italian Epic. In March 2010, a panel entitled "The New Italian Epic between Pulp and political intervention" was held at the 8th annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association, which took place at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The Horla "The Horla" (French: "Le Horla") is an 1887 short horror story written in the style of a journal by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, after an initial, much shorter version published in the newspaper "Gil Blas", October 26, 1886. American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in his survey "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), provides his own interpretation of the story: The story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's own "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. The word "horla" itself is not French, and is a neologism. Charlotte Mandell, who has translated "The Horla" for publisher Melville House, suggests in an afterword that the word "horla" is a portmanteau of the French words "hors" ("outside"), and "là" ("there") and that "le horla" sounds like "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," and can be transliterally interpreted as "the 'what's out there'". Synopsis. In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried, bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a "superb three-mast" Brazilian ship and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home. All around him, he senses the presence of a being that he calls the "Horla". The torment that the Horla causes is first manifested physically: The narrator complains that he suffers from "an atrocious fever", and that he has trouble sleeping. He wakes up from nightmares with the chilling feeling that someone is watching him and "kneeling on [his] chest." Throughout the short story, the main character's sanity, or rather, his feelings of alienation, are put into question as the Horla progressively dominates his thoughts. Initially, the narrator himself questions his sanity, exclaiming "Am I going mad?" after having found his glass of water empty, despite not having drunk from it. He later decides that he is not, in fact, going mad, since he is fully "conscious" of his "state" and that he could indeed "analyze it with the most complete lucidity." The presence of the Horla becomes more and more intolerable to the protagonist, as it is "watching…looking at…[and] dominating" him. After reading about a large number of Brazilians who fled their homes, bemoaning the fact that "they are pursued, possessed, governed like human cattle by…a species of vampire, which feeds on their life while they are asleep…[and] drinks water," the narrator soon realizes the Horla was aboard the Brazilian three-mast boat that he had previously greeted. He feels so "lost" and "possessed" to the point that he is ready to kill either the Horla, or himself.

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To Kill a Mockingbird in popular culture Since the publication of" To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1960, there have been many references and allusions to it in popular culture. The book has been internationally popular for more than a half century, selling more than 30 million copies in 40 languages. It currently (2013) sells 750,000 copies a year and is widely read in schools in America and abroad. Harper Lee and her publisher did not expect "To Kill a Mockingbird" to be such a huge success. Since it was first published in 1960, it has sold close to one million copies a year and has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the United States. Whether they like the book or not, readers can remember when and where they were the first time they opened the book. Because of this, "Mockingbird" has become a pillar for students around the country and symbol of justice and the reminiscence of childhood. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is not solely about the cultural legal practices of Atticus Finch, but about the fatherly virtues he held towards his children and the way Scout viewed him as a father. Parties were held across the United States for the 50th anniversary of publication in 2010. In honor of the 50th anniversary, famous authors and celebrities as well as people close to the book's author, Harper Lee, shared their experiences with "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the book "Scout, Atticus, & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird". The book features interviews with Mary Badham, Tom Brokaw, Oprah Winfrey, Anna Quindlen, Richard Russo, as well as Harper Lee's sister, Alice Finch Lee. The 2010 documentary film "Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird" focuses on the background of the book and the film as well as their impact on readers and viewers.

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The Scarlet Letter in popular culture The following is a list of references to the 1850 novel "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne in popular culture.

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Of Mice and Men in popular culture "Of Mice and Men" is a 1937 novella by John Steinbeck, which tells the story of George and Lennie, two displaced migrant workers in California during the Great Depression (1929–1939). The story is set on a ranch a few miles from Soledad in the Salinas Valley. Since its initial publication it has been frequently referenced in popular culture. In cartoons and animation. Homages to the characters Lennie and George have been especially popular in American cartoons and animated films. The "New York Times" reviewed the 1939 film based on the novella thusly: Theatrical cartoon shorts of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" cartoons released by Warner Bros., are awash with "Of Mice and Men" parodies. The reference most often appears in the form of one character asking another, "à la" Lennie, "Which way did he go, George; which way did he go?", such as the episodes "Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt" or "Falling Hare". The other popular reference draws on Lennie's love of soft furry animals and his underestimation of his strength. In "The Abominable Snow Rabbit" (1961), the abominable snowman grabs Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck saying, "I will name him George, and I will hug him, and pet him, and squeeze him" with Mel Blanc doing an unmistakable imitation of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Lennie. Tex Avery, who worked as a director on Warner-released cartoons during the 1930s and early 1940s, started the "Of Mice and Men" trend with "Of Fox and Hounds" (1940) and "Lonesome Lenny" (1946) featuring Screwy Squirrel. The formula was so successful that it was used again and again in subsequent shorts, notably Robert McKimson's "Hoppy Go Lucky" (1952), "Cat-Tails for Two" (1953) and Chuck Jones' "The Abominable Snow Rabbit" (1961). Many more serious animated features use George and Lennie-type characters to serve as comic relief. Other examples in animation include: References. http://comicbook.com/blog/2014/03/16/the-walking-deads-the-grove-is-steinbecks-of-mice-and-men-with-the-undead/

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The Catcher in the Rye in popular culture The 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger has had a lasting influence as it remains both a bestseller and a frequently challenged book. Numerous works in popular culture have referenced the novel. Factors contributing to the novel's mystique and impact include its portrayal of protagonist Holden Caulfield; its tone of sincerity; its themes of familial neglect, tension between teens and society, and rebellion; its previous banned status; and Salinger's reclusiveness. "The Catcher in the Rye" has inspired "rewrites" which have been said to form their own genre. On the other hand, there are examples of similarities between the novel and other works that were not intended by their authors, which suggests that the novel is "present, at least spiritually, in ... any story line that involves quirky young people struggling to find their places in a society prone to reward conformity and condemn individuality." While the novel is linked to several murders and murder attempts, it has been claimed that the novel's overall effect on society is "far more positive than negative." The novel also helped popularize the slang verb "screw up". In recent years there has been a discussion of depression as exhibited in Holden Caulfield. Shootings. The best-known event associated with "The Catcher in the Rye" is arguably Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon. Chapman identified with the novel's narrator to the extent that he wanted to change his name to Holden Caulfield. On the night he shot Lennon, Chapman was found with a copy of the book in which he had written "This is my statement" and signed Holden's name. Later, he read a passage from the novel to address the court during his sentencing. Daniel Stashower speculated that Chapman had wanted Lennon's innocence to be preserved by death, inspired by Holden's wish to preserve children's innocence despite Holden's later realization that children should be left alone. After John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981, police found "The Catcher in the Rye" in his hotel room. Hinckley later admitted to being an admirer of Chapman and studying his attempt on John Lennon. Hinckley's possession of the novel was later dismissed as an influence, as a half dozen various other types of books were also discovered in his possession. Robert John Bardo, who murdered Rebecca Schaeffer, was carrying the book when he visited Schaeffer's apartment in Hollywood on July 18, 1989 and murdered her. Films. Although Salinger had refused a film adaptation, many Hollywood films have based characters on Holden Caulfield. Holden has been identified as "one of the most reproduced characters on film." Furthermore, many such films reference each other. Anthony Caputi, a specialist in dramatic literature at Cornell University, claims that the novel inspires both "variations" and "imitations", comparing it with several coming-of-age films. Books. "The Catcher in the Rye" has had significant cultural influence, and works inspired by the novel have been said to form their own genre. Sarah Graham assessed works influenced by "The Catcher in the Rye" to include the novels "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "A Complicated Kindness" by Miriam Toews, "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath, "Ordinary People" by Judith Guest, and the film "Igby Goes Down" by Burr Steers.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four in popular media References to George Orwell's 1949 dystopian political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four themes, concepts and plot elements are also frequent in other works, particularly popular music and video entertainment. References on stage. A successful new adaptation of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan), which twice toured the UK and played an extended run in London's West End at the Almeida Theatre and Headlong, have been staged. More recently, a Broadway presentation of the stage adaptation is scheduled to open on 22 June 2017 at the Hudson Theatre.

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Cultural references to Hamlet Numerous cultural references to "Hamlet" (in film, literature, arts, etc.) reflect the continued influence of this play. "Hamlet" is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays, topping the list at the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1879, as of 2004. Plays. The following list of plays including references to "Hamlet" is ordered alphabetically. Film and television. Film. The following list is ordered alphabetically. Television. Comedy and cartoons. Sitcoms alluding to "Hamlet" include "Gilligan's Island", "Happy Days", "Skins", "Mystery Science Theater 3000," "Frasier" and "Upstart Crow". Cartoons include "The Simpsons", "", "Animaniacs" and "The Brak Show". Music. Opera. Several operas have been written based on "Hamlet", including: Instrumental. Instrumental works based on "Hamlet" include: Contemporary. Contemporary popular music mentions include: Other. The play has contributed many phrases to common English vernacular, including the famous "To be, or not to be". It (as well as the Shakespearean canon as a whole) is frequently given as an example of a text which would be reproduced under the conditions of the infinite monkey theorem. Gallery. Artworks inspired by the play includes works by Eugène Delacroix, Henrietta Rae and William Blake.

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Cultural references to Ophelia Ophelia, a character in William Shakespeare's drama "Hamlet", is often referred to in literature and the arts, often in connection to suicide, love, and/or mental instability.

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The Other William

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Parallel novel A parallel novel is an in-universe (but often non-canonical) pastiche (or sometimes sequel) piece of literature written within, derived from, or taking place during the framework of another work of fiction by the same or another author with respect to continuity. Parallel novels or "reimagined classics" are works of fiction that "borrow a character and fill in his story, mirror an 'old' plot, or blend the characters of one book with those of another". These stories further the works of already well-known novels by focusing on a minor character and making them the major character. The revised stories may have the same setting and time frame and even the same characters. Goodreads.com maintains a list of its readers' ratings of the most popular parallel novels. As of 2019 the top five were: "Wide Sargasso Sea", "Wicked", "Telemachus and Homer", "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (a play, not a novel), and "The Penelopiad". Creating parallel novels can have significant legal implications when the copyright of the original author's work has not expired, and a later author makes a parallel novel derived from the original author's work. References.

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Philosophy and literature Philosophy and literature involves the literary treatment of philosophers and philosophical themes (the literature of philosophy), and the philosophical treatment of issues raised by literature (the philosophy of literature). The philosophy of literature. Strictly speaking, the philosophy of literature is a branch of aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the question, "what is art"? Much of aesthetic philosophy has traditionally focused on the plastic arts or music, however, at the expense of the verbal arts. In fact, much traditional discussion of aesthetic philosophy seeks to establish criteria of artistic quality that are indifferent to the subject matter being depicted. Since all literary works, almost by definition, contain notional content, aesthetic theories that rely on purely formal qualities tend to overlook literature. The very existence of narrative raises philosophical issues. In narrative, a creator can embody, and readers be led to imagine, fictional characters, and even fantastic creatures or technologies. The ability of the human mind to imagine, and even to experience empathy with, these fictional characters is itself revealing about the nature of the human mind. Some fiction can be thought of as a sort of a thought experiment in ethics: it describes fictional characters, their motives, their actions, and the consequences of their actions. It is in this light that some philosophers have chosen various narrative forms to teach their philosophy ("see below"). Literature and language. Plato, for instance, believed that literary culture had a strong impact on the ethical outlook of its consumers. In "The Republic", Plato displays a strong hostility to the contents of the culture of his period, and proposes a strong censorship of popular literature in his utopia. More recently, however, philosophers of various stripes have taken different and less hostile approaches to literature. Since the work of the British Empiricists and Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, Western philosophy has been preoccupied with a fundamental question of epistemology: the question of the relationship between ideas in the human mind and the world existing outside the mind, if in fact such a world exists. In more recent years, these epistemological issues have turned instead to an extended discussion of words and meaning: can language in fact bridge the barrier between minds? This cluster of issues concerning the meaning of language and of "writings" sometimes goes by the name of "the linguistic turn". As such, techniques and tools developed for literary criticism and literary theory rose to greater prominence in Western philosophy of the late twentieth century. Philosophers of various stripes paid more attention to literature than their predecessors did. Some sought to examine the question of whether it was in fact truly possible to communicate using words, whether it was possible for an author's intended meaning to be communicated to a reader. Others sought to use literary works as examples of contemporary culture, and sought to reveal unconscious attitudes they felt present in these works for the purpose of social criticism. The truth of fiction. Literary works also pose issues concerning truth and the philosophy of language. In educated opinion, at least, it is commonly reputed as true that "Sherlock Holmes lived in London". (see David Lewis 'Truth in Fiction', American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 15. No. 1, January 1978) It is also considered true that "Samuel Pepys lived in London". Yet Sherlock Holmes never lived anywhere at all; he is a fictional character. Samuel Pepys, contrarily, is judged to have been a real person. Contemporary interest in Holmes and in Pepys share strong similarities; the only reason why anyone knows either of their names is because of an abiding interest in reading about their alleged deeds and words. These two statements would appear to belong to two different orders of truth. Further problems arise concerning the truth value of statements about fictional worlds and characters that can be implied but are nowhere explicitly stated by the sources for our knowledge about them, such as "Sherlock Holmes had only one head" or "Sherlock Holmes never travelled to the moon". The literature of philosophy. Philosophical poems. A number of poets have written poems on philosophical themes, and some important philosophers have expressed their philosophy in verse. The cosmogony of Hesiod and the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius are important philosophical poems. The genre of epic poetry was also used to teach philosophy. Vyasa narrated the ancient Indian epic "Mahabharata" in order to teach Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy. Homer also presented some philosophical teachings in his "Odyssey". Many of the Eastern philosophers worked out their thought in poetical fashion. Some of the important names include: Notable Western philosophical poets include: Philosophical fiction. Some philosophers have undertaken to write philosophy in the form of fiction, including novels and short stories (see separate article on philosophical fiction). This is apparent early on in the literature of philosophy, where philosophers such as Plato wrote dialogues in which fictional or fictionalized characters discuss philosophical subjects; Socrates frequently appears as a protagonist in Plato's dialogues, and the dialogues are one of the prime sources of knowledge about Socrates' teaching, though at this remove it is sometimes hard to distinguish Socrates' actual positions from Plato's own. Numerous early Christian writers, including Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard produced dialogues; several early modern philosophers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, wrote occasionally in this genre. Other philosophers have resorted to narrative to get their teachings across. The classical 12th century Islamic philosopher, Abubacer (Ibn Tufail), wrote a fictional Arabic narrative "Philosophus Autodidactus" as a response to al-Ghazali's "The Incoherence of the Philosophers", and then the 13th century Islamic theologian-philosopher Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a fictional narrative "Theologus Autodidactus" as a response to Abubacer's "Philosophus Autodidactus". The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche often articulated his ideas in literary modes, most notably in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", a re-imagined account of the teachings of Zoroaster. Marquis de Sade and Ayn Rand wrote novels in which characters served as mouthpieces for philosophical positions, and act in accordance with them in the plot. George Santayana was also a philosopher who wrote novels and poetry; the relationship between Santayana's characters and his beliefs is more complex. The existentialists include among their numbers important French authors who used fiction to convey their philosophical views; these include Jean-Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea" and play "No Exit", and Albert Camus's "The Stranger". Maurice Blanchot's entire fictional production, whose titles include "The Step Not Beyond", "The madness of the Day", and "The Writing of Disaster", among others, constitutes an indispensable corpus for the treatment of the relationship between philosophy and literature. So does Jacques Derrida's "". A number of philosophers have had important influence on literature. Arthur Schopenhauer, largely as a result of his system of aesthetics, is perhaps the most influential recent philosopher in the history of literature; Thomas Hardy's later novels frequently allude to Schopenhauerian themes, particularly in "Jude the Obscure". Schopenhauer also had an important influence on Joseph Conrad. Schopenhauer also had a less specific but more widely diffused influence on the Symbolist movement in European literature. Lionel Johnson also refers to Schopenhauer's aesthetics in his essay "The Cultured Faun". Jacques Derrida's entire oeuvre has been hugely influential for so-called continental philosophy and the understanding of the role of literature in modernity. Other works of fiction considered to have philosophical content include: Philosophical writing as literature. A number of philosophers are read for the literary merits of their works apart from their philosophical content. The philosophy in the "Meditations" of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is unoriginal Stoicism, but the "Meditations" are still read for their literary merit and for the insight they give into the workings of the emperor's mind. Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy is noted for the quality and readability of its prose, as are some of the works of the British Empiricists, such as Locke and Hume. Søren Kierkegaard's style is frequently regarded as poetic artistry as well as philosophical, especially in "Fear and Trembling" and "Either/Or". Friedrich Nietzsche's works such as "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" frequently resemble prose poetry and contain imagery and allusion instead of argument. Philosophy in literature. Philosophers in literature. Socrates appears in a highly fictionalized guise, as a comic figure and the object of mockery, in "The Clouds" by Aristophanes. In the play, Socrates appears hanging from a basket, where he delivers oracles such as: Early Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou expressed his ideas primarily through short literary anecdotes and fables such as "Dream of the Butterfly". The other major philosophers of the time appear as characters within these stories, allowing Zhuangzi to playfully explore their ideas and contrast them with his own, as he does with Laozi, Liezi, Hui Shi, and many others. Most prominently in his work is the presence of Confucius and his prominent disciples, who are sometimes used to undermine popular understandings of Confucian philosophy or to reinforce Zhuangzi's own understanding of how one lives in accordance with the Dao. Jorge Luis Borges is perhaps the twentieth century's preeminent author of philosophical fiction. He wrote a short story in which the philosopher Averroes is the chief protagonist, "Averroes's Search". Many plot points in his stories paraphrase the thought of philosophers, including George Berkeley, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Bertrand Russell; he also attributes various opinions to figures including George Dalgarno. A key plot point in Umberto Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose" turns on the discovery of a mysterious book that turns out to contain a lost manuscript by Aristotle. Eco's later novel "Foucault's Pendulum" became the forerunner of a run of thrillers or detective fiction that toss around learned allusions and the names of historical thinkers; more recent examples include Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Rule of Four" by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. Also, Philip K. Dick, who has often been compared to Borges, raises a significant number of philosophical issues in his novels, everything from the problem of solipsism to many questions of perception and reality. Fictional philosophers. Jorge Luis Borges introduces many philosophical themes, and a number of fictional philosophers, in his short stories. A fictional philosophical movement is a part of the premise of his story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and the unnamed narrator of his story "The Library of Babel" could also be called a fictional philosopher. A fictional theologian is the subject of his story "Three Versions of Judas". Fictional philosophers occasionally occur throughout the works of Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" contains long passages that could be considered as successors to the fictionalized philosophical dialogues of the ancient world, set within the plot.

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Great Conversation The Great Conversation is the ongoing process of writers and thinkers referencing, building on, and refining the work of their predecessors. This process is characterized by writers in the Western canon making comparisons and allusions to the works of earlier writers. As such it is a name used in the promotion of the "Great Books of the Western World" published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1952. It is also the title of (i) the first volume of the first edition of this set of books, written by the educational theorist Robert Maynard Hutchins, and (ii) an accessory volume to the second edition (1990), written by the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. According to Hutchins, "The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day". Adler said, What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways.

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Authorial intent In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the view, according to which an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. Opponents have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies. Literary theory. New Criticism. New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art". The author, they argue, cannot be reconstructed from a writing—the text is the primary source of meaning, and any details of the author's desires or life are secondary. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that even details about the work's composition or the author's intended meaning and purpose that might be found in other documents such as journals or letters are "private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact" and are thus secondary to the trained reader's rigorous engagement with the text itself. Wimsatt and Beardsley divide the evidence used in making interpretations of poetry (although their analysis can be applied equally well to any type of art) into three categories: Thus, a text's internal evidence—the words themselves and their meanings—is open for literary analysis. External evidence—anything not contained within the text itself, such as statements made by the poet about the poem that is being interpreted—does not belong to literary criticism. Preoccupation with the authorial intent "leads away from the poem." According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, a poem does not belong to its author but rather "is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public." Psychoanalytic criticism. In psychoanalytic criticism, the author's biography and unconscious state were seen as part of the text, and therefore the author's intent could be revived from a literary text—although the intent might be an unconscious one. Cambridge School contextualism. The Cambridge School of contextualist hermeneutics, a position most elaborated by Quentin Skinner, in the first instances distinguishes linguistic meaning from speech-acts: that is to say, things which the performance of an utterance "does". Consider the following. Typically, the ceremony of marriage concludes upon the exchange of the utterance "I do". In such a case, to utter "I do" is not merely to report an internal disposition, but to perform an action, namely, to "get" married. The intended force of "I do" in such a circumstance is only ever retrievable through understanding something about the complex social activity of marriage. Indeed, to understand a speech-act is to understand what conventions are regulating its significance. Since actions are always publicly legible—they are done by the speech itself—this presupposes no knowledge about the author's mental states. The task is always thus: with as much contextual information as possible, can we establish which conventions a text was interacting with, and by inference to the best explanation, what the author's intent was? Post-structuralism. In post-structuralism, there are a variety of approaches to authorial intent. For some of the theorists deriving from Jacques Lacan, and in particular theories variously called "écriture féminine", gender and sex predetermine the ways that texts will emerge, and the language of textuality itself will present an argument that is potentially counter to the author's conscious intent. Marxist criticism. For Marxist literary theorists, the author's intent is always a code for a particular set of ideologies in the author's own day. For Marxists (especially those of the Soviet realism type), authorial intent is manifest in the text and must be placed in a context of liberation and the materialist dialectic. However, Marxist-derived theorists have seen authorial intent in a much more nuanced way. Raymond Williams, for example, posits literary productions always exist within a context of emerging, resistant, and synthetic ideological positions. The author's intent is recoverable from the text, but there are always encoded within it several separate positions. The author might be arguing consciously for empire, but hidden within that argument will be a response to a counterargument and a presentation of an emerging synthesis. Some members of the reception theory group (Hans Robert Jauss, in particular) have approximated the Marxist view by arguing that the forces of cultural reception reveal the ideological positions of both author and readership. Reader response. Reader response critics view the authorial intent variously. In general, they have argued that the author's intent itself is immaterial and cannot be fully recovered. However, the author's intent will shape the text and limit the possible interpretations of a work. The reader's "impression" of the author's intent is a working force in interpretation, but the author's actual intent is not. Weak intentionalism. Weak intentionalism combines intentionalism with insights from reader response. Mark Bevir in "The Logic of the History of Ideas" sees meanings as necessarily intentional but suggests that the relevant intentions can be those of readers as well as those of authors. Weak intentionalists privilege intentionality to emphasize that texts do not have meanings in themselves. They believe that meanings are always meanings for people—albeit the relevant people, whether authors or readers. In textual criticism. Authorial intention is of great practical concern to some textual critics. These are known as intentionalists and are identified with the Bowers-Tanselle school of thought. Their editions have as one of their most important goals the recovery of the author's intentions (generally final intentions). When preparing a work for the press, an editor working along the principles outlined by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle will attempt to construct a text that is close to the author's final intentions. For transcription and typesetting, authorial intentionality can be considered paramount. An intentionalist editor would constantly investigate the documents for traces of authorial intention. On one hand, it can be argued that the author always intends whatever the author writes and that at different points in time the same author might have very different intentions. On the other hand, an author may in some cases write something he or she did not intend. For example, an intentionalist would consider for emendation the following cases: In cases such as these where the author is living, they would be questioned by the editor who would then adhere to the intention expressed. In cases where the author is deceased, an intentionalist would attempt to approach authorial intention. The strongest voices countering an emphasis on authorial intent in scholarly editing have been D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, proponents of a model that accounts for the "social text," tracing material transformations and embodiments of works while not privileging one version over another.

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Sublime (philosophy) In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin "sublīmis") is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Ancient philosophy. The first known study of the "sublime" is ascribed to Longinus: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous or "On the Sublime". This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship are uncertain. For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers. Longinus' treatise is also notable for referring not only to Greek authors such as Homer, but also to biblical sources such as Genesis. This treatise was rediscovered in the 16th century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by linguist Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux in 1674. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted in 1712, and William Smith in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800. Modern philosophy. British philosophy. The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his "The Spectator", and later the "Pleasures of the Imagination". All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities. John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as "Miscellanies" in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the "Moralists". His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec. 1, 390–91), but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit..." (Part III, sec. 1, 373). Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour in 1699 and commented in "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc." that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified—greatness, uncommonness, and beauty—"arise from visible objects"; that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric. It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime" but uses semi-synonymous terms such as "unbounded", "unlimited", "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess. Edmund Burke. Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of sublimity. An object of art could be beautiful yet it could not possess greatness. His "Pleasures of the Imagination", as well as Mark Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination" of 1744 and Edward Young's poem "Night Thoughts" of 1745 are generally considered the starting points for Edmund Burke's analysis of sublimity. Edmund Burke developed his conception of sublimity in "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" of 1756. Burke was the first philosopher to argue that sublimity and beauty are "mutually exclusive". The dichotomy that Burke articulated is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, and is antithetical in the same degree as light and darkness. Light may accentuate beauty, but either great light or darkness, i. e., the absence of light, is sublime to the extent that it can annihilate vision of the object in question. What is "dark, uncertain, and confused" moves the imagination to awe and a degree of horror. While the relationship of sublimity and beauty is one of mutual exclusivity, either can provide pleasure. Sublimity may evoke horror, but knowledge that the perception is a fiction is pleasureful. Burke's concept of sublimity was an antithetical contrast to the classical conception of the aesthetic quality of beauty being the pleasurable experience that Plato described in several of his dialogues, e. g. "Philebus", "Ion", "Hippias Major", and "Symposium", and suggested that ugliness is an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill intense emotions, ultimately providing pleasure. For Aristotle, the function of artistic forms was to instill pleasure, and he first pondered the problem that an object of art representing ugliness produces "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involved his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature as both shocking and having poetic value. The classical notion of ugliness prior to Edmund Burke, most notably described in the works of Saint Augustine of Hippo, denoted it as the absence of form and therefore as a degree of non-existence. For St. Augustine, beauty is the result of the benevolence and goodness of God in His creation, and as a category it had no opposite. Because ugliness lacks any attributive value, it is formless due to the absence of beauty. Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects of sublimity, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction that other authors noted. Burke described the sensation attributed to sublimity as a "negative pain", which he denominated "delight" and which is distinct from positive pleasure. "Delight" is thought to result from the removal of pain, caused by confronting a sublime object, and supposedly is more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of sublimity, e. g. tension resulting from eye strain, were not seriously considered by later authors, his empirical method of reporting his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to the analysis of Immanuel Kant. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence. German philosophy. Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime". He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying. In his "Critique of Judgment" (1790), Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime. Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant evidently divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid "of" it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the magnitude of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located. Arthur Schopenhauer. To clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Arthur Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his "The World as Will and Representation", § 39. For him, the feeling of the beautiful is in seeing an object that invites the observer to transcend individuality, and simply observe the idea underlying the object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is when the object does not invite such contemplation but instead is an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel considered the sublime a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered "oriental" cultures as less developed, more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage God only through "sublated" means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe. Rudolf Otto. Rudolf Otto compared the sublime with his newly coined concept of the numinous. The numinous comprises terror, "Tremendum", but also a strange fascination, "Fascinans". Contemporary philosophy. 20th century. The last decades of the 19th century saw the rise of "Kunstwissenschaft", or the "science of art"—a movement to discern laws of aesthetic appreciation and arrive at a scientific approach to aesthetic experience. At the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the "Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft", which he edited for many years, and published the work "Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft" in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic. The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate". Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant's aesthetics and the Romantic conception of the sublime through the prism of semiotic theory and psychoanalysis. He argued that Kant's "mathematical sublime" could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers, a monotonous infinity threatens to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions. The "dynamic sublime", on the other hand, was an excess of signifieds: meaning was always overdetermined. According to Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Lyotard argued that the modernists attempted to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition. For him, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an "aporia" (impassable doubt) in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world. 21st century. According to Mario Costa, the concept of the sublime should be examined first of all in relation to the epochal novelty of digital technologies, and technological artistic production: new media art, computer-based generative art, networking, telecommunication art. For him, the new technologies are creating conditions for a new kind of sublime: the "technological sublime". The traditional categories of aesthetics (beauty, meaning, expression, feeling) are being replaced by the notion of the sublime, which after being "natural" in the 18th century, and "metropolitan-industrial" in the modern era, has now become technological. There has also been some resurgence of interest in the sublime in analytic philosophy since the early 1990s, with occasional articles in "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism" and "The British Journal of Aesthetics", as well as monographs by writers such as Malcolm Budd, James Kirwan and Kirk Pillow. As in the postmodern or critical theory tradition, analytic philosophical studies often begin with accounts of Kant or other philosophers of the 18th or early 19th centuries. Noteworthy is a general theory of the sublime, in the tradition of Longinus, Burke and Kant, in which Tsang Lap Chuen takes the notion of limit-situations in human life as central to the experience. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov in "The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity" argues for sublimity as the common root to aesthetics and ethics, "The origin of surprise is the break (the pause, the rupture) between one's sensibility and one's powers of representation... The recuperation that follows the break between one's sensibility and one's representational capability leads to sublimity and the subsequent feelings of admiration and/or responsibility, allowing for the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics... The roles of aesthetics and ethics—that is, the roles of artistic and moral judgments, are very relevant to contemporary society and business practices, especially in light of the technological advances that have resulted in the explosion of visual culture and in the mixture of awe and apprehension as we consider the future of humanity."

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Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno (; ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947), "Minima Moralia" (1951) and "Negative Dialectics" (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel "Doctor Faustus", while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published "Aesthetic Theory", which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion. Life and career. Early years: Frankfurt. Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund) was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952). His mother, a Catholic from Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name, Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve. At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school, before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukács's "The Theory of the Novel" that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's "The Spirit of Utopia", of which he would later write: Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself. Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s; after fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith—but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the "Frankfurter Zeitung"s literary editor, of whom he would later write: Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the "Zeitschrift für Musik", the "Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur" and later for the "Musikblätter des Anbruch". In these articles Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky's "The Soldier's Tale", which in 1923 he called a "dismal Bohemian prank". In these early writings he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances that either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence that Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: "No cathedral", he wrote, "can be built if no community desires one." In the summer of 1924 Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation Adorno had already met his most important intellectual collaborators, Horkheimer and Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock. Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin. During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's "Three Fragments from Wozzeck", op. 7, premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture that had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna he and Berg attended public lectures by the satirist Karl Kraus, and he met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Berg, whom Adorno called "my master and teacher", was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends: After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet", op. 2, were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique", as well as songs later integrated into the "Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano", op. 6, Adorno presented his habilitation manuscript, "The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche" ("Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre"), to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In the manuscript Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged from Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature." Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op. 3, were performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the "Musikblätter des Anbruch". In a proposal for transforming the journal, he sought to use "Anbruch" for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Richard Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced. According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer. At this time Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, discussing problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a 1934 letter he sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title "The Construction of the Aesthetic". At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favourable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the "venia legendi" in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, 23 March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers. Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with Benjamin's "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments that should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open." Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung", was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not an Institute member, the journal published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favour of a form of ideology critique that held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a "Singspiel" based on Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" titled "The Treasure of Indian Joe", which he never completed; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over 100 opera or concert reviews and 50 critiques of music composition. As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag, Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flagpole of town hall, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the institute's offices. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into 15 years of exile. Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles. After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and begun making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical journal "23", "On Jazz" in the Institute's "Zeitschrift", "Farewell to Jazz" in "Europäische Revue". But Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the "Zeitschrift". Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, "Dawn and Decline", Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what later became "Minima Moralia". While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, and Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished opera Lulu. At this time Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin about the latter's "Arcades Project". After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937, and stayed for two weeks. While he was in New York, Horkheimer's essays "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" and "Traditional and Critical Theory," which would soon become instructive for the Institute's self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adorno's work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for "the precision of their materialist deciphering" as well as the way in which "musical facts ... had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me." In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize "Dialectic of Enlightenment"—man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on February 16, 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark, New Jersey, to discuss the Project's plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music. Although he was expected to embed the Project's research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it." Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project's topic, "Music in Radio." Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony," he wrote, "heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church." In essays published by the Institute's "Zeitschrift", Adorno dealt with the atrophy of musical culture that had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies—toward conformism, trivialization and standardization—already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the project. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was prolific, publishing "The Radio Symphony", "A Social Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular Music", texts that, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, are found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation, "Current of Music". In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute. In addition to helping with the "Zeitschrift", Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger "Arcades Project". In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks that had become manifest through Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility". At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic", which would later become "Dialectic of Enlightenment". Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, they entertained few delusions about their work's practical effects. "In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe," Horkheimer wrote, "our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle." As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of antisemitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported Franz Leopold Neumann's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of "monopoly capitalism"; on the other were those who supported Friedrich Pollock's "state capitalist theory." Horkheimer's contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian State", "The End of Reason", and "The Jews and Europe", served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic. In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California", setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his "Philosophy of New Music", a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion," he wrote after reading the manuscript. The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as "Philosophical Fragments", the text waited another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, "Dialectic of Enlightenment", by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through the chapters that treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer's "Odyssey" and the Marquis de Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism. With their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on antisemitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee. In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity". The result of these labors, the 1950 study "The Authoritarian Personality", was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale personality test. After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "enemy aliens", became increasingly restricted. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who was not naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms that conclude "Dialectic of Enlightenment", Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday that were later published as "Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life". These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration, totalitarianism, and individuality, as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling and the impossibility of love. In California Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, films' visual aspect. Adorno also assisted Thomas Mann with his novel "Doktor Faustus" after the latter asked for his help. "Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work—I mean Leverkühn's work—might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?" At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as "The Authoritarian Personality" was being published. Before his return, Adorno had reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of "Philosophy of New Music" and completed two compositions: "Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op.7", and "Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Däubler, op. 8". Postwar Europe. Return to Frankfurt University. Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, with seminars on "Kant's Transcendental Dialectic", aesthetics, Hegel, "Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge", and "The Concept of Knowledge". Adorno's surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened, holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness. Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and the Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought. Essays on fascism. Starting with his 1947 essay "Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler", Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was "The Authoritarian Personality" (1950), published as a contribution to the "Studies in Prejudice" performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions. The books have had a major influence on sociology and remain highly discussed and debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda", in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest." In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, "The Meaning of Working Through the Past" (1959), and "Education after Auschwitz" (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again. Later on, however, Jean Améry—who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity" ("absolute Negativität"), using a language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache"). Public events. In September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and René Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled "The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany" at a conference on opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would "raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness." With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institute's work fell upon Adorno. At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek's opera "Leben des Orest", and a seminar on "Criteria of New Music" at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamin's "Berlin Childhood Around 1900", Kracauer's writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin's writings. Adorno's own recently published "Minima Moralia" was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952: Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann's novel "Professor Unrat" with its film title, "The Blue Angel"; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes. More essays on mass culture and literature. Because Adorno's American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in "The Stars Down to Earth"), and the essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television"; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute. Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed three essays: "Notes on Kafka", "Valéry Proust Museum", and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were included in the 1955 essay collection "Prisms". In response to the publication of Thomas Mann's "The Black Swan", Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal "Akzente". A second collection of essays, "Notes to Literature", appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame," which, along with studies of Proust, Valéry, and Balzac, formed the central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his "Notes to Literature". Adorno's entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers' Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress". Although the "Zeitschrift" was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including "Sociologica" (1955), a collection of essays, "Gruppenexperiment" (1955), "Betriebsklima", a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann, and "Soziologische Exkurse", a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline. Public figure. Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure, not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews, and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio, and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as "The Administered World" (September 1950), "What is the Meaning of 'Working Through the Past?"' (February 1960) to "The Teaching Profession and its Taboos" (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for "Frankfurter Allgemeine", "Frankfurter Rundschau", and the weekly "Die Zeit". At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, "The Aging of the New Music", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adorno feared that music was being sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published "Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy" in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a "musique informelle", which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else. Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end." Post-war German culture. At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Adorno's 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in "Negative Dialectics", for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in "Commitment," he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany's struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge. In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the "Positivist Dispute in German Sociology", arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin. Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of "The Jargon of Authenticity" took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision" and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed "Negative Dialectics" in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967–68, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection, which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself." Confrontations with students. At the time of "Negative Dialectics" publication, student protests fragilized West German democracy. Trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's 1967 state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz". The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's "Iphigenie in Tauris". After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favour of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine "alternative", which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt's articles in "Merkur", claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's "Writings" and "Letters" with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of "Merkur" to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt. Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in "Die Zeit", signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb." Adorno would refer to the radical students as stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) in jeans.". In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of "Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link". Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possible any more." After striking students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment, the police were brought in to close the building. Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on "Aesthetic Theory". In June 1969 he completed "Catchwords: Critical Models". During the winter semester of 1968–69 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics. For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking," as well as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object. But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head. Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the conservative thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack. Intellectual influences. Like most theorists of the Frankfurt School, Adorno was influenced by the works of Hegel, Marx and Freud. Their major theories fascinated many left-wing intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. Lorenz Jäger speaks critically of Adorno's "Achilles' heel" in his political biography: that Adorno placed "almost unlimited trust in finished teachings, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the teachings of the Second Viennese School." Hegel. Adorno's adoption of Hegelian philosophy can be traced back to his inaugural lecture in 1931, in which he postulated: "only dialectically does philosophical interpretation seem possible to me" ("Gesammelte Schriften" 1: 338). Hegel rejected the idea of separating methods and content, because thinking is always thinking of something; dialectics for him is "the comprehended movement of the object itself." Like Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Adorno adopted this claim as his own, and based his thinking on one of the Hegelian basic categories, the determinate negation, according to which something is not abstractly negated and dissolved into zero, but is preserved in a new, richer concept through its opposite. Adorno understood his "Three Studies of Hegel" as "preparation of a changed definition of dialectics" and that they stop "where the start should be" ("Gesammelte Schriften" 5: 249 f.). Adorno dedicated himself to this task in one of his later major works, the "Negative Dialectics" (1966). The title expresses "tradition and rebellion in equal measure." Drawing from Hegelian reason's speculative dialectic, Adorno developed his own "negative" dialectic of the "non-identical." Karl Marx. Marx's "Critique of Political Economy" clearly shaped Adorno's thinking. As described by Jürgen Habermas, Marxist critique is, for Adorno, a "silent orthodoxy, whose categories [are revealed] in Adorno's cultural critique, although their influence is not explicitly named." Marx's influence on Adorno first came by way of György Lukács's "History and Class Consciousness" ("Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein"); from this text, Adorno took the Marxist categories of commodity fetishism and reification. These are closely related to Adorno's concept of trade, which stands in the center of his philosophy, not exclusively restricted to economic theory. Adorno's "exchange society" "(Tauschgesellschaft"), with its "insatiable and destructive appetite for expansion," is easily decoded as a description of capitalism. Furthermore, the Marxist concept of ideology is central for Adorno. Class theory, which appears less frequently in Adorno's work, also has its origins in Marxist thinking. Adorno made explicit reference to class in two of his texts: the first, the subchapter "Classes and Strata" ("Klassen und Schichten"), from his "Introduction to the Sociology of Music"; the second, an unpublished 1942 essay, "Reflections on Class Theory", published postmortem in his "Collected Works". Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is a constitutive element of critical theory. Adorno read Sigmund Freud's work early on, although, unlike Horkheimer, he had never experienced psychoanalysis in practice. He first read Freud while working on his initial (withdrawn) habilitation thesis, "The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind" (1927). In it Adorno argued that "the healing of all neuroses is synonymous with the complete understanding of the meaning of their symptoms by the patient". In his essay "On the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology" (1955), he justified the need to "supplement the theory of society with psychology, especially analytically oriented social psychology" in the face of fascism. Adorno emphasized the necessity of researching prevailing psychological drives in order to explain the cohesion of a repressive society acting against fundamental human interests. Adorno always remained a supporter and defender of Freudian orthodox doctrine, "psychoanalysis in its strict form". From this position, he attacked Erich Fromm and later Karen Horney because of their revisionism. He expressed reservations about sociologized psychoanalysis as well as about its reduction to a therapeutic procedure. Theory. Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: the recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself. Neither Picasso's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian's reduction of painting to its most elementary component—the line—is comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At that time, the Western world, beset by world-wars, colonialist consolidation and accelerating commodification, sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in overcoming. According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from societally sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality which seeks to counteract whatever aims either to repress this primitive aspect or to further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism. From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music and literature are a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary price of self-preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation". In this sense, the principle of self-preservation, Adorno writes in "Negative Dialectics", is nothing but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history." At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law. Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukács's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his "Negative Dialectics" (1966), philosophy is still necessary because the time to realise it was missed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. Adorno, as well as Horkheimer, critiqued all forms of positivism as responsible for technocracy and disenchantment and sought to produce a theory that both rejected positivism and avoided reinstating traditional metaphysics. Adorno and Horkheimer have been criticized for over-applying the term "positivism," especially in their interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper as positivists. Music. Adorno criticized jazz and popular music, viewing it as part of the culture industry, that contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". In his early essays for the Vienna-based journal "Anbruch", Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what he called the "musical material." For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of composition. The objective validity of composition, according to him, rests with neither the composer's genius nor the work's conformity with prior standards, but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of the material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven is not the sign of musical regression; instead, new music is to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material previously repressed: The musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series and tonal harmony. Thus, historical progress is achieved only by the composer who "submits to the work and seemingly does not undertake anything active except to follow where it leads." Because historical experience and social relations are embedded within this musical material, it is to the analysis of such material that the critic must turn. In the face of this radical liberation of the musical material, Adorno came to criticize those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from this freedom by taking recourse to forms of the past as well as those who turned twelve-tone composition into a technique which dictated the rules of composition. Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. "Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them." The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism". By doing so, the culture industry appeals to every single consumer in a unique and personalized way, all while maintaining minimal costs and effort on their behalf. Consumers purchase the illusion that every commodity or product is tailored to the individual's personal preference, by incorporating subtle modifications or inexpensive "add-ons" in order to keep the consumer returning for new purchases, and therefore more revenue for the corporation system. Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as "pseudo-individualisation" and the "always-the-same". Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives—left and right—the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals, or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as "Essays on Music". Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since "Dialectic of Enlightenment" had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection. Adorno's reputation as a musicologist has been in steady decline since his death. His sweeping criticisms of jazz and championing of the Second Viennese School in opposition to Stravinsky have caused him to fall out of favour. The distinguished American scholar Richard Taruskin declared Adorno to be "preposterously over-rated." The eminent pianist and critic Charles Rosen saw Adorno's book "The Philosophy of New Music" as "largely a fraudulent presentation, a work of polemic that pretends to be an objective study." Even a fellow Marxist such as the historian and jazz critic Eric Hobsbawm saw Adorno's writings as containing "some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz". The British philosopher Roger Scruton saw Adorno as producing "reams of turgid nonsense devoted to showing that the American people are just as alienated as Marxism requires them to be, and that their cheerful life-affirming music is a 'fetishized' commodity, expressive of their deep spiritual enslavement to the capitalist machine." Irritation with Adorno's tunnel vision started even while he was alive. He may have championed Schoenberg, but the composer notably failed to return the compliment: "I have never been able to bear the fellow [...] It is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky." On the other hand, the scholar Slavoj Žižek has written a foreword to Adorno's "In Search of Wagner", where Žižek attributes an "emancipatory impulse" to the same book, although Žižek suggests that fidelity to this impulse demands "a betrayal of the explicit theses of Adorno's Wagner study." Writing in the New Yorker in 2014, music critic Alex Ross, argued that Adorno's work has a renewed importance in the digital age: "The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons...Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies.". The five components of recognition. Adorno states that a start to understand the recognition in respect of any particular song hit may be made by drafting a scheme which divides the experience of recognition into its different components. All the factors people enumerate are interwoven to a degree that would be impossible to separate from one another in reality. Adorno's scheme is directed towards the different objective elements involved in the experience of recognition, than the actual experience felt for the individual. Marxist criticisms. Adorno posits social totality as an automatic system. According to Horst Müller's "Kritik der kritischen Theorie" ("Critique of Critical Theory"), this assumption is consistent with Adorno's idea of society as a self-regulating system, from which one must escape (but from which nobody "can" escape). For him it was existent, but inhuman. Müller argues against the existence of such a system and claims that critical theory provides no practical solution for societal change. He concludes that Jürgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue Marx. Standardization. The phenomenon of standardization is "a concept used to characterize the formulaic products of capitalist-driven mass media and mass culture that appeal to the lowest common denominator in pursuit of maximum profit". According to Adorno we inhabit a media culture driven society which has product consumption as one of its main characteristics. Mass media is employed to deliver messages about products and services to consumers in order to convince these individuals to purchase the commodity they are advertising. Standardization consists of the production of large amounts of commodities to then pursue consumers in order to gain the maximum profit possible. They do this, as mentioned above, by individualizing products to give the illusion to consumers that they are in fact purchasing a product or service that was specifically designed for them. Adorno highlights the issues created with the construction of popular music, where different samples of music used in the creation of today's chart-topping songs are put together in order to create, re-create, and modify numerous tracks by using the same variety of samples from one song to another. He makes a distinction between "Apologetic music" and "Critical music". Apologetic music is defined as the highly produced and promoted music of the "pop music" industry: music that is composed of variable parts and interchanged to create several different songs. "The social and psychological functions of popular music [are that it] acts like a social cement" "to keep people obedient and subservient to the status quo of existing power structures." Serious music, according to Adorno, achieves excellence when its whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The example he gives is that of Beethoven's symphonies: "[his] greatness shows itself in the complete subordination of the accidentally private melodic elements to the form as a whole." Standardization not only refers to the products of the culture industry but to the consumers as well: many times every day consumers are bombarded by media advertising. Consumers are pushed and shoved into consuming products and services presented to them by the media system. The masses have become conditioned by the culture industry, which makes the impact of standardization much more important. By not realizing the impact of social media and commercial advertising, the individual is caught in a situation where conformity is the norm. "During consumption the masses become characterized by the commodities which they use and exchange among themselves." Adorno's responses to his critics. As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism (including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s) could never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time. Adorno's sociological methods. As Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he also believed that the language the sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant individuals and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's book "The Weight of the World"). He felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in an essay published in Germany on Adorno's return from the US, and reprinted in the "Critical Models" essays collection (), Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness of US society based on his sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955: "Characteristic for the life in America [...]is a moment of peacefulness, kindness and generosity". ("Dem amerikanischen Leben eignet [...] ein Moment von Friedlichkeit, Gutartigkeit und Großzügigkeit".) One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the late 1930s after fleeing Hitler. As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in "The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance" (MIT 1995), Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio liked and ways to improve their "taste", so that RCA could profitably air more classical music. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's "lack of discipline in ... presentation". Adorno himself provided the following personal anecdote: Adorno translated into English. While even German readers can find Adorno's work difficult to understand, an additional problem for English readers is that his German idiom is particularly difficult to translate into English. A similar difficulty of translation is true of Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of other German philosophers and poets. As a result, some early translators tended toward over-literalness. In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press have published new translations of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including "Introduction to Sociology", "Problems of Moral Philosophy" and his transcribed lectures on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" and Aristotle's "Metaphysics", and a new translation of the "Dialectic of Enlightenment". Professor Henry Pickford, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has translated many of Adorno's works such as "The Meaning of Working Through the Past." A new translation has also appeared of "Aesthetic Theory" and the "Philosophy of New Music" by Robert Hullot-Kentor, from the University of Minnesota Press. Hullot-Kentor is also currently working on a new translation of "Negative Dialectics". Adorno's correspondence with Alban Berg, "Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction", and the letters to Adorno's parents, have been translated by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press. These fresh translations are slightly less literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers. The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th-century public opinion research.

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Friedrich Paulsen Friedrich Paulsen (; July 16, 1846 – August 14, 1908) was a German Neo-Kantian philosopher and educator. Biography. He was born at Langenhorn (Schleswig) and educated at the Gymnasium Christianeum, the University of Erlangen, and the University of Berlin. He completed his doctoral thesis under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg at Berlin in 1871, he habilitated there in 1875, and he became extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy there in 1878. In 1896 he succeeded Eduard Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin. He was the greatest of the pupils of Gustav Theodor Fechner, to whose doctrine of panpsychism he gave great prominence by his "Einleitung in die Philosophie" (1892; 7th ed., 1900; Eng. trans., 1895). He went, however, considerably beyond Fechner in attempting to give an epistemological account of the knowledge of the psychophysical. Admitting Immanuel Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious of mental states only, he holds that this consciousness constitutes a knowledge of the thing-in-itself which Kant denies. Soul is, therefore, a practical reality which Paulsen, with Arthur Schopenhauer, regards as known by the act of will. But this will is neither rational desire, unconscious irrational will, nor conscious intelligent will, but an instinct, a will to live ("Zielstrebigkeit"), often subconscious, pursuing ends, indeed, but without reasoning as to means. This conception of will, though consistent and convenient to the main thesis, must be rigidly distinguished from the ordinary significance of will, i.e. rational desire. Paulsen is almost better known for his educational writings than as a pure philosopher, including his "German Education, Past and Present" (Eng. trans., by I. Lorenz, 1907). Works. Among his other works are:

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Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, with further collections being published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He adopted his nephews after his sister died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau. Vonnegut published his first novel, "Player Piano", in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which ("The Sirens of Titan" [1959] and "Cat's Cradle" [1963]) were nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel. He published a short story collection titled "Welcome to the Monkey House" in 1968. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969). The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, "Slaughterhouse-Five" went to the top of "The New York Times" Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors. Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as "Fates Worse Than Death" (1991) and "A Man Without a Country" (2005). After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, titled "Armageddon in Retrospect", in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published "Complete Stories", a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including five previously unpublished stories. "Complete Stories" was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor. Biography. Family and early life. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and his wife Edith (née Lieber). His older siblings were Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917). He was descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. His father and grandfather Bernard were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The Athenæum"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city with their fortune deriving from ownership of a successful brewery. Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent German speakers, but the ill feeling toward Germany during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture in order to show their American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach Vonnegut to speak German or introduce him to German literature and traditions, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless." Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and giving him values; he said that she "gave [him] decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to [him]," and "was as great an influence on [him] as anybody." He described her as "humane and wise" and added that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her. The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers' brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent of prohibition. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce. Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school called Public School No. 43 (now the James Whitcomb Riley School). He was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune. His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist." His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid." She unsuccessfully tried to sell short stories she had written to "Collier's", "The Saturday Evening Post", and other magazines. High school and Cornell. Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became a co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) for the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, "The Shortridge Echo". Vonnegut said his tenure with the "Echo" allowed him to write for a large audience—his fellow students—rather than for a teacher, an experience he said was "fun and easy." "It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people," Vonnegut observed. "Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it." After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies. As his father had been a member at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did. He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, "The Cornell Daily Sun", first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. By the end of his first year, he was writing a column titled "Innocents Abroad" which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a piece, "Well All Right," focusing on pacifism, a cause he strongly supported, arguing against U.S. intervention in World War II. World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war. Vonnegut was a member of Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but poor grades and a satirical article in Cornell's newspaper cost him his place there. He was placed on academic probation in May 1942 and dropped out the following January. No longer eligible for a deferment as a member of ROTC, he faced likely conscription into the United States Army. Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Army and in March 1943 reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training. Vonnegut was trained to fire and maintain howitzers and later received instruction in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout. He lived so close to his home that he was "able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends". On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Possible factors that contributed to Edith Vonnegut's suicide include the family's loss of wealth and status, Vonnegut's forthcoming deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer. She was inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs. Three months after his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of the war. During the battle, the 106th Infantry Division, which had only recently reached the front and was assigned to a "quiet" sector due to its inexperience, was overrun by advancing German armored forces. Over 500 members of the division were killed and over 6,000 were captured. On December 22, Vonnegut was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in Saxony. During the journey, the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains carrying Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war, killing about 150 of them. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the "first fancy city [he had] ever seen." He lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked in a factory that made malt syrup for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever another city was bombed. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories." On February 13, 1945, Dresden became the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies engaged in a fierce firebombing of the city. The offensive subsided on February 15, with around 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing. Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it. He had survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around", Vonnegut said. "When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town down." Vonnegut and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt". The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after US General George S. Patton captured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers. Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart, about which he remarked: "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite." He was discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to Indianapolis. Marriage, University of Chicago, and early employment. After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The pair relocated to Chicago; there, Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year joint undergraduate/graduate program that conferred a master's degree. He augmented his income by working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night. Jane accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane dropped out of the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), while Kurt also left the University without any degree (despite having completed his undergraduate education) when his master's thesis on the Ghost Dance religious movement was unanimously rejected by the department. Shortly thereafter, General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a publicist for the company's Schenectady, New York, research laboratory. Although the job required a college degree, Vonnegut was hired after claiming to hold a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. His brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, contributing significantly to an iodine-based cloud seeding project. In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," published in the February 11, 1950 issue of "Collier's", for which he received $750. Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at "Collier's", Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950. While Burger supported Vonnegut's writing, he was shocked when Vonnegut quit GE as of January 1, 1951, later stating: "I never said he should give up his job and devote himself to fiction. I don't trust the freelancer's life, it's tough." Nevertheless, in early 1951 Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to write full time, leaving GE behind. First novel. In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, "Player Piano", was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-Third World War setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines. "Player Piano" draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in "Player Piano" is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who have all the material goods they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning revolution. "Player Piano" expresses Vonnegut's opposition to McCarthyism, something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one character as "fellow travelers". In "Player Piano", Vonnegut originates many of the techniques he would use in his later works. The comic, heavy-drinking Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this dystopian corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an insider would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For example, when taken to see the artificially intelligent supercomputer EPICAC, the Shah asks it "what are people for?" and receives no answer. Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a "false god". This type of alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's literature. "The New York Times" writer and critic Granville Hicks gave "Player Piano" a positive review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". Hicks called Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers considered the novel particularly important. Several editions were printed—one by Bantam with the title "Utopia 14", and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club—whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre, and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works." Struggling writer. After "Player Piano", Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became "Cat's Cradle"), he struggled to complete it and the work languished for years. In 1954 the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional sources of income as well. In 1957, he and a partner opened a Saab automobile dealership in Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year. In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adams' young sons—James, Steven, and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively. A fourth Adams son, Peter (2), also stayed with the Vonneguts for about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in Georgia. Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot. "The Sirens of Titan" (1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth, as experienced by a bored billionaire, Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that allows him to appear on Earth every 59 days. The billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home—human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as the Kremlin, are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach's opera "The Tales of Hoffmann". Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, also physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described, "he put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up." William Rodney Allen, in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the fictional political figures who would play major roles in "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" and "Jailbird". "Mother Night", published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who is raised in Germany from age 11 and joins the Nazi party during the war as a double agent for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and rises to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann, and later commits suicide. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition, "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion". Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom". Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War misunderstandings of communism and socialism. With "Cat's Cradle" (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time". The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, ice-nine, solid water stable at room temperature, and if a particle of it is dropped in water, all of it becomes ice-nine. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted) give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to have himself and his story survive. Vonnegut based the title character of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" (1964), on an accountant he knew on Cape Cod, who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department, and by giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers, and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Allen deemed "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time. In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999 he wrote in "The New York Times", "I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids..." But then, on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a teaching job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man. "Slaughterhouse-Five". After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. At the time of the bombing, Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and based on early figures he came to believe that 135,000 had died there. Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned from the war, but had never been able to write anything acceptable to himself or his publishers—Chapter 1 of "Slaughterhouse-Five" tells of his difficulties. Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes—Billy's death in 1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's first pages. In 1970, he was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. "Slaughterhouse-Five" received generally positive reviews, with Michael Crichton writing in "The New Republic", "he writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. No one else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelists." The book went immediately to the top of "The New York Times" Best Seller list. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of "Slaughterhouse-Five" resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War. He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed for an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden. Later career and events. After "Slaughterhouse-Five" was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished professor during the 1973–1974 academic year. He was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a play called "Happy Birthday, Wanda June", which opened on October 7, 1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted "Slaughterhouse-Five" into a film which the author said was "flawless". Meanwhile, Vonnegut's personal life was disintegrating. His wife Jane had embraced Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and with five of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said the two were forced to find "other sorts of seemingly important work to do". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful", and said the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand." The couple divorced and they remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond his marriage, he was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression, and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist weekly. Vonnegut's difficulties materialized in numerous ways; most distinctly though, was the painfully slow progress he was making on his next novel, the darkly comical "Breakfast of Champions". In 1971, Vonnegut stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S. Hischak's book "American Literature on Stage and Screen", "Breakfast of Champions" was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it "lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness." Vonnegut's 1976 novel "Slapstick", which meditates on the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In "The New York Times"'s review of "Slapstick", Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said Vonnegut "seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before", and that "it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all." At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints. In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including "Jailbird" (1979), "Deadeye Dick" (1982), "Galápagos" (1985), "Bluebeard" (1987), and "Hocus Pocus" (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later, Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film "Back to School". The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels, "Timequake" (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut biographer Gregory Sumner said, "a reflection of an aging man facing mortality and testimony to an embattled faith in the resilience of human awareness and agency." Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays entitled "A Man Without a Country" (2005), became a bestseller. Death and legacy. In a 2006 "Rolling Stone" interview, Vonnegut sardonically stated that he would sue the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, the maker of the Pall Mall-branded cigarettes he had been smoking since he was around 12 or 14 years old, for false advertising: "And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." He died in the Manhattan borough of New York City on the night of April 11, 2007, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior from a fall at his brownstone home. His death was reported by his wife Jill. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death, he had written 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five non-fiction books. A book composed of his unpublished pieces, "Armageddon in Retrospect", was compiled and posthumously published by his son Mark in 2008. When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich stated that he has "much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian." "Los Angeles Times" columnist Gregory Rodriguez said that the author will "rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture", and Dinitia Smith of "The New York Times" dubbed Vonnegut the "counterculture's novelist". Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973 the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in 2012. Late 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies, Gregory Sumner's "Unstuck in Time" and Charles J. Shields's "And So It Goes". Shields's biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to "The Guardian", the book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty. "Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes", said "The Daily Beast"'s Wendy Smith. "Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose", said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth. Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five", has been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances. In the case of "Island Trees School District v. Pico", the United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on "Slaughterhouse-Five"—which the board had called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy"—and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouri decided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the district. Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him. "The time for scholars to say 'Here's why Vonnegut is worth reading' has definitively ended, thank goodness. We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know." Todd F. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal readers, who have "significant influence as they continue to purchase Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his entire canon in print—an impressive list of more than twenty books that [Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover designs." Donald E. Morse notes that Vonnegut, "is now firmly, if somewhat controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as well as in high school, college and graduate curricula". Tally writes of Vonnegut's work: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor. Views. War. In the introduction to "Slaughterhouse-Five" Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"I guess", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?" This underlined Vonnegut's belief that wars were, unfortunately, inevitable, but that it was important to ensure the wars one fought were just wars. In 2011, NPR wrote, "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview that, "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write "A Man Without a Country". "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in "Slaughterhouse-Five" and wrote in "Palm Sunday" (1991) that "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima". Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In "Player Piano", the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal, and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In "Cat's Cradle", John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed. Religion. Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for "Playboy", he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. He did not, however, disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work "Palm Sunday", Vonnegut says he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic"; in a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian. Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book "Fates Worse than Death", Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, "anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American". In "Palm Sunday", he wrote that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade." However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded. Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric, and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian", Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout—the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example in "Player Piano", "The Sirens of Titan" and "Cat's Cradle". In "The Sirens of Titan", Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. "Slaughterhouse-Five" sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and displaying a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. In "Cat's Cradle", Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism. Politics. Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism, and mused on the specious simplicity of American politics, saying facetiously, "If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said, "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead." Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of "survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man". Vonnegut would often return to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American, and believed that they may offer beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems. Writing. Influences. Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity, and a skeptical take on religion, and, as Vonnegut put it, were both "associated with the enemy in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story 'twerps.' Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer, and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. "I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four", and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, heavily influenced his debut novel, "Player Piano", in 1952. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]", and an "enormous influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses." Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include "The War of the Worlds" author H. G. Wells, and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist. Style and technique. In his book "Popular Contemporary Writers", Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward; his sentences concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions are also laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Slapstick". Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points: much of "Player Piano" leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states, "every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote, "rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness." Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large artificial families that the U.S. population is formed into in "Slapstick" soon serve as an excuse for tribalism, with people giving no help to those not part of their group, and with the extended family's place in the social hierarchy becoming vital. In the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a "black humorist", but a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label's stereotype. Vonnegut's works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He also resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes that are often associated with those genres. In several of his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in works of science fiction. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate absurdities and idiosyncrasies in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often humorizes the problems that plague societies, as is done in satirical works. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in "Fabulation and Metafiction" that Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the humanizing value of laughter." Examples of postmodernism may also be found in Vonnegut's works. Postmodernism often entails a response to the theory that the truths of the world will be discovered through science. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective, rather than objective, as it is biased towards each individual's beliefs and outlook on the world. They often use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five", features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook as it seeks both to represent actual historical events while problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that. This is encapsulated in the opening lines of the novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." This bombastic opening—"All this happened"—"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis" which is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at one and the same time." While Vonnegut does use elements as fragmentation and metafictional elements, in some of his works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril posed by individuals who find subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, then proceed to impose these truths on others. Themes. Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In "The Sirens of Titan", the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater", readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances as the lives of both groups' members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in "Hocus Pocus", the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views. In "Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion", Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary aristocracy" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism, and a "survival of the fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune, and fails to help them out of their poverty because "they deserve their fate". Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Timequake" the characters have no choice in what they do; in "Breakfast of Champions", characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in "Cat's Cradle", Bokononism views free will as heretical. The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in "Player Piano" called their manager's spouse "Mom". In "Cat's Cradle", Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A "karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his will, and a "granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly, in "Slapstick", the U.S. government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families. Fear of the loss of one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel, "Player Piano", where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in "Galápagos", where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in "Timequake", where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software. Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that "many people are not fond of life." He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments, and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In "Deadeye Dick", Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which he claims is designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians. "What is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his response is, "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that, "[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports come in." In the epigraph to "Bluebeard", Vonnegut quotes his son Mark, and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." Works. Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book "Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion", and the date in parentheses is the date the work was first published:

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Simone de Beauvoir Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiographies and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was known for her 1949 treatise "The Second Sex", a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism; and for her novels, including "She Came to Stay" and "The Mandarins". Her most enduring contribution to literature is her memoirs, notably the first volume, “Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée” (1958), which have a warmth and descriptive power. She won the 1954 Prix Goncourt, the 1975 Jerusalem Prize, and the 1978 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. She was also known for her open, lifelong relationship with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Early years. Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family in the 6th arrondissement. Her parents were Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor, and Françoise Beauvoir (née Brasseur), a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic. Simone's sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would boast, "Simone thinks like a man!" Because of her family's straitened circumstances, she could no longer rely on her dowry, and like other middle-class girls of her age, her marriage opportunities were put at risk. She took this opportunity to take steps towards earning a living for herself. She first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the "agrégation" in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for it that she met "École Normale" students Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or "beaver"). The jury for the "agrégation" narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam. Writing of her youth in "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" she said: "...my father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual." Secondary and post-secondary education. Beauvoir pursued post-secondary education after completing her high school years at Lycée Fenelon. After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the . She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and after completing her degree in 1928, wrote her "" (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis) on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg (the topic was "Le concept chez Leibniz" ["The Concept in Leibniz"]).. Her studies of political philosophy through university influenced her to start thinking of societal concerns rather than her own individual issues. Religious upbringing. De Beauvoir was raised in a strict Catholic household. She had been sent to convent schools as a youth. She was deeply religious as a child, at one point intending to become a nun. At age 14, Beauvoir questioned her faith as she saw many changes in the world after witnessing tragedies throughout her life. She abandoned her faith in her early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of her life. Beauvoir quotes "Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself." Middle years. From 1929 until 1943, Beauvoir taught at the lycée level until she could support herself solely on the earnings of her writings. She taught at the (Marseille), the , and the (1936–39). Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met during her college years. Intrigued by her determination as an educator, he sought out to make their relationship romantic. However, she had no interest in doing so. During October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir became a couple and, after they were confronted by her father, Sartre asked her to marry him on a provisional basis: One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease". Though Beauvoir wrote, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry", scholars point out that her ideal relationships described in "The Second Sex" and elsewhere bore little resemblances to the marriage standards of the day. Instead, she and Sartre entered into a lifelong "soul partnership", which was sexual but not exclusive, nor did it involve living together. Sartre and Beauvoir always read each other's work. Debate continues about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" and Beauvoir's "She Came to Stay" and "Phenomenology and Intent". However, recent studies of Beauvoir's work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". However, Beauvoir, reading Hegel in German during the war, produced an original critique of his dialectic of consciousness. Personal life. Beauvoir's prominent open relationships at times overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. A scholar lecturing with her chastised their "distinguished [Harvard] audience [because] every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life." Beginning in 1929, Beauvoir and Sartre were partners and remained so for 51 years, until his death in 1980. She chose never to marry or set up a joint household, and never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, write and teach, and take lovers. Perhaps her most famous lover was American author Nelson Algren, whom she met in Chicago in 1947, and to whom she wrote across the Atlantic as "my beloved husband." Algren won the National Book Award for "The Man with the Golden Arm" in 1950, and in 1954, Beauvoir won France's most prestigious literary prize for "The Mandarins," in which Algren is the character Lewis Brogan. Algren vociferously objected to their intimacy becoming public. Years after they separated, she was buried wearing his gift of a silver ring. However, she lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959. Beauvoir was bisexual, and her relationships with young women were controversial. French author Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book "Mémoires d'une Jeune Fille Dérangée" (published in English under the title "A Disgraceful Affair") that, while a student at Lycée Molière, she was sexually exploited by her teacher Beauvoir, who was in her 30s. Lamblin had affairs with both Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir for a number of years. In 1943, Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching position when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against Beauvoir for debauching a minor (the age of consent in France at the time was 15), and Beauvoir's license to teach in France was revoked, although it was subsequently reinstated. In 1977, Beauvoir, Sartre, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and much of the era's intelligentsia signed a petition seeking to abrogate the age of consent in France. Notable works. "She Came to Stay". Beauvoir published her first novel "She Came to Stay" in 1943. It has been assumed that it is inspired by her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during the early 1930s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she rejected him, so he began a relationship with her sister Wanda. Upon his death, Sartre was still supporting Wanda. He also supported Olga for years, until she met and married Jacques-Laurent Bost, a lover of Beauvoir. However, the main thrust of the novel is philosophical, a scene in which to situate Beauvoir's abiding philosophical pre-occupation - the relationship between the self and the other. In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, Beauvoir creates one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalised versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois. "She Came to Stay" was followed by many others, including "The Blood of Others", which explores the nature of individual responsibility, telling a love story between two young French students participating in the Resistance in World War II. Existentialist ethics. In 1944 Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, "Pyrrhus et Cinéas", a discussion on existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1947); it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. In the essay, Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as "Being and Nothingness". In "The Ethics of Ambiguity", Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance. "Les Temps modernes". At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited "Les Temps modernes", a political journal which Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used "Les Temps Modernes" to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death. Sexuality, existentialist feminism and "The Second Sex". "The Second Sex", first published in 1949 in French as "Le Deuxième Sexe", turns the existentialist mantra that "existence precedes essence" into a feminist one: "One is not born but becomes a woman" (French: "On ne naît pas femme, on le devient"). With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes. Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's oppression is its [femininity's] historical and social construction as the quintessential" Other. Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined in relation to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas referred to woman as "imperfect man" and the "incidental" being. She quotes “In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.” Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the "immanence" to which they were previously resigned and reaching "transcendence", a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom. Chapters of "The Second Sex" were originally published in "Les Temps modernes", in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France. It was published soon after in America due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message. For years, Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars. Only in 2009 was there a second translation, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation in 2010, reinstating a third of the original work. In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of "The Second Sex", Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by application of a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that a similar kind of oppression by hierarchy also happened in other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion, but she claimed that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy. Despite her contributions to the feminist movement, especially the French women's liberation movement, and her beliefs in women's economic independence and equal education, Beauvoir was initially reluctant to call herself a feminist. However, after observing the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beauvoir stated she no longer believed a socialist revolution to be enough to bring about women's liberation. She publicly declared herself a feminist in 1972 in an interview with "Le Nouvel Observateur". In 2018 the manuscript pages of "Le Deuxième Sexe" were published. At the time her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon-Beauvoir, a philosophy professor, described her mother's writing process: Beauvoir wrote every page of her books longhand first and only after that would hire typists. "The Mandarins". Published in 1954, "The Mandarins" won her France's highest literary prize, the "Prix Goncourt". The book is set after the end of World War II and follows the personal lives of philosophers and friends among Sartre's and Beauvoir's intimate circle, including her relationship with American writer Nelson Algren, to whom the book was dedicated. Algren was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir described their sexual experiences in both "The Mandarins" and her autobiographies. Algren vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of Beauvoir's work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death. "Les Inséparables". In 2020 it was announced that a previously unpublished Beauvoir novel would be published by Vintage in 2021, to be translated by Lauren Elkin. The novel was written in 1954 and details the "passionate and tragic" real life friendship she had as a young girl with Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin, depicted by two characters named Andrée and Sylvie. The novel was deemed "too intimate" to be published during Beauvoir's lifetime. Later years. Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in the United States and China and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including "The Woman Destroyed", which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging. 1980 saw the publication of "When Things of the Spirit Come First", a set of short stories centred around and based upon women important to her earlier years. Though written long before the novel "She Came to Stay", Beauvoir did not at the time consider the stories worth publishing, allowing some forty years to pass before doing so. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave "Les Temps Modernes". Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions. Beauvoir also wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of: "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter"; "The Prime of Life"; "Force of Circumstance" (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: "After the War" and "Hard Times"); and "All Said and Done". In 1964 Beauvoir published a novella-length autobiography, "A Very Easy Death", covering the time she spent visiting her ageing mother, who was dying of cancer. The novella brings up questions of ethical concerns with truth-telling in doctor-patient relationships. Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse ("The Coming of Age") is a rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about the age of 60. In the 1970s Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She wrote and signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a manifesto that included a list of famous women who claimed to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. Some argue most of the women had not had abortions, including Beauvoir. Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Poupette. In 1974, abortion was legalised in France. In an interview with Betty Friedan, Beauvoir said: "No, we don’t believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorised to stay at home to bring up her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction." In about 1976 Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon made a trip to New York City in the United States to visit Kate Millett on her farm. In 1981 she wrote "La Cérémonie Des Adieux" ("A Farewell to Sartre"), a painful account of Sartre's last years. In the opening of "Adieux", Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication. She contributed the piece "Feminism – alive, well, and in constant danger" to the 1984 anthology "", edited by Robin Morgan. After Sartre died in 1980, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm would not let many of Sartre's letters be published in unedited form. Most of Sartre's letters available today have Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren. Beauvoir died of pneumonia on 14 April 1986 in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

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Gaston Bachelard Gaston Bachelard (; ; 27 June 1884 – 16 October 1962) was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of "epistemological obstacle" and "epistemological break" ("obstacle épistémologique" and "rupture épistémologique"). He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour. For Bachelard the scientific object should be constructed and therefore, different from the positivist sciences, information is in continuous construction. Empiricism and rationalism are not regarded as dualism or opposition but complementary, therefore studies of a priori and a posteriori, or in other words reason and dialectic, are part of scientific research. Life and work. Bachelard was a postal clerk in Bar-sur-Aube, and then studied physics and chemistry before finally becoming interested in philosophy. To obtain his doctorate ("doctorat ès lettres") in 1927, he wrote two theses: the main one, "Essai sur la connaissance approchée", under the direction of Abel Rey, and the complementary one, "Étude sur l'évolution d'un problème de physique : la propagation thermique dans les solides", supervised by Léon Brunschvicg. He first taught from 1902 to 1903 at the college of Sézanne. But he turned away from teaching to consider a career in telegraphy. Literary by training, he took the technological path before moving towards science and mathematics.Fascinated by the great discoveries of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (radioactivity, quantum and wave mechanics, Relativity, electromagnetism and wireless telegraphy), He was a professor at the University of Dijon from 1930 to 1940 and then was appointed chair in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. In 1958 he became a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. Bachelard's psychology of science. Bachelard's studies of the history and philosophy of science in such works as "Le nouvel esprit scientifique" ("The New Scientific Spirit", 1934) and "La formation de l'esprit scientifique" ("The Formation of the Scientific Mind", 1938) were based on his vision of historical epistemology as a kind of psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. In the English-speaking world, the connection Bachelard made between psychology and the history of science has been little understood. Bachelard demonstrated how the progress of science could be blocked by certain types of mental patterns, creating the concept of "obstacle épistémologique" ("epistemological obstacle"). One task of epistemology is to make clear the mental patterns at use in science, in order to help scientists overcome the obstacles to knowledge. Another goal is to “give back to human reason its function of agitation and aggressiveness” as Bachelard put it in ‘L'engagement rationaliste’ (1972). Epistemological breaks: the discontinuity of scientific progress. Bachelard was critical of Auguste Comte's positivism, which considered science as a continual progress. To Bachelard, scientific developments such as Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated the discontinuous nature of the history of sciences. Thus models that framed scientific development as continuous, such as that of Comte and Émile Meyerson, seemed simplistic and erroneous to Bachelard. Through his concept of "epistemological break", Bachelard underlined the discontinuity at work in the history of sciences. However the term "epistemological break" itself is almost never used by Bachelard, but became famous through Louis Althusser. He showed that new theories integrated old theories in new paradigms, changing the sense of concepts (for instance, the concept of mass, used by Newton and Einstein in two different senses). Thus, non-Euclidean geometry did not contradict Euclidean geometry, but integrated it into a larger framework. The role of epistemology in science. Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian sense, although he recommended his "non-Cartesian epistemology" as a replacement for the more standard Cartesian epistemology. He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it, and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically, one thinks truth as the historical rectification of a persistent error, and experiments as correctives for an initial, common illusion ("illusion première")." The role of epistemology is to show the history of the (scientific) production of concepts; those concepts are not just theoretical propositions: they are simultaneously abstract and concrete, pervading technical and pedagogical activity. This explains why "The electric bulb is an object of scientific thought… an example of an abstract-concrete object." To understand the way it works, one has to take the detour of scientific knowledge. Epistemology is thus not a general philosophy that aims at justifying scientific reasoning. Instead it produces regional histories of science. Shifts in scientific perspective. Bachelard saw how seemingly irrational theories often simply represented a drastic shift in scientific perspective. For instance, he claimed that the theory of probabilities was just another way of complexifying reality through a deepening of rationality (even though critics like Lord Kelvin found this theory irrational). One of his main theses in "The New Scientific Mind" was that modern sciences had replaced the classical ontology of the substance with an "ontology of relations", which could be assimilated to something like a process philosophy. For instance, the physical concepts of matter and rays correspond, according to him, to the metaphysical concepts of the thing and of movement; but whereas classical philosophy considered both as distinct, and the thing as ontologically real, modern science can not distinguish matter from rays: it is thus impossible to examine an immobile thing, which was precisely the condition for knowledge according to classical theory of knowledge (Becoming being impossible to be known, in accordance with Aristotle and Plato's theories of knowledge). In non-Cartesian epistemology, there is no "simple substance" as in Cartesianism, but only complex objects built by theories and experiments, and continuously improved (VI, 4). Intuition is therefore not primitive, but built (VI, 2). These themes led Bachelard to support a sort of constructivist epistemology. Other academic interests. In addition to epistemology, Bachelard's work deals with many other topics, including poetry, dreams, psychoanalysis, and the imagination. "The Psychoanalysis of Fire" (1938) and "The Poetics of Space" (1958) are among the most popular of his works: Jean-Paul Sartre cites the former and Bachelard's "Water and Dreams" in his "Being and Nothingness" (1943), and the latter had a wide reception in architectural theory circles. In philosophy, this nocturnal side of his work is developed by his student Gilbert Durand. Philosopher and citizen. Feminist philosopher. It should be noted, in his singular career, the concern which he had to ensure the development of his daughter, so much the time was marked by the cleavage of the sexes and the functions. Going against sexist stereotypes, he wanted to make his daughter a scholar. Suzanne would be a mathematician and philosopher and would be able to develop phenomenological and epistemological research of high standing. Bibliography. His works include: English translations. Though most of Bachelard's major works on poetics have been translated into English, only about half of his works on the philosophy of science have been translated.

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Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism. He was particularly known for developing and extending the field of semiotics through the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France. Biography. Early life. Roland Barthes was born on 12 November in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea before Barthes's first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life. Student years. Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, where he earned a "licence" in classical literature. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military service during World War II. His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a "licence" in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. He received a "diplôme d'études supérieures" (roughly equivalent to an MA by thesis) from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy. Early academic career. In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper "Combat", out of which grew his first full-length work, "Writing Degree Zero" (1953). In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine "Les Lettres Nouvelles", in which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in the "Mythologies" collection that was published in 1957). Consisting of fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954–1956, "Mythologies" were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City. Rise to prominence. Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism (a label that he inaccurately applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes's rebuttal in "Criticism and Truth" (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such as Marxism. By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He traveled to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, he wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought. Mature critical work. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine "Tel Quel", which was developing similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes's writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense, critical reading of Balzac's "Sarrasine" entitled "S/Z". Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva. In those same years he became primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled "Roland Barthes" and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work, "Camera Lucida", is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette. Death. On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. One month later, on 26 March, he died from the chest injuries he sustained in the accident. Writings and ideas. Early thought. Barthes's earliest ideas reacted to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically to the figurehead of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's "What Is Literature?" (1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established forms of writing and more experimental, avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes's response was to try to discover that which may be considered unique and original in writing. In "Writing Degree Zero" (1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both language and style, rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form, or what Barthes calls "writing" (the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect), is the unique and creative act. However, a writer's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. In "Michelet", a critical analysis of the French historian Jules Michelet, Barthes developed these notions, applying them to a broader range of fields. He argued that Michelet's views of history and society are obviously flawed. In studying his writings, he continued, one should not seek to learn from Michelet's claims; rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn from his errors, since understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly, Barthes felt that avant-garde writing should be praised for its maintenance of just such a distance between its audience and itself. In presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, Barthes argued, avant-garde writers ensure that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek to explain it, as Michelet had done. Semiotics and myth. Barthes's many monthly contributions, collected in his "Mythologies" (1957), frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values through them. For example, Barthes cited the portrayal of wine in French society. Its description as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. He developed a theory of signs to demonstrate this perceived deception. He suggested that the construction of myths results in two levels of signification: the "language-object", a first order linguistic system; and the "metalanguage", the second-order system transmitting the myth. The former pertains to the literal or explicit meaning of things while the latter is composed of the language used to speak about the first order. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations." A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, the bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes in line with similar Marxist theory. Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular, consumer culture of post-war France in order to reveal that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values." In "The Fashion System" Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a 'blouse' is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with 'skirt', 'vest' or any number of combinations. In the end Barthes's "Mythologies" became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art. Structuralism and its limits. As Barthes's work with structuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: 'functions', 'actions' and 'narrative'. 'Functions' are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an 'action', and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key 'functions' work in forming characters. For example, key words like 'dark', 'mysterious' and 'odd', when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or 'action'. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture. While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. The post-structuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes's work exemplified. Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signifier; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow. Transition. Such thought led Barthes to consider the limitations not just of signs and symbols, but also of Western culture's dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He travelled to Japan in 1966 where he wrote "Empire of Signs" (published in 1970), a meditation on Japanese culture's contentment in the absence of a search for a transcendental signifier. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the centre of Tokyo, the Emperor's Palace, as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent and nondescript presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only the significance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts greatly to the one he dissected in "Mythologies", which was revealed to be always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural one. In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay "The Death of the Author" (1968). Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author's mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the 'knowable text' acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed, the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. "The Death of the Author" is considered to be a post-structuralist work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms . Indeed, the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking. Textuality and "S/Z". Since Barthes contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, he considers what other sources of meaning or significance can be found in literature. He concludes that since meaning can't come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis. In his "S/Z" (1970), Barthes applies this notion in an analysis of "Sarrasine", a Balzac novella. The end result was a reading that established five major codes for determining various kinds of significance, with numerous lexias throughout the text – a "lexia" here being defined as a unit of the text chosen arbitrarily (to remain methodologically unbiased as possible) for further analysis. The codes led him to define the story as having a capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project Barthes concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text can be reversible by avoiding the restrictive devices that "Sarrasine" suffered from such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He describes this as the difference between the writerly text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading. The project helped Barthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation. Neutral and novelistic writing. In the late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal. He called these two conflicting modes the Doxa (the official and unacknowledged systems of meaning by which we know culture) and the Para-doxa. While Barthes had sympathized with Marxist thought in the past (or at least parallel criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language with assertive meanings, as was bourgeois literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to this, he wrote "The Pleasure of the Text" (1975), a study that focused on a subject matter he felt was equally outside the realm of both conservative society and militant leftist thinking: hedonism. By writing about a subject that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa. The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that, while reading for pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself to the ideas of the writer, the final cathartic climax of this pleasurable reading, which he termed the bliss in reading or jouissance, is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within the text or immersion in the text, signifies a final impact of reading that is experienced outside the social realm and free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral with regard to social progress. Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes remained concerned with the difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing, which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, like "Mythologies", had suffered from this. He became interested in finding the best method for creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product of this endeavor was "" in 1977, in which he presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover's search for signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved in such a pursuit. The lover's attempts to assert himself into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to criticism but also understanding from the reader. The end result is one that challenges the reader's views of social constructs of love, without trying to assert any definitive theory of meaning. Mind and body. Barthes also attempted to reinterpret the mind-body dualism theory. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Levinas, he also drew from Eastern philosophical traditions in his critique of European culture as "infected" by Western metaphysics. His body theory emphasized the formation of the self through bodily cultivation. The theory, which is also described as ethico-political entity, considers the idea of the body as one that functions as a "fashion word" that provides the illusion of a grounded discourse. This theory has influenced the work of other thinkers such as Jerome Bel. Photography and Henriette Barthes. Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles in the 50s had attempted to show how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer 'naturalistic truths'. But he still considered the photograph to have a unique potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writing "Camera Lucida" as an attempt to explain the unique significance a picture of her as a child carried for him. Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which 'pierces the viewer' (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother's picture. Barthes explained that a picture creates a falseness in the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of 'what has ceased to be'. Instead of making reality solid, it reminds us of the world's ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the photograph of Barthes's mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death, "Camera Lucida" was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his grief. Posthumous publications. A posthumous collection of essays was published in 1987 by François Wahl, "Incidents". It contains fragments from his journals: his "Soirées de Paris" (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier diary he kept which explicitly detailed his paying for sex with men and boys in Morocco; and "Light of the Sud Ouest" (his childhood memories of rural French life). In November 2007, Yale University Press published a new translation into English (by Richard Howard) of Barthes's little known work "What is Sport". This work bears a considerable resemblance to "Mythologies" and was originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin. In February 2009, Éditions du Seuil published "Journal de deuil" (Journal of Mourning), based on Barthes's files written from 26 November 1977 (the day following his mother's death) up to 15 September 1979, intimate notes on his terrible loss: He grieved his mother's death for the rest of his life: "Do not say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering." and "In the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and where I now sleep, in the wall where her headboard had stood against I hung an icon—not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on a table. I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away." In 2012 the book "Travels in China" was published. It consists of his notes from a three-week trip to China he undertook with a group from the literary journal Tel Quel in 1974. The experience left him somewhat disappointed, as he found China "not at all exotic, not at all disorienting". Influence. Roland Barthes's incisive criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such as structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. While his influence is mainly found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it is also felt in every field concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes's breadth of focus is that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after him. The fact that Barthes's work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism". Key terms. "Readerly" and "writerly" are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out in "S/Z", while the essay "From Work to Text", from "Image—Music—Text" (1977), provides an analogous parallel look at the active–passive and postmodern–modern ways of interacting with a text. Readerly text. A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200).<ref name="S/Z">Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.</ref> Writerly text. A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product," the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing", but rather a "form of work" (10). The "Author" and the "scriptor". "Author" and "scriptor" are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. "The author" is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents us with a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader." Criticism. In 1964, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer" ("Le dernier des écrivains heureux" in "Essais critiques"), the title of which refers to Voltaire. In the essay he commented on the problems of the modern thinker after discovering the relativism in thought and philosophy, discrediting previous philosophers who avoided this difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes's description of Voltaire, Daniel Gordon, the translator and editor of "Candide" (The Bedford Series in History and Culture), wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another." The sinologist Simon Leys, in a review of Barthes's diary of a trip to China during the Cultural Revolution, disparages Barthes for his seeming indifference to the situation of the Chinese people, and says that Barthes "has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length." In popular culture. Barthes's "" was the inspiration for the name of 1980s new wave duo The Lover Speaks. Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot" draws out excerpts from Barthes's "A Lover's Discourse: Fragments" as a way to depict the unique intricacies of love that one of the main characters, Madeleine Hanna, experiences throughout the novel. In the film "Birdman" (2014) by Alejandro González Iñárritu, a journalist quotes to the protagonist Riggan Thompson an extract from "Mythologies": "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters". In the film "The Truth About Cats & Dogs" (1996) by Michael Lehmann, Brian is reading an extract from "Camera Lucida" over the phone to a woman whom he thinks to be beautiful but who is her more intellectual and less physically desirable friend. In the film "Elegy", based on Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal", the character of Consuela (played by Penélope Cruz) is first depicted in the film carrying a copy of Barthes's "The Pleasure of the Text" on the campus of the university where she is a student. Laurent Binet's novel "The 7th Function of Language" is based on the premise that Barthes was not merely accidentally hit by a van but that he was instead murdered, as part of a conspiracy to acquire a document known as the "Seventh Function of Language".

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Aspasia Aspasia (; ; c. 470–c. 400 BC) was an influential woman in Ancient Greece, who according to Plutarch attracted the most prominent writers and thinkers of the time, including Socrates, to her salon, which became an intellectual centre in Athens. Aspasia was a metic and although she spent most of her adult life in Greece, few details of her life are fully known. Although some accounts credit Aspasia as a distinguished rhetorician and philosopher, there also exist ancient depictions of Aspasia as a brothel keeper and a hetaera. Aspasia is mentioned in the writings of Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon and others. The hypothetical nature of conclusions reached about Aspasia, based on relatively scant and contradictory information, have led to this range of contradictory portrayals from intellectual luminary to courtesan. For this reason modern scholars express scepticism about the historicity of Aspasia's life, the consensus being that so much is unverifiable, and so little can be known, as to render Aspasia void of much historical reality. Aspasia's role in history provides crucial insight to the understanding of the women of ancient Greece. Very little is known about women from her time period. One scholar stated that, "To ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity." She was the partner of Athenian statesman Pericles in Classical-era Athens. The couple had a son, Pericles the Younger, but the full details of the couple's marital status are unknown. Origin and early years. Aspasia was born in the Ionian Greek city of Miletus (in the modern province of Aydın, Turkey). Little is known about her family except that her father's name was Axiochus, although it is evident that she must have belonged to a wealthy family, for only the well-to-do could have afforded the excellent education that she received. Her name, which means "the desired one," was likely not her given name. Some ancient sources claim that she was a Carian prisoner-of-war turned slave; these statements are generally regarded as false. It is not known under what circumstances she first traveled to Athens. The discovery of a 4th-century grave inscription that mentions the names of Axiochus and Aspasius has led historian Peter K. Bicknell to attempt a reconstruction of Aspasia's family background and Athenian connections. His theory connects her to Alcibiades II of Scambonidae (grandfather of the famous Alcibiades), who was ostracized from Athens in 460 BC and may have spent his exile in Miletus. Bicknell conjectures that, following his exile, the elder Alcibiades went to Miletus, where he married the daughter of a certain Axiochus. Alcibiades apparently returned to Athens with his new wife and her younger sister, Aspasia. Bicknell argues that the first child of this marriage was named Axiochus (uncle of the famous Alcibiades) and the second Aspasios. He also maintains that Pericles met Aspasia through his close connections with Alcibiades's household. While in Athens, Aspasia may have also had affairs with the philosopher Anaxagoras and the general Jason of Lira. Life in Athens. According to the disputed statements of the ancient writers and some modern scholars, in Athens Aspasia became a hetaera and ran a brothel. Hetaerae were professional high-class entertainers, as well as courtesans. Besides displaying physical beauty, they differed from most Athenian women in being educated (often to a high standard, as Aspasia evidently was), having independence, and paying taxes. They were the nearest thing perhaps to liberated women; and Aspasia, who became a vivid figure in Athenian society, was probably an obvious example. According to Plutarch, Aspasia was compared to the famous Thargelia, another renowned Ionian hetaera of ancient times. As a non-Athenian woman, Aspasia was less bound by the traditional restraints that largely confined Athenian wives to their homes, and appears to have taken the opportunity to participate in the public life of the city. She became the companion of the statesman Pericles around 445 BC. After he divorced his first wife (perhaps c. 450 BC), Aspasia began to live with him, although her marital status is disputed. Their son, Pericles the Younger, must have been born by 440 BC. Aspasia would have to have been quite young, if she were able to bear a child to Lysicles c. 428 BC. In social circles, Aspasia was noted for her ability as a conversationalist and adviser rather than merely an object of physical beauty. Plutarch writes that despite her immoral life, friends of Socrates brought their wives to hear her converse. Personal and judicial attacks. Though they were influential, Pericles, Aspasia and their friends were not immune from attack, as preeminence in democratic Athens was not equivalent to absolute rule. Her relationship with Pericles and her subsequent political influence aroused many reactions. Donald Kagan, a Yale historian, believes that Aspasia was particularly unpopular in the years immediately following the Samian War. In 440 BC, Samos was at war with Miletus over Priene, an ancient city of Ionia in the foothills of Mycale. Worsted in the war, the Milesians came to Athens to plead their case against the Samians. When the Athenians ordered the two sides to stop fighting and submit the case to arbitration at Athens, the Samians refused. In response, Pericles passed a decree dispatching an expedition to Samos. The campaign proved to be difficult and the Athenians had to endure heavy casualties before Samos was defeated. According to Plutarch, it was thought that Aspasia, who came from Miletus, was responsible for the Samian War, and that Pericles had decided against and attacked Samos to gratify her. According to some later accounts, before the eruption of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), Pericles, some of his closest associates (including the philosopher Anaxagoras and sculptor Phidias) and Aspasia faced a series of personal and legal attacks. Aspasia, in particular, was accused in comedy of corrupting the women of Athens in order to satisfy Pericles' perversions. According to Plutarch, she was put on trial for asebeia (impiety), with the comic poet Hermippus as prosecutor. The historical nature of the accounts about these events is disputed; it is unlikely that a non-Athenian woman could be subject to legal charges of this kind (though her protector or "kurios", in this case Pericles, might be), and no harm came to her as a result. In "The Acharnians", Aristophanes blames Aspasia for the Peloponnesian War. He claims that the Megarian decree of Pericles, which excluded Megara from trade with Athens or its allies, was retaliation for prostitutes being kidnapped from the house of Aspasia by Megarians. Aristophanes' portrayal of Aspasia as responsible, from personal motives, for the outbreak of the war with Sparta may reflect memory of the earlier episode involving Miletus and Samos. Plutarch reports also the taunting comments of other comic poets, such as Eupolis and Cratinus. According to Podlecki, Douris appears to have propounded the view that Aspasia instigated both the Samian and Peloponnesian Wars. Aspasia was labeled the "New Omphale", "Deianira", "Hera" and "Helen". Further attacks on Pericles' relationship with Aspasia are reported by Athenaeus. Even Pericles' own son, Xanthippus, who had political ambitions, readily criticised his father about his domestic affairs. Later years and death. In 429 BC during the Plague of Athens, Pericles witnessed the death of his sister and of both his legitimate sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, from his first wife. With his morale undermined, he burst into tears, and not even Aspasia's companionship could console him. Just before his death, the Athenians allowed a change in the citizenship law of 451 BC that made his half-Athenian son with Aspasia, Pericles the Younger, a citizen and legitimate heir, a decision all the more striking in considering that Pericles himself had proposed the law confining citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides. Pericles died of the plague in the autumn of 429 BC. Plutarch cites Aeschines Socraticus, who wrote a dialogue on Aspasia (now lost), to the effect that after Pericles's death, Aspasia lived with Lysicles, an Athenian strategos (general) and democratic leader, with whom she had another son; and that she made him the first man at Athens. Lysicles was killed in action on an expedition to levy subsidies from allies in 428 BC. With Lysicles' death the contemporaneous record ends. It is unknown if she was alive when her son, Pericles, was elected general or when he was executed after the Battle of Arginusae. The time of her death that most historians give (c. 401–400 BC) is based on the assessment that Aspasia died before the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, a chronology which is implied in the structure of Aeschines' "Aspasia". References in philosophical works. Ancient philosophical works. Aspasia appears in the philosophical writings of Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines Socraticus and Antisthenes. Some scholars argue that Plato was impressed by her intelligence and wit and based his character Diotima in the "Symposium" on her, while others suggest that Diotima was in fact a historical figure. According to Charles H. Kahn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Diotima is in many respects Plato's response to Aeschines' Aspasia. In "Menexenus", Plato satirizes Aspasia's relationship with Pericles, and quotes Socrates as claiming ironically that she was a trainer of many orators and that since Pericles was educated by Aspasia, he would be superior in rhetoric to someone educated by Antiphon. He also attributes authorship of the Funeral Oration to Aspasia and attacks his contemporaries' veneration of Pericles. Kahn maintains that Plato has taken from Aeschines the motif of Aspasia as teacher of rhetoric for Pericles and Socrates. Plato's Aspasia and Aristophanes' Lysistrata are two apparent exceptions to the rule of women's incapacity as orators, though these fictional characters tell us nothing about the actual status of women in Athens. As Martha L. Rose, Professor of History at Truman State University, explains, "only in comedy do dogs litigate, birds govern, or women declaim". Xenophon mentions Aspasia twice in his Socratic writings: in "Memorabilia" and in "Oeconomicus". In both cases her advice is recommended to Critobulus by Socrates. In "Memorabilia" Socrates quotes Aspasia as saying that the matchmaker should report truthfully on the good characteristics of the man. In "Oeconomicus" Socrates defers to Aspasia as more knowledgeable about household management and the economic partnership between husband and wife. Aeschines Socraticus and Antisthenes each named a Socratic dialogue after Aspasia (though neither survives except in fragments). Our major sources for Aeschines Socraticus' "Aspasia" are Athenaeus, Plutarch, and Cicero. In the dialogue, Socrates recommends that Callias send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia for instructions. When Callias recoils at the notion of a female teacher, Socrates notes that Aspasia had favorably influenced Pericles and, after his death, Lysicles. In a section of the dialogue, preserved in Latin by Cicero, Aspasia figures as a "female Socrates", counseling first Xenophon's wife and then Xenophon himself (the Xenophon in question is not the famous historian) about acquiring virtue through self-knowledge. Aeschines presents Aspasia as a teacher and inspirer of excellence, connecting these virtues with her status as hetaira. According to Kahn, every single episode in Aeschines' Aspasia is not only fictitious but incredible. Of Antisthenes' "Aspasia" only two or three quotations are extant. This dialogue contains much slander, but also anecdotes pertaining to Pericles' biography. Antisthenes appears to have attacked not only Aspasia, but the entire family of Pericles, including his sons. The philosopher believes that the great statesman chose the life of pleasure over virtue. Thus, Aspasia is presented as the personification of the life of sexual indulgence. Modern literature. Aspasia appears in several significant works of modern literature. Her romantic attachment with Pericles has inspired some of the most famous novelists and poets of the last centuries. In particular the romanticists of the 19th century and the historical novelists of the 20th century found in their story an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In 1835 Lydia Maria Child, an American abolitionist, novelist, and journalist, published "Philothea", a classical romance set in the days of Pericles and Aspasia. This book is regarded as "the most elaborate and successful of the author's productions", in which the female characters, including Aspasia, "are portrayed with great beauty and delicacy." Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem (1836) is one of her series, Subjects for Pictures. In 1836, Walter Savage Landor, an English writer and poet, published "Pericles and Aspasia", one of his most famous books. "Pericles and Aspasia" is a rendering of classical Athens through a series of imaginary letters, which contain numerous poems. The letters are frequently unfaithful to actual history but attempt to capture the spirit of the Age of Pericles. Robert Hamerling is another novelist and poet who was inspired by Aspasia's personality. In 1876 he published his novel "Aspasia", a book about the manners and morals of the Age of Pericles and a work of cultural and historical interest. Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet influenced by the movement of romanticism, published a group of five poems known as the "circle of Aspasia". These Leopardi poems were inspired by his painful experience of desperate and unrequited love for a woman named Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. Leopardi called this person Aspasia, after the companion of Pericles. In 1918, novelist and playwright George Cram Cook produced his first full-length play, "The Athenian Women" (an adaption of "Lysistrata"), which portrays Aspasia leading a strike for peace. Cook combined an anti-war theme with a Greek setting. American writer Gertrude Atherton in "The Immortal Marriage" (1927) treats the story of Pericles and Aspasia and illustrates the period of the Samian War, the Peloponnesian War and the Plague of Athens. Taylor Caldwell's "Glory and the Lightning" (1974) is another novel that portrays the historical relationship of Aspasia and Pericles. Fame and assessments. Aspasia's name is closely connected with Pericles' glory and fame. Plutarch accepts her as a significant figure both politically and intellectually and expresses his admiration for a woman who "managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length". The biographer says that Aspasia became so renowned that even Cyrus the Younger, who went to war with the King Artaxerxes II of Persia, gave her name to one of his concubines, who before was called Milto. After Cyrus had fallen in battle, this woman was carried captive to the King and acquired a great influence with him. Lucian calls Aspasia a "model of wisdom", "the admired of the admirable Olympian" and lauds "her political knowledge and insight, her shrewdness and penetration". A Syriac text, according to which Aspasia composed a speech and instructed a man to read it for her in the courts, confirms Aspasia's rhetorical fame. Aspasia is said by the "Suda", a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, to have been "clever with regards to words," a sophist, and to have taught rhetoric. On the basis of such assessments, researchers such as Cheryl Glenn, Professor at the Pennsylvania State University, argue that Aspasia seems to have been the only woman in classical Greece to have distinguished herself in the public sphere and must have influenced Pericles in the composition of his speeches. Some scholars believe that Aspasia opened an academy for young women of good families or even invented the Socratic method. However, Robert W. Wallace, Professor of classics at Northwestern University, underscores that "we cannot accept as historical the joke that Aspasia taught Pericles how to speak and hence was a master rhetorician or philosopher". According to Wallace, the intellectual role Aspasia was given by Plato may have derived from comedy. Roger Just, a classicist and Professor of social anthropology at the University of Kent, believes that Aspasia was an exceptional figure, but her example alone is enough to underline the fact that any woman who was to become the intellectual and social equal of a man would have to be a hetaera. According to Sr. Prudence Allen, a philosopher and seminary professor, Aspasia moved the potential of women to become philosophers one step forward from the poetic inspirations of Sappho. In art. The 1979 installation artwork "The Dinner Party" by feminist Judy Chicago has a place setting for Aspasia among the 39 figured. Aspasia appears in "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" as the partner of the Athenian statesman Pericles and the leader of the villainous Cult of Kosmos. Aspasia is the protagonist in Taylor Caldwell's novel Glory and the Lightning, 1974, Doubleday & Company. Accuracy of historical sources. The main problem remains, as Jona Lendering points out, that most of the things we know about Aspasia are based on mere hypothesis. Thucydides does not mention her; our only sources are the untrustworthy representations and speculations recorded by men in literature and philosophy, who did not care at all about Aspasia as a historical character. Therefore, in the figure of Aspasia, we get a range of contradictory portrayals; she is either a good wife like Theano or some combination of courtesan and prostitute like Thargelia. This is the reason modern scholars express their scepticism about the historicity of Aspasia's life. According to Wallace, "for us Aspasia herself possesses and can possess almost no historical reality". Hence, Madeleine M. Henry, Professor of Classics at Iowa State University, maintains that "biographical anecdotes that arose in antiquity about Aspasia are wildly colorful, almost completely unverifiable, and still alive and well in the twentieth century". She finally concludes that "it is possible to map only the barest possibilities for [Aspasia's] life". According to Charles W. Fornara and Loren J. Samons II, Professors of Classics and history, "it may well be, for all we know, that the real Aspasia was more than a match for her fictional counterpart".

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Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher) Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (; – ), a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer, and literary critic, played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early-20th century. Life and work. He was born in Moscow; the son of the historian Sergey Mikhaylovich Solovyov (1820–1879), and the brother of historical novelist Vsevolod Solovyov (1849-1903) and the poet Polyxena Solovyova (1867-1924). His mother Polyxena Vladimirovna belonged to a Polish origin family and had, among her ancestors, the thinker Gregory Skovoroda (1722–1794). In his teens, Solovyov renounced Eastern Orthodoxy for nihilism, but later, his disapproval of positivism saw him begin to express views that were in line with those of the Orthodox Church. Solovyov studied at the University of Moscow, and his philosophy professor was Pamfil Yurkevich. In his "The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists", Solovyov discredited the positivists' rejection of Aristotle's essentialism, or philosophical realism. In "Against the Positivists", he took the position of intuitive noetic comprehension, or insight. He saw consciousness as integral (see the Russian term "sobornost") and requiring both phenomenon (validated by dianonia) and noumenon validated intuitively. Positivism, according to Solovyov, validates only the phenomenon of an object, denying the intuitive reality that people experience as part of their consciousness. As Solovyov's basic philosophy rests on the idea that the essence of an object (see essentialism) can be validated only by intuition and that consciousness as a single organic whole is done in part by reason or logic but in completeness by (non-dualist) intuition. Solovyov was partially attempting to reconcile the dualism (subject-object) found in German idealism. Vladimir Solovyov became a friend and confidant of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). In opposition to his friend, Solovyov was sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church. He favoured the healing of the schism (ecumenism, sobornost) between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It is clear from Solovyov's work that he accepted papal primacy over the Universal Church, but there is not enough evidence, at this time, to support the claim that he ever officially embraced Roman Catholicism. As an active member of Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia, he spoke Hebrew and struggled to reconcile Judaism and Christianity. Politically, he became renowned as the leading defender of Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s. Solovyov also advocated for his cause internationally and published a letter in "The London Times" pleading for international support for his struggle. The "Jewish Encyclopedia" describes him as "a friend of the Jews" and states that "Even on his death-bed he is said to have prayed for the Jewish people". Solovyov's attempts to chart a course of civilization's progress toward an East-West Christian ecumenicism developed an increasing bias against Asian cultures which he initially studied with great interest. He dismissed the Buddhist concept of Nirvana as a pessimistic nihilistic "nothingness" which was antithetical to salvation, no better than Gnostic dualism. Solovyov spent his final years obsessed with fear of the "Yellow Peril", warning that soon the Asian peoples, especially the Chinese, would invade and destroy Russia. Solovyov further elaborated in his apocalyptic short story "Tale of the Antichrist" published in the "Nedelya" newspaper on February 27, 1900, in which China and Japan join forces to conquer Russia. His 1894 poem "Pan-Mongolism", whose opening lines serve as epigraph to the story, was widely seen as predicting the coming Russo-Japanese War. Solovyov never married or had children, but he pursued idealized relationships as immortalized in his spiritual love poetry, including with two women named Sophia. He rebuffed the advances of mystic Anna Schmidt, who claimed to be his divine partner. In his later years, Solovyov became a vegetarian but ate fish occasionally. He often lived alone for months without a servant and would work into the night. Influence. It is widely held that Solovyov was one of the sources for Dostoevsky's characters Alyosha Karamazov and Ivan Karamazov in "The Brothers Karamazov". In Janko Lavrin's opinion, Solovyov has not left a single work which can be considered an epoch-making contribution to philosophy as such. And yet his writings have proved one of the most stimulating influences to the religious-philosophic thought of his country. Solovyov's influence can also be seen in the writings of the Symbolist and Neo-Idealist writers of the later Russian Soviet era. His book "The " can be seen as one of the philosophical sources of Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889). It was also the work in which he introduced the concept of 'syzygy', to denote 'close union'. Another legacy of Solovyov can be found in symphonic metal band Therion's 2018 triple album, Beloved Antichrist. Sophiology. Solovyov compiled a philosophy based on Hellenistic philosophy (see Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) and early Christian tradition with Buddhist and Hebrew Kabbalistic elements (Philo of Alexandria). He also studied Gnosticism and the works of the Gnostic Valentinus. His religious philosophy was syncretic and fused philosophical elements of various religious traditions with Orthodox Christianity and his own experience of Sophia. Solovyov described his encounters with the entity Sophia in his works, such as "Three Encounters" and "Lectures on Godmanhood". His fusion was driven by the desire to reconcile and/or unite with Orthodox Christianity the various traditions by the Russian Slavophiles' concept of sobornost. His Russian religious philosophy had a very strong impact on the Russian Symbolist art movements of his time. His teachings on Sophia, conceived as the merciful unifying feminine wisdom of God comparable to the Hebrew Shekinah or various goddess traditions, have been deemed a heresy by Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and as unsound and unorthodox by the Patriarchate of Moscow. Sobornost. Solovyov sought to create a philosophy that could through his system of logic or reason reconcile all bodies of knowledge or disciplines of thought, and fuse all conflicting concepts into a single system. The central component of this complete philosophic reconciliation was the Russian Slavophile concept of "sobornost" (organic or spontaneous order through integration, which is related to the Russian word for 'catholic'). Solovyov sought to find and validate common ground, or where conflicts found common ground, and, by focusing on this common ground, to establish absolute unity and/or integral fusion of opposing ideas and/or peoples. Professor Joseph Papin, in his work Doctrina De Bono Perfecto, Eiusque Systemate N.O. Losskij Personalistico Applicatio (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1946) gives insight into the thoughts of Vladimir Soloviev. After teaching at the University of Notre Dame, Papin founded the Theology Institute at Villanova University. He edited publications from the first six symposia of the Theology Institute (1968-1974). The idea of Sobornost was prominent in the VI volume: The Church and Human Society at the Threshold of the Third Millennium (Villanova University Press, 1974). His own in-depth scholarly contribution was entitled: "From Collegiality and Sobornost to Church Unity." In volume V of the Symposia, Papin published a profound study on Soloviev in relation to the future development of Christianity, a community of love: "Eschaton in the Vision of the Russian Newman (Soloviev)" in The Eschaton: A Community of Love, (ed. Joseph Papin, Volume V, Villanova university Press, 1971, pp. 1–55). The Dean of Harvard Divinity School, Krister Stendahl, gave his highest praise to Papin for his efforts in overcoming the divisions separating Christians: "It gladdens me that you will be honored at the time of having completed a quarter century of teaching us all. Your vision of and your dogged insistence on a truly catholic i.e. ecumenical future of the church and theology has been one of the forces that have broken through the man-made walls of partition. . ." [Transcendence and Immanence, Reconstruction in the Light of Process Thinking, Volume I, ed. Joseph Armenti, St Meinrad: The Abbey Press, 1972, p. 5). At the time of his death, United States President Ronald Reagan along with theologians, philosophers, poets, and dignitaries from around the world wrote to Dr. Joseph Armenti praising the life and work of Reverend Joseph Papin. See: “President Reagan Leads International Homage to Fr. Papin in Memorial,” JEDNOTA, 1983, page 8). Death. Intense mental work shattered Solovyov's health. He died at the Moscow estate of Nikolai Petrovitch Troubetzkoy, where a relative of the latter, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, was living. Solovyov was apparently a homeless pauper in 1900. He left his brother, Mikhail Sergeevich, and several colleagues to defend and promote his intellectual legacy. He is buried at Novodevichy Convent. Quotes. "But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man's common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life."

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Roman Ingarden Roman Witold Ingarden (; February 5, 1893 – June 14, 1970) was a Polish philosopher who worked in aesthetics, ontology, and phenomenology. Before World War II, Ingarden published his works mainly in the German language. During the war, he switched to Polish, and as a result, his major works in ontology went largely unnoticed by the wider world philosophical community. Biography. Ingarden was born in Kraków, Austria-Hungary, on February 5, 1893. He first studied mathematics and philosophy at the Lwów University under Kazimierz Twardowski, then moved to the University of Göttingen to study philosophy under Edmund Husserl. He was considered by Husserl to be one of his best students and accompanied Husserl to the University of Freiburg, where in 1918 Ingarden submitted his doctoral dissertation with Husserl as director. The title of his thesis was "Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson" ("Intuition and Intellect in Henri Bergson"). Ingarden previously suggested that he transfer to Lwów and write a new dissertation under Twardowski due to an increasing tension between Germany and Poland but Husserl refused. Ingarden then returned to Poland, where he spent his academic career after obtaining his doctorate. For a long period, he had to support himself by secondary-school teaching. During this period, one of his works - aside from his post-doctoral work in epistemology - was a review of the "Festschrift" written for Twardowski. This involved an analysis of Zygmunt Lempicki's "W sprawie uzasadnienia poetyki czystej" (On the Justification of Pure Poetics). In 1925 he submitted his "Habilitationschrift", "Essentiale Fragen" ("Essential Questions"), to Kazimierz Twardowski at Lwów University. This thesis was noticed by the English-speaking philosophical community. In 1933, the University promoted him as professor of philosophy. He became well known for his work on "The Literary Work of Art" ("Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft", 1931). From 1939 to 1941 during the Soviet occupation of Lwów he continued his university activity and lived in the Kraków area. After the Operation Barbarossa 1941 under the German occupation Ingarden secretly taught students mathematics and philosophy. After his house was bombed, he continued work on his book, "The Controversy over the Existence of the World". Ingarden became a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 1945 shortly after the war but was banned in 1946 because of the Communist government. He then moved to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he was offered a position. In 1949, however, he was banned from teaching due to his alleged idealism, supposedly being an "enemy of materialism". In 1957 he was reappointed at the Jagiellonian University after the ban was lifted, and so he went on to teach, write and publish. Ingarden died on June 14, 1970, in Kraków as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. Works. Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist and thus did not accept Husserl's transcendental idealism. His training was phenomenological; nonetheless, his work as a whole was directed towards ontology. That is why Ingarden is one of the most renowned phenomenological ontologists, as he strove to describe the ontological structure and state of being of various objects based on the essential features of any experience that could provide such knowledge. The best-known works of Ingarden, and the only ones widely-known to English-speaking readers, concern aesthetics and literature. His most popular book, for instance, was "The Literary Work of Art," which explored the concept of the literary work of art. In this book, Ingarden argued that a literary work of art is a purely intentional object and is a product of the author's conscious acts. This work would contribute to the development of the literary theory called reader-response criticism and influence scholars such as René Wellek and Wolfgang Iser. The exclusive focus on Ingarden's work in aesthetics does not reflect Ingarden's overall philosophical standpoint, which is focused on the ideas regarding formal, existential, and material ontology set forth in his "Controversy over the Existence of the World". In his aesthetic investigations, Ingarden considered aesthetics as an integral part of philosophy. He argued that his aesthetic theory is not only an analysis of art but an approach that answers basic philosophical issues. Ingarden also attempted to establish a phenomenological circle at Lvov. The group, which focused on aesthetics and descriptive psychology, attracted some of Twardowski's students including Leopold Blaustein and Eugénie Ginsberg. Ingarden was a close associate of Edith Stein. He came to her defense when her work with Husserl was challenged. Ingarden wrote his own biography in 1949. This work, which was written in third person, was one of the three biographies he submitted to Tatarkiewicz, who was then revising his "Historia filozofii" (History of philosophy). The philosopher had also undertaken work for Husserl.

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Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders. Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the "Tableaux Parisiens" section of Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal" and parts of Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu". In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the invading Wehrmacht. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Life. Early life and education. Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). The patriarch of Walter Benjamin's family, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. Benjamin's uncle William Stern (born Wilhelm Louis Stern; 1871-1938) was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ), and Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern; 1902-1992) was a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, his great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld. In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Walter was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda, a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at summer semester's end returned to Berlin, then matriculated at the University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of "cultural Zionism"—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values. In Benjamin's formulation his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote, "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong. Elected president of the "Freie Studentenschaft" (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change. When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg University to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time he travelled to France and Italy. His attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. The next year, 1915, he moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend. In that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his Ph.D. "cum laude" with the dissertation "Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik" ("The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism"). Later, unable to support himself and family, he returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Kritik der Gewalt" ("Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life. Career. In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published "Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens". At that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose "The Theory of the Novel" (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic consequent to the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, a country under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East. In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the "Neue Deutsche Beiträge" magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities"), about Goethe's third novel, "Die Wahlverwandtschaften" (1809). Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama") as a habilitation dissertation meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's "History and Class Consciousness" (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; she became his lover and was a lasting intellectual influence on him. A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" as his possible qualification for the habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection; he was not to be an academic instructor. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers "Frankfurter Zeitung" (The Frankfurt Times) and "Die Literarische Welt" (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926, the year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium. In 1927, he began "Das Passagen-Werk" ("The Arcades Project"), his uncompleted "magnum opus", a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published "Einbahnstraße" ("One-Way Street"), and a revision of his habilitation dissertation "Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama"). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, he also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg. Exile and death. In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the "de facto" Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but before doing so he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived. As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, a first version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer in the "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung" journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity". In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the "Arcades Project" manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy. Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country. The historical record indicates that he safely crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They crossed the border on 25 September 1940 but were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to the United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the "Hotel de Francia"; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. Despite his suicide, Benjamin was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery. The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of "Theses" to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his "Arcades Project" in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. Thought. Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, Gerschom Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm, has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding the influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah. "Theses on the Philosophy of History". "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in the spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published "Theses" in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the "Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin": In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter." "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility". Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility. The aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created. This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious, a concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention. "The Origin of German Tragic Drama". "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama", 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the (postdoctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the "Habilitation" (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany. Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" inappropriate for his "Germanistik" department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" as a "Habilitation" dissertation to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" as a book. "Criticism and prophecy must be the two categories that meet in the salvation of the past" "The Arcades Project". The "Passagenwerk" ("Arcades Project", 1927–40) was Benjamin's final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the "Passages couverts de Paris"—the covered passages that extended the culture of "flânerie" (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made "flânerie" infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper. In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture. The "Arcades Project", in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940. The "Arcades Project" was published for the first time in 1982, and is over a thousand pages long. Writing style. Susan Sontag said that in Benjamin's writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a "freeze-frame baroque" style of writing and cogitation. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct". The difficulty of Benjamin's style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding. Benjamin's writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in "The Task of the Translator", wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational modification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth. His work "The Task of the Translator" was later commented by the French translation scholar Antoine Berman ("L'âge de la traduction"). Legacy and reception. Since the publication of "Schriften" ("Writings", 1955), 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work—especially the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (French edition, 1936)—has become of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines. In 1968, the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft was established by the German thinker, poet and artist Natias Neutert, as a free association of philosophers, writers, artists, media theoreticians and editors. They did not take Benjamin's body of thought as a scholastic "closed architecture [...], but as one in which all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open", as the founder Neutert put it—more poetically than politically—in his manifesto. The members felt liberated to take Benjamin's ideas as a welcome touchstone for social change. Like the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft, a new one, established in 2000, researches and discusses the imperative that Benjamin formulated in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it." The successor society was registered in Karlsruhe (Germany); Chairman of the Board of Directors was Bernd Witte, an internationally recognized Benjamin scholar and Professor of Modern German Literature in Düsseldorf (Germany). Its members come from 19 countries, both within and beyond Europe and represents an international forum for discourse. The Society supported research endeavors devoted to the creative and visionary potential of Benjamin's works and their view of 20th century modernism. Special emphasis had been placed upon strengthening academic ties to Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe. The society conducts conferences and exhibitions, as well as interdisciplinary and intermedial events, at regular intervals and different European venues: In 2017 Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project" was reinterpreted in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, held at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", features 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project. Commemoration. A commemorative plaque is located by the residence where Benjamin lived in Berlin during the years 1930–1933: (Prinzregentenstraße 66, Berlin-Wilmersdorf). A commemorative plaque is located in Paris (10 rue Dombasle, 15th) where Benjamin lived in 1938–1940. Close by Kurfürstendamm, in the district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town square created by Hans Kollhoff in 2001 was named "Walter-Benjamin-Platz". There is a memorial sculpture by the artist Dani Karavan at Portbou, where Walter Benjamin ended his life. It was commissioned to mark 50 years since his death. Works (selection). Among Walter Benjamin's works are:

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Tzachi Zamir Tzachi Zamir (born 1967) is an Israeli philosopher and literary critic specialising in the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of theatre, and animal ethics. He is Professor of English and General & Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Academic career. Zamir studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University, going on to be a Rothschild and Fulbright postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at The University of Chicago. He joined the English department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004 as a lecturer, and is now Professor of English and General & Comparative Literature. Zamir is the author of the 2006 book "Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama" and the 2007 book "Ethics & the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation", both published by Princeton University Press. His 2014 book "Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self" was published by the University of Michigan Press. In 2018, he published both the monograph "Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost" and the edited collection "Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives" with Oxford University Press, and in 2020 he published "Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism and Justice" with Routledge. Personal life. Zamir lives with his wife and three children in Hod Hasharon.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic and educational thought. His "Discourse on Inequality" and "The Social Contract" are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau's sentimental novel "Julie, or the New Heloise" (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His "Emile, or On Education" (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—the posthumously published "Confessions" (composed in 1769), which initiated the modern autobiography, and the unfinished "Reveries of the Solitary Walker" (composed 1776–1778)—exemplified the late-18th-century "", and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. Rousseau befriended fellow philosopher Denis Diderot in 1742, and would later write about Diderot's romantic troubles in his "Confessions". During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophers among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death. Biography. Youth. Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Five generations before Rousseau, his ancestor Didier, a bookseller who may have published Protestant tracts, had escaped persecution from French Catholics by fleeing to Geneva in 1549, where he became a wine merchant. Rousseau was proud that his family, of the "moyen" order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva". Geneva, in theory, was governed "democratically" by its male voting "citizens". The citizens were a minority of the population when compared to the immigrants, referred to as "inhabitants", whose descendants were called "natives" and continued to lack suffrage. In fact, rather than being run by vote of the "citizens", the city was ruled by a small number of wealthy families that made up the "Council of Two Hundred"; these delegated their power to a 25-member executive group from among them called the "Little Council". There was much political debate within Geneva, extending down to the tradespeople. Much discussion was over the idea of the sovereignty of the people, of which the ruling class oligarchy was making a mockery. In 1707, a democratic reformer named Pierre Fatio protested this situation, saying "a sovereign that never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being". He was shot by order of the Little Council. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father, Isaac, was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it. Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, followed his grandfather, father and brothers into the watchmaking business. He also taught dance for a short period. Isaac, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. Rousseau wrote that "A Genevan watchmaker is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches". In 1699, Isaac ran into political difficulty by entering a quarrel with visiting English officers, who in response drew their swords and threatened him. After local officials stepped in, it was Isaac who was punished, as Geneva was concerned with maintaining its ties to foreign powers. Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, was from an upper-class family. She was raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher. He cared for Suzanne after her father, Jacques, who had run into trouble with the legal and religious authorities for fornication and having a mistress, died in his early 30s. In 1695, Suzanne had to answer charges that she had attended a street theater disguised as a peasant woman so she could gaze upon M. Vincent Sarrasin, whom she fancied despite his continuing marriage. After a hearing, she was ordered by the Genevan Consistory to never interact with him again. She married Rousseau's father at the age of 31. Isaac's sister had married Suzanne's brother eight years earlier, after she had become pregnant and they had been chastised by the Consistory. The child died at birth. The young Rousseau was told a fabricated story about the situation in which young love had been denied by a disapproving patriarch but later prevailed, resulting in two marriages uniting the families on the same day. Rousseau never learnt the truth. Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712, and he would later relate: "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me". He was baptized on 4 July 1712, in the great cathedral. His mother died of puerperal fever nine days after his birth, which he later described as "the first of my misfortunes". He and his older brother François were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne. When Rousseau was five, his father sold the house that the family had received from his mother's relatives. While the idea was that his sons would inherit the principal when grown up and he would live off the interest in the meantime, in the end the father took most of the substantial proceeds. With the selling of the house, the Rousseau family moved out of the upper-class neighborhood and moved into an apartment house in a neighborhood of craftsmen—silversmiths, engravers, and other watchmakers. Growing up around craftsmen, Rousseau would later contrast them favorably to those who produced more aesthetic works, writing "those important persons who are called artists rather than artisans, work solely for the idle and rich, and put an arbitrary price on their baubles". Rousseau was also exposed to class politics in this environment, as the artisans often agitated in a campaign of resistance against the privileged class running Geneva. Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he remembered how when he was five or six his father encouraged his love of reading: Rousseau's reading of escapist stories (such as "L'Astrée" by Honoré d'Urfé) had an effect on him; he later wrote that they "gave me bizarre and romantic notions of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to cure me of". After they had finished reading the novels, they began to read a collection of ancient and modern classics left by his mother's uncle. Of these, his favorite was Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans", which he would read to his father while he made watches. Rousseau saw Plutarch's work as another kind of novel—the noble actions of heroes—and he would act out the deeds of the characters he was reading about. In his "Confessions", Rousseau stated that the reading of Plutarch's works and "the conversations between my father and myself to which it gave rise, formed in me the free and republican spirit". Witnessing the local townsfolk participate in militias made a big impression on Rousseau. Throughout his life, he would recall one scene where, after the volunteer militia had finished its manoeuvres, they began to dance around a fountain and most of the people from neighboring buildings came out to join them, including him and his father. Rousseau would always see militias as the embodiment of popular spirit in opposition to the armies of the rulers, whom he saw as disgraceful mercenaries. When Rousseau was ten, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him. Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here, the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister. Virtually all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published "Confessions", in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks. At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva (on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city gates locked due to the curfew. In adjoining Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him to Françoise-Louise de Warens, age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin, the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy), to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism to regain it. In converting to Catholicism, both de Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man. Leo Damrosch writes: "An eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare 'that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good'". De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins. Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and France. During this time, he lived on and off with de Warens, whom he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, de Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with the idea of becoming a priest. Early adulthood. When Rousseau reached 20, de Warens took him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house. The sexual aspect of their relationship (a "ménage à trois") confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered de Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender, she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She and her circle, comprising educated members of the Catholic clergy, introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and used a portion of it to repay de Warens for her financial support of him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon. In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible with typography, is based on a single line, displaying numbers representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again. He befriended Denis Diderot that year, connecting over the discussion of literary endeavors. From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera: Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly. After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy. Return to Paris. Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thérèse Levasseur, a seamstress who was the sole support of her mother and numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together, though later Rousseau took Thérèse and her mother in to live with him as his servants, and himself assumed the burden of supporting her large family. According to his "Confessions", before she moved in with him, Thérèse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is no independent verification for this number). Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she [Thérèse] allowed herself to be overcome" ("Confessions"). In his letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't rich enough to raise his children, but in Book IX of the "Confessions" he gave the true reasons of his choice: "I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less". Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son, but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for "ad hominem" attacks. Beginning with some articles on music in 1749, Rousseau contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great "Encyclopédie", the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755. Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a "lettre de cachet" for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles", that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. According to science historian Conway Zirkle, Rousseau saw the concept of natural selection "as an agent for improving the human species." Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon to be published in the "Mercure de France" on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were basically good by nature. Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame. Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera "Le devin du village" ("The Village Soothsayer"), which was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension". He also turned down several other advantageous offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave offense and caused him problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's "La serva padrona", prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau as noted above, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his "Letter on French Music". Return to Geneva. On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men" (the "Discourse on Inequality"), which elaborated on the arguments of the "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences". He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel, "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse" (also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d'Épinay, whom he treated rather highhandedly. He resented being at Mme. d'Épinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and shallow atheism of the "Encyclopedistes" whom he met at her table. Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between Rousseau and Madame d'Épinay; her lover, the journalist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau. Diderot later described Rousseau as being "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked... He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me". Rousseau's break with the "Encyclopedistes" coincided with the composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the universe, in contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie and D'Holbach. During this period, Rousseau enjoyed the support and patronage of Charles II François Frédéric de Montmorency-Luxembourg and the Prince de Conti, two of the richest and most powerful nobles in France. These men truly liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to converse on any subject, but they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged. Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, "Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse", was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth-century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published "Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique" (in English, literally "Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right") in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the "Social Contract", which implied that the concept of a Christian republic was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than participation in public affairs. Rousseau helped Roustan find a publisher for the rebuttal. Rousseau published "Emile, or On Education" in May. A famous section of "Emile", "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar", was intended to be a defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense. Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. This religious indifferentism caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from France and Geneva. He was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned and warrants were issued for his arrest. Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals. A sympathetic observer, David Hume "professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were banned in Geneva and elsewhere". Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country... as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous." Voltaire and Frederick the Great. After Rousseau's "Emile" had outraged the French parliament, an arrest order was issued by parliament against him, causing him to flee to Switzerland. Subsequently, when the Swiss authorities also proved unsympathetic to him—condemning both "Emile", and also "The Social Contract"—Voltaire issued an invitation to Rousseau to come and reside with him, commenting that: "I shall always love the author of the 'Vicaire savoyard' whatever he has done, and whatever he may do...Let him come here [to Ferney]! He must come! I shall receive him with open arms. He shall be master here more than I. I shall treat him like my own son." Rousseau later expressed regret that he had not replied to Voltaire's invitation. In July 1762, after Rousseau was informed that he could not continue to reside in Bern, d'Alembert advised him to move to the Principality of Neuchâtel, ruled by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Subsequently, Rousseau accepted an invitation to reside in Môtiers, fifteen miles from Neuchâtel. On 11 July 1762, Rousseau wrote to Frederick, describing how he had been driven from France, from Geneva, and from Bern; and seeking Frederick's protection. He also mentioned that he had criticized Frederick in the past and would continue to be critical of Frederick in the future, stating however: "Your Majesty may dispose of me as you like." Frederick, still in the middle of the Seven Years' War, then wrote to the local governor of Neuchatel, Marischal Keith who was a mutual friend of theirs: Rousseau, touched by the help he received from Frederick, stated that from then onwards he took a keen interest in Frederick's activities. As the Seven Years' War was about to end, Rousseau wrote to Frederick again, thanking him for the help received and urging him to put an end to military activities and to endeavor to keep his subjects happy instead. Frederick made no known reply, but commented to Keith that Rousseau had given him a "scolding". Fugitive. For more than two years (1762–1765) Rousseau lived at Môtiers, spending his time in reading and writing and meeting visitors such as James Boswell (December 1764). In the meantime, the local ministers had become aware of the apostasies in some of his writings, and resolved not to let him stay in the vicinity. The Neuchâtel Consistory summoned Rousseau to answer a charge of blasphemy. He wrote back asking to be excused due to his inability to sit for a long time due to his ailment. Subsequently, Rousseau's own pastor, Frédéric-Guillaume de Montmollin, started denouncing him publicly as the Antichrist. In one inflammatory sermon, Montmollin quoted Proverbs 15:8: "The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is his delight"; this was interpreted by everyone to mean that Rousseau's taking communion was detested by the Lord. The ecclesiastical attacks inflamed the parishioners, who proceeded to pelt Rousseau with stones when he would go out for walks. Around midnight of 6–7 September 1765, stones were thrown at the house Rousseau was staying in, and some glass windows were shattered. When a local official, Martinet, arrived at Rousseau's residence he saw so many stones on the balcony that he exclaimed "My God, it's a quarry!" At this point, Rousseau's friends in Môtiers advised him to leave the town. Since he wanted to remain in Switzerland, Rousseau decided to accept an offer to move to a tiny island, the Ile de St.-Pierre, having a solitary house. Although it was within the Canton of Bern, from where he had been expelled two years previously, he was informally assured that he could move into this island house without fear of arrest, and he did so (10 September 1765). Here, despite the remoteness of his retreat, visitors sought him out as a celebrity. However, on 17 October 1765, the Senate of Bern ordered Rousseau to leave the island and all Bernese territory within fifteen days. He replied, requesting permission to extend his stay, and offered to be incarcerated in any place within their jurisdiction with only a few books in his possession and permission to walk occasionally in a garden while living at his own expense. The Senate's response was to direct Rousseau to leave the island, and all Bernese territory, within twenty four hours. On 29 October 1765 he left the Ile de St.-Pierre and moved to Strasbourg. At this point: He subsequently decided to accept Hume's invitation to go to England. Back in Paris. On 9 December 1765, having secured a passport from the French government to come to Paris, Rousseau left Strasbourg for Paris where he arrived after a week, and lodged in a palace of his friend, the Prince of Conti. Here he met Hume, and also numerous friends, and well wishers, and became a very conspicuous figure in the city. At this time, Hume wrote: One significant meeting could have taken place at this time: Diderot wanted to reconcile and make amends with Rousseau. However, both Diderot and Rousseau wanted the other person to take the initiative, so the two did not meet. Letter of Walpole. On 1 January 1766, Grimm wrote a report to his clientele, in which he included a letter said to have been written by Frederick the Great to Rousseau. This letter had actually been composed by Horace Walpole as a playful hoax. Walpole had never met Rousseau, but he was well acquainted with Diderot and Grimm. The letter soon found wide publicity; Hume is believed to have been present, and to have participated in its creation. On 16 February 1766, Hume wrote to the Marquise de Brabantane: "The only pleasantry I permitted myself in connection with the pretended letter of the King of Prussia was made by me at the dinner table of Lord Ossory." This letter was one of the reasons for the later rupture in Hume's relations with Rousseau. In Britain. On 4 January 1766 Rousseau left Paris along with Hume, the merchant De Luze (an old friend of Rousseau), and Rousseau's pet dog Sultan. After a four-day journey to Calais, where they stayed for two nights, the travelers embarked on a ship to Dover. On 13 January 1766 they arrived in London. Soon after their arrival, David Garrick arranged a box at the Drury Lane Theatre for Hume and Rousseau on a night when the King and Queen also attended. Garrick was himself performing in a comedy by himself, and also in a tragedy by Voltaire. Rousseau became so excited during the performance that he leaned too far and almost fell out of the box; Hume observed that the King and Queen were looking at Rousseau more than at the performance. Afterwards, Garrick served supper for Rousseau, who commended Garrick's acting: "Sir, you have made me shed tears at your tragedy, and smile at your comedy, though I scarce understood a word of your language." At this time, Hume had a favorable opinion of Rousseau; in a letter to Madame de Brabantane, Hume wrote that after observing Rousseau carefully he had concluded that he had never met a more affable and virtuous person. According to Hume, Rousseau was "gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, of extreme sensitivity". Initially, Hume lodged Rousseau in the house of Madam Adams in London, but Rousseau began receiving so many visitors that he soon wanted to move to a quieter location. An offer came to lodge him in a Welsh monastery, and he was inclined to accept it, but Hume persuaded him to move to Chiswick. Rousseau now asked for Thérèse to rejoin him. Meanwhile, James Boswell, then in Paris, offered to escort Thérèse to Rousseau. (Boswell had earlier met Rousseau and Thérèse at Motiers; he had subsequently also sent Thérèse a garnet necklace and had written to Rousseau seeking permission to occasionally communicate with her.) Hume foresaw what was going to happen: "I dread some event fatal to our friend's honor." Boswell and Thérèse were together for more than a week, and as per notes in Boswell's diary they consummated the relationship, having intercourse several times. On one occasion, Thérèse told Boswell: "Don't imagine you are a better lover than Rousseau." Since Rousseau was keen to relocate to a more remote location, Richard Davenport—a wealthy and elderly widower who spoke French—offered to accommodate Thérèse and Rousseau at Wootton Hall in Staffordshire. On 22 March 1766 Rousseau and Thérèse set forth for Wootton, against Hume's advice. Hume and Rousseau would never meet again. Initially Rousseau liked his new accommodation at Wootton Hall, and wrote favorably about the natural beauty of the place, and how he was feeling reborn, forgetting past sorrows. Quarrel with Hume. On 3 April 1766 a daily newspaper published the letter constituting Horace Walpole's hoax on Rousseau - without mentioning Walpole as the actual author; that the editor of the publication was Hume's personal friend compounded Rousseau's grief. Gradually articles critical of Rousseau started appearing in the British press; Rousseau felt that Hume, as his host, ought to have defended him. Moreover, in Rousseau's estimate, some of the public criticism contained details to which only Hume was privy. Further, Rousseau was aggrieved to find that Hume had been lodging in London with François Tronchin, son of Rousseau's enemy in Geneva. About this time, Voltaire anonymously published his "Letter to Dr. J.-J. Pansophe" in which he gave extracts from many of Rousseau's prior statements which were critical of life in England; the most damaging portions of Voltaire's writeup were reprinted in a London periodical. Rousseau now decided that there was a conspiracy afoot to defame him. A further cause for Rousseau's displeasure was his concern that Hume might be tampering with his mail. The misunderstanding had arisen because Rousseau tired of receiving voluminous correspondence whose postage he had to pay. Hume offered to open Rousseau's mail himself and to forward the important letters to Rousseau; this offer was accepted. However, there is some evidence of Hume intercepting even Rousseau's outgoing mail. After some correspondence with Rousseau, which included an eighteen-page letter from Rousseau describing the reasons for his resentment, Hume concluded that Rousseau was losing his mental balance. On learning that Rousseau had denounced him to his Parisian friends, Hume sent a copy of Rousseau's long letter to Madame de Boufflers. She replied stating that, in her estimate, Hume's alleged participation in the composition of Horace Walpole's "faux" letter was the reason for Rousseau's anger. When Hume learnt that Rousseau was writing the "Confessions", he assumed that the present dispute would feature in the book. Adam Smith, Turgot, Marischal Keith, Horace Walpole, and Mme de Boufflers advised Hume not to make his quarrel with Rousseau public; however, many members of d'Holbach's coterie—particularly, d'Alembert—urged him to reveal his version of the events. In October 1766 Hume's version of the quarrel was translated into French and published in France; in November it was published in England. Grimm included it in his "correspondance"; ultimately, After the dispute became public, due in part to comments from notable publishers like Andrew Millar, Walpole told Hume that quarrels such as this only end up becoming a source of amusement for Europe. Diderot took a charitable view of the mess: "I knew these two philosophers well. I could write a play about them that would make you weep, and it would excuse them both." Amidst the controversy surrounding his quarrel with Hume, Rousseau maintained a public silence; but he resolved now to return to France. To encourage him to do so swiftly, Thérèse advised him that the servants at Wootton Hall sought to poison him. On 22 May 1767 Rousseau and Thérèse embarked from Dover for Calais. In Grenoble. On 22 May 1767, Rousseau reentered France even though an arrest warrant against him was still in place. He had taken an assumed name, but was recognized, and a banquet in his honor was held by the city of Amiens. French nobles offered him a residence at this time. Initially, Rousseau decided to stay in an estate near Paris belonging to Mirabeau. Subsequently, on 21 June 1767, he moved to a chateau of the Prince of Conti in Trie. Around this time, Rousseau started developing feelings of paranoia, anxiety, and of a conspiracy against him. Most of this was just his imagination at work, but on 29 January 1768, the theatre at Geneva was destroyed through burning, and Voltaire mendaciously accused Rousseau of being the culprit. In June 1768, Rousseau left Trie, leaving Therese behind, and went first to Lyon, and subsequently to Bourgoin. He now invited Therese to this place and "married" her, under his alias "Renou" in a faux civil ceremony in Bourgoin on 30 August 1768. In January 1769, Rousseau and Thérèse went to live in a farmhouse near Grenoble. Here he practiced botany and completed the "Confessions". At this time he expressed regret for placing his children in an orphanage. On 10 April 1770, Rousseau and Therese left for Lyon where he befriended Horace Coignet, a fabric designer and amateur musician. At Rousseau's suggestion, Coignet composed musical interludes for Rousseau's prose poem "Pygmalion"; this was performed in Lyon together with Rousseau's romance "The Village Soothsayer" to public acclaim. On 8 June, Rousseau and Therese left Lyon for Paris; they reached Paris on 24 June. In Paris, Rousseau and Therese lodged in an unfashionable neighborhood of the city, the Rue Platrière—now called the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He now supported himself financially by copying music, and continued his study of botany. At this time also, he wrote his "Letters on the Elements of Botany". These consisted of a series of letters Rousseau wrote to Mme Delessert in Lyon to help her daughters learn the subject. These letters received widespread acclaim when they were eventually published posthumously. "It's a true pedagogical model, and it complements "Emile"," commented Goethe. For defending his reputation against hostile gossip, Rousseau had begun writing the "Confessions" in 1765. In November 1770, these were completed, and although he did not wish to publish them at this time, he began to offer group readings of certain portions of the book. Between December 1770, and May 1771, Rousseau made at least four group readings of his book with the final reading lasting seventeen hours. A witness to one of these sessions, Claude Joseph Dorat, wrote: After May 1771, there were no more group readings because Madame d'Épinay wrote to the chief of police, who was her friend, to put a stop to Rousseau's readings so as to safeguard her privacy. The police called on Rousseau, who agreed to stop the readings. The "Confessions" were finally published posthumously in 1782. In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the "Considerations on the Government of Poland", which was to be his last major political work. Also in 1772, Rousseau began writing his "", which was another attempt to reply to his critics. He completed writing it in 1776. The book is in the form of three dialogues between two characters; a "Frenchman" and "Rousseau" who argue about the merits and demerits of a third character—an author called "Jean-Jacques". It has been described as his most unreadable work; in the foreword to the book, Rousseau admits that it may be repetitious and disorderly, but he begs the reader's indulgence on the grounds that he needs to defend his reputation from slander before he dies. Final years. In 1766, Rousseau had impressed Hume with his physical prowess by spending ten hours at night on the deck in severe weather during the journey by ship from Calais to Dover while Hume was confined to his bunk. "When all the seamen were almost frozen to death...he caught no harm...He is one of the most robust men I have ever known," Hume noted. By 1770, Rousseau's urinary disease had also been greatly alleviated after he stopped listening to the advice of doctors. At that time, notes Damrosch, it was often better to let nature take its own course rather than subject oneself to medical procedures. His general health had also improved. However, on 24 October 1776, as he was walking on a narrow street in Paris a nobleman's carriage came rushing by from the opposite direction; flanking the carriage was a galloping Great Dane belonging to the nobleman. Rousseau was unable to dodge both the carriage and the dog, and was knocked down by the Great Dane. He seems to have suffered a concussion and neurological damage. His health began to decline; Rousseau's friend Corancez described the appearance of certain symptoms which indicate that Rousseau started suffering from epileptic seizures after the accident. In 1777, Rousseau received a royal visitor, when the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to meet him. His free entry to the Opera had been renewed by this time and he would go there occasionally. At this time also (1777–78), he composed one of his finest works, "Reveries of a Solitary Walker". In the spring of 1778, the Marquis Girardin invited Rousseau to live in a cottage in his château at Ermenonville. Rousseau and Thérèse went there on 20 May. Rousseau spent his time at the château in collecting botanical specimens, and teaching botany to Girardin's son. He ordered books from Paris on grasses, mosses and mushrooms, and made plans to complete his unfinished "Emile and Sophie" and "Daphnis and Chloe". On 1 July, a visitor commented that "men are wicked", to which Rousseau replied with "men are wicked, yes, but man is good"; in the evening there was a concert in the château in which Rousseau played on the piano his own composition of the Willow Song from "Othello". On this day also, he had a hearty meal with Girardin's family; the next morning, as he was about to go teach music to Girardin's daughter, he died of cerebral bleeding resulting in an apoplectic stroke. It is now believed that repeated falls, including the accident involving the Great Dane, may have contributed to Rousseau's stroke. Following his death, Grimm, Madame de Staël and others spread the false news that Rousseau had committed suicide; according to other gossip, Rousseau was insane when he died. All those who met him in his last days agree that he was in a serene frame of mind at this time. On 4 July 1778, Rousseau was buried on the , which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. On 11 October 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire. Philosophy. Rousseau based his political philosophy on contract theory and his reading of Hobbes. Theory of human nature. In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical "state of nature" as a normative guide. Rousseau criticized Thomas Hobbes for asserting that since man in the "state of nature... has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue". On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature" and he especially praised the admirable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which "always seems to inflame the passions". Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best or optimal in human development, between the less-than-optimal extreme of brute animals on the one hand and the extreme of decadent civilization on the other. "...[N]othing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man". Referring to the stage of human development which Rousseau associates with savages, Rousseau writes: The perspective of many of today's environmentalists can be traced back to Rousseau who believed that the more men deviated from the state of nature, the worse off they would be. Espousing the belief that all degenerates in men's hands, Rousseau taught that men would be free, wise, and good in the state of nature and that instinct and emotion, when not distorted by the unnatural limitations of civilization, are nature's voices and instructions to the good life. Rousseau's "noble savage" stands in direct opposition to the man of culture. Stages of human development. Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage. Rousseau held that this third savage stage of human societal development was an optimum, between the extreme of the state of brute animals and animal-like "ape-men" on the one hand and the extreme of decadent civilized life on the other. This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, which Arthur Lovejoy conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought. Rousseau's view was that morality was not embued by society, but rather "natural" in the sense of "innate". It could be seen as an outgrowth from man's instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise emotions of compassion or empathy. These are sentiments shared with animals, and whose existence even Hobbes acknowledged. Rousseau's ideas of human development were highly interconnected with forms of mediation, or the processes that individual humans use to interact with themselves and others while using an alternate perspective or thought process. According to Rousseau, these were developed through the innate perfectibility of humanity. These include a sense of self, morality, pity, and imagination. Rousseau's writings are purposely ambiguous concerning the formation of these processes to the point that mediation is always intrinsically part of humanity's development. An example of this is the notion that as an individual, one needs an alternative perspective to come to the realization that they are a 'self'. In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of "amour de soi", a positive self-love, into "amour-propre", or pride. "Amour de soi" represents the instinctive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, "amour-propre" is artificial and encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction. It had been invoked by Vauvenargues, among others. In the "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty; and he concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy, fear, and suspicion. In contrast to the optimistic view of other Enlightenment figures, for Rousseau, progress has been inimical to the well-being of humanity, that is, unless it can be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty. Only in civil society can man be ennobled—through the use of reason: Society corrupts men only insofar as the Social Contract has not "de facto" succeeded, as we see in contemporary society as described in the "Discourse on Inequality" (1754). In this essay, which elaborates on the ideas introduced in the "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences", Rousseau traces man's social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for self-preservation and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. They differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the greatest happiness known to humanity. As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: they began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self-esteem. Rousseau posits that the original, deeply flawed social contract (i.e., that of Hobbes), which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society. Rousseau's own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the "Discourse on Inequality", Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last chapter of the "Social Contract", Rousseau would ask 'What is to be done?' He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was needed. Like other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau was critical of the Atlantic slave trade. Political theory. "The Social Contract" outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article "Économie Politique" ("Discourse on Political Economy"), featured in Diderot's "Encyclopédie". The treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they." Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, the division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Rousseau opposed the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). He approved the kind of republican government of the city-state, for which Geneva provided a model—or would have done if renewed on Rousseau's principles. France could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free: The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy. ... It is, however, an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion. Some commentators see it as no more than the dictatorship of the proletariat or the tyranny of the urban poor (such as may perhaps be seen in the French Revolution). Such was not Rousseau's meaning. This is clear from the "Discourse on Political Economy", where Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place". A remarkable peculiarity of "Social Contract" is its logical rigor that Rousseau has learned in his twenties from mathematics: The logical framework of "Social Contract" is also analyzed in. Education and child rearing. Rousseau's philosophy of education concerns itself not with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil's character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live. The hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of "natural consequences". Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure that no harm results to Émile through his learning experiences. Rousseau became an early advocate of developmentally appropriate education; his description of the stages of child development mirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages: Rousseau recommends that the young adult learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and thought, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune (the most illustrious aristocratic youth to have been educated this way may have been Louis XVI, whose parents had him learn the skill of locksmithing). The sixteen-year-old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex. Although his ideas foreshadowed modern ones in many ways, in one way they do not: Rousseau was a believer in the moral superiority of the patriarchal family on the antique Roman model. Sophie, the young woman Émile is destined to marry, as his representative of ideal womanhood, is educated to be governed by her husband while Émile, as his representative of the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy; it is essential to his account of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the subordination of women, for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should. Rousseau anticipated the modern idea of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education. Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphere—unless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared "men would be tyrannized by women ... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses—men would finally be their victims ..." His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their children. Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "One must forgive something," she said, "in one who has taught us to be mothers." Rousseau's ideas have influenced progressive "child-centered" education. John Darling's 1994 book "Child-Centered Education and its Critics" portrays the history of modern educational theory as a series of footnotes to Rousseau, a development he regards as bad. The theories of educators such as Rousseau's near contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme. de Genlis and, later, Maria Montessori and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices, have significant points in common with those of Rousseau. Religion. Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life. Unlike many of the more agnostic Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism. Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded in "Émile", was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. Although he praised the Bible, he was disgusted by the Christianity of his day. Rousseau's assertion in "The Social Contract" that true followers of Christ would not make good citizens may have been another reason for his condemnation in Geneva. He also repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays a large part in Calvinism. In his "Letter to Beaumont", Rousseau wrote, "there is no original perversity in the human heart." In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its emotionality. He saw the presence of God in the creation as good, and separate from the harmful influence of society. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion. (Historians—notably William Everdell, Graeme Garrard, and Darrin McMahon—have additionally situated Rousseau within the Counter-Enlightenment.) Rousseau was upset that his deism was so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophers were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Mgr de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris", "in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force." Legacy. General will. Rousseau's idea of the "volonté générale" ("general will") was not original with him but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time. The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu (and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche). It served to designate the common interest embodied in legal tradition, as distinct from and transcending people's private and particular interests at any particular time. It displayed a rather democratic ideology, as it declared that the citizens of a given nation should carry out whatever actions they deem necessary in their own sovereign assembly. The concept was also an important aspect of the more radical 17th-century republican tradition of Spinoza, from whom Rousseau differed in important respects, but not in his insistence on the importance of equality: French Revolution. Robespierre and Saint-Just, during the Reign of Terror, regarded themselves to be principled egalitarian republicans, obliged to do away with superfluities and corruption; in this they were inspired most prominently by Rousseau. According to Robespierre, the deficiencies in individuals were rectified by upholding the 'common good' which he conceptualized as the collective will of the people; this idea was derived from Rousseau's "General Will". The revolutionaries were also inspired by Rousseau to introduce Deism as the new official civil religion of France: Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution was noted by Edmund Burke, who critiqued Rousseau in "Reflections on the Revolution in France," and this critique reverberated throughout Europe, leading Catherine the Great to ban his works. This connection between Rousseau and the French Revolution (especially the Terror) persisted through the next century. As François Furet notes that "we can see that for the whole of the nineteenth century Rousseau was at the heart of the interpretation of the Revolution for both its admirers and its critics." Effect on the American Revolution. According to some scholars, Rousseau exercised minimal influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States, despite similarities between their ideas. They shared beliefs regarding the self-evidence that "all men are created equal," and the conviction that citizens of a republic be educated at public expense. A parallel can be drawn between the United States Constitution's concept of the "general welfare" and Rousseau's concept of the "general will". Further commonalities exist between Jeffersonian democracy and Rousseau's praise of Switzerland and Corsica's economies of isolated and independent homesteads, and his endorsement of a well-regulated militia, such as those of the Swiss cantons. However, Will and Ariel Durant have opined that Rousseau had a definite political influence on America. According to them: One of Rousseau's most important American followers was textbook writer Noah Webster (1758–1843), who was influenced by Rousseau's ideas on pedagogy in "Emile" (1762). Webster structured his "Speller" in accord with Rousseau's ideas about the stages of a child's intellectual development. Rousseau's writings perhaps had an indirect influence on American literature through the writings of Wordsworth and Kant, whose works were important to the New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as on Unitarians such as theologian William Ellery Channing. "The Last of the Mohicans" and other American novels reflect republican and egalitarian ideals present alike in Thomas Paine and in English Romantic primitivism. Criticisms of Rousseau. The first to criticize Rousseau were his fellow "Philosophes", above all, Voltaire. According to Jacques Barzun, Voltaire was annoyed by the first discourse, and outraged by the second. Voltaire's reading of the second discourse was that Rousseau would like the reader to "walk on all fours" befitting a savage. Samuel Johnson told his biographer James Boswell, "I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been". Jean-Baptiste Blanchard was his leading Catholic opponent. Blanchard rejects Rousseau's negative education, in which one must wait until a child has grown to develop reason. The child would find more benefit from learning in his earliest years. He also disagreed with his ideas about female education, declaring that women are a dependent lot. So removing them from their motherly path is unnatural, as it would lead to the unhappiness of both men and women. Historian Jacques Barzun states that, contrary to myth, Rousseau was no primitivist; for him:The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. This was cause enough for the "philosophes"' hatred of their former friend. Rousseau's unforgivable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. Voltaire had sung "The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant's. It was the country versus the city—an exasperating idea for them, as was the amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau's was a huge success, whether the subject was politics, theater, education, religion, or a novel about love. As early as 1788, Madame de Staël published her "Letters on the works and character of J.-J. Rousseau". In 1819, in his famous speech "On Ancient and Modern Liberty", the political philosopher Benjamin Constant, a proponent of constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, criticized Rousseau, or rather his more radical followers (specifically the Abbé de Mably), for allegedly believing that "everything should give way to collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power." Frédéric Bastiat severely criticized Rousseau in several of his works, most notably in "The Law", in which, after analyzing Rousseau's own passages, he stated that: And what part do persons play in all this? They are merely the machine that is set in motion. In fact, are they not merely considered to be the raw material of which the machine is made? Thus the same relationship exists between the legislator and the prince as exists between the agricultural expert and the farmer; and the relationship between the prince and his subjects is the same as that between the farmer and his land. How high above mankind, then, has this writer on public affairs been placed? Bastiat believed that Rousseau wished to ignore forms of social order created by the people—viewing them as a thoughtless mass to be shaped by philosophers. Bastiat, who is considered by thinkers associated with the Austrian School of Economics to be one of the precursors of the "spontaneous order", presented his own vision of what he considered to be the "Natural Order" in a simple economic chain in which multiple parties might interact without necessarily even knowing each other, cooperating and fulfilling each other's needs in accordance with basic economic laws such as supply and demand. In such a chain, to produce clothing, multiple parties have to act independently—"e.g." farmers to fertilize and cultivate land to produce fodder for the sheep, people to shear them, transport the wool, turn it into cloth, and another to tailor and sell it. Those persons engage in economic exchange by nature, and don't need to be ordered to, nor do their efforts need to be centrally coordinated. Such chains are present in every branch of human activity, in which individuals produce or exchange goods and services, and together, naturally create a complex social order that does not require external inspiration, central coordination of efforts, or bureaucratic control to benefit society as a whole. Bastiat also believed that Rousseau contradicted himself when presenting his views concerning human nature; if nature is "sufficiently invincible to regain its empire", why then would it need philosophers to direct it back to a natural state? Another point of criticism Bastiat raised was that living purely in nature would doom mankind to suffer unnecessary hardships. The Marquis de Sade's "Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue" (1791) partially parodied and used as inspiration Rousseau's sociological and political concepts in the "Discourse on Inequality" and "The Social Contract". Concepts such as the state of nature, civilization being the catalyst for corruption and evil, and humans "signing" a contract to mutually give up freedoms for the protection of rights, particularly referenced. The Comte de Gernande in "Justine", for instance, after Thérèse asks him how he justifies abusing and torturing women, states: The necessity mutually to render one another happy cannot legitimately exist save between two persons equally furnished with the capacity to do one another hurt and, consequently, between two persons of commensurate strength: such an association can never come into being unless a contract ["un pacte"] is immediately formed between these two persons, which obligates each to employ against each other no kind of force but what will not be injurious to either. . . [W]hat sort of a fool would the stronger have to be to subscribe to such an agreement? Edmund Burke formed an unfavorable impression of Rousseau when the latter visited England with Hume and later drew a connection between Rousseau's egoistic philosophy and his personal vanity, saying Rousseau "entertained no principle... but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness". Charles Dudley Warner wrote about Rousseau in his essay, "Equality"; "Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this was not his only lack of originality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century." In 1919, Irving Babbitt, founder of a movement called the "New Humanism", wrote a critique of what he called "sentimental humanitarianism", for which he blamed Rousseau. Babbitt's depiction of Rousseau was countered in a celebrated and much reprinted essay by A.O. Lovejoy in 1923. In France, fascist theorist Charles Maurras, founder of "Action Française", "had no compunctions in laying the blame for both "Romantisme et Révolution" firmly on Rousseau in 1922." During the Cold War, Rousseau was criticized for his association with nationalism and its attendant abuses, for example in . This came to be known among scholars as the "totalitarian thesis". Political scientist J.S. Maloy states that "the twentieth century added Nazism and Stalinism to Jacobinism on the list of horrors for which Rousseau could be blamed. ... Rousseau was considered to have advocated just the sort of invasive tampering with human nature which the totalitarian regimes of mid-century had tried to instantiate." But he adds that "The totalitarian thesis in Rousseau studies has, by now, been discredited as an attribution of real historical influence." Arthur Melzer, however, while conceding that Rousseau would not have approved of modern nationalism, observes that his theories do contain the "seeds of nationalism", insofar as they set forth the "politics of identification", which are rooted in sympathetic emotion. Melzer also believes that in admitting that people's talents are unequal, Rousseau therefore tacitly condones the tyranny of the few over the many. Others counter, however, that Rousseau was concerned with the concept of equality under the law, not equality of talents. For Stephen T. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of "imagined communities" that transcend social and religious divisions within states. On similar grounds, one of Rousseau's strongest critics during the second half of the 20th century was political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Using Rousseau's thought as an example, Arendt identified the notion of sovereignty with that of the general will. According to her, it was this desire to establish a single, unified will based on the stifling of opinion in favor of public passion that contributed to the excesses of the French Revolution. Appreciation and influence. The book "Rousseau and Revolution", by Will and Ariel Durant, begins with the following words about Rousseau: The German writers Goethe, Schiller, and Herder have stated that Rousseau's writings inspired them. Herder regarded Rousseau to be his "guide", and Schiller compared Rousseau to Socrates. Goethe, in 1787, stated: ""Emile" and its sentiments had a universal influence on the cultivated mind." The elegance of Rousseau's writing is held to have inspired a significant transformation in French poetry and drama—freeing them from rigid literary norms. Other writers who were influenced by Rousseau's writings included Leopardi in Italy; Pushkin and Tolstoy in Russia; Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats in England; and Hawthorne and Thoreau in America. According to Tolstoy: "At fifteen I carried around my neck, instead of the usual cross, a medallion with Rousseau's portrait." Rousseau's "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences", emphasizing individualism and repudiating "civilization", was appreciated by, among others, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Edward Carpenter. Rousseau's contemporary Voltaire appreciated the section in Emile titled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar". Modern admirers of Rousseau include John Dewey and Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Matthew Josephson, Rousseau has remained controversial for more than two centuries, and has continued to gain admirers and critics down to the present time. However, in their own way, both critics and admirers have served to underscore the significance of the man, while those who have evaluated him with fairness have agreed that he was the finest thinker of his time on the question of civilization. Composer. Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C. P. E. Bach. One of his more well-known works is the one-act opera "The Village Soothsayer". It contains the duet "Non, Colette n'est point trompeuse," which was later rearranged as a standalone song by Beethoven, and the gavotte in scene no. 8 is the source of the tune of the folk song Go Tell Aunt Rhody. He also composed several noted motets, some of which were sung at the Concert Spirituel in Paris. Rousseau's Aunt Suzanne was passionate about music and heavily influenced Rousseau's interest in music. In his "Confessions", Rousseau claims he is "indebted" to her for his passion of music. Rousseau took formal instruction in music at the house of Françoise-Louise de Warens. She housed Rousseau on and off for about 13 years, giving him jobs and responsibilities. In 1742, Rousseau developed a system of musical notation that was compatible with typography and numbered. He presented his invention to the Academie Des Sciences, but they rejected it, praising his efforts and pushing him to try again. In 1743, Rousseau wrote his first opera, "", which was first performed in 1745. Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau argued over the superiority of Italian music over French. Rousseau argued that Italian music was superior based on the principle that melody must have priority over harmony. Rameau argued that French music was superior based on the principle that harmony must have priority over melody. Rousseau's plea for melody introduced the idea that in art, the free expression of a creative person is more important than the strict adherence to traditional rules and procedures. This is now known today as a characteristic of Romanticism. Rousseau argued for musical freedom, and changed people's attitudes towards music. His works were acknowledged by composers such as Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After composing "The Village Soothsayer" in 1752, Rousseau felt he could not go on working for the theater because he was a moralist who had decided to break from worldly values. Musical compositions

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Philip Kitcher Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 20 February 1947) is a British philosophy professor teaching at Columbia University who specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism. Life and career. Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the south coast of the United Kingdom. He went to school at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974, where he worked closely with Carl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn. Kitcher currently teaches at Columbia University in the Department of Philosophy where he holds an appointment as the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy. As chair of Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (part of its undergraduate Core Curriculum), he also holds the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization. Before moving to Columbia, Kitcher taught at the University of Vermont, Vassar College, The University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, and for several years at University of California, San Diego where he held the position of Presidential Professor of Philosophy. Kitcher is past president of the American Philosophical Association. In 2002, Kitcher was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded the inaugural Prometheus Prize from the American Philosophical Association in 2006 in honour of extended achievement in the philosophy of science. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. Kitcher was Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Philosophy of Science" from 1994-1999, was also a member of the NIH/DOE Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project from 1995 to 1997. He has trained a number of prominent philosophers of science, including Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney), Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine), and Michael R. Dietrich (University of Pittsburgh). He also taught C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary) and Michael Weisberg (University of Pennsylvania) as undergraduates. He is married to Patricia Kitcher. She is a well known Kant scholar and philosopher of mind who has been the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia. Philosophical work. Within philosophy, Kitcher is best known for his work in philosophy of biology, science, and mathematics, and outside academia for his work examining creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill, Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. His 2012 book documented his developing interest in John Dewey and a pragmatic approach to philosophical issues. He sees pragmatism as providing a unifying and reconstructive approach to traditional philosophy issues. He had, a year earlier, published a book outlining a naturalistic approach to ethics, "The Ethical Project" (Harvard University Press, 2011). He has also done work on the philosophy of climate change. Criteria for what constitutes 'good science'. Kitcher's three criteria for good science are: He increasingly recognised the role of values in practical decisions about scientific research Kuhn and creationism. Kitcher is the author of "Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism". He has commented on the way creationists have misinterpreted Kuhn: Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn's position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.

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Monique Wittig Monique Wittig (; July 13, 1935 – January 3, 2003) was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender roles and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". She published her first novel, "L'Opoponax", in 1964. Her second novel, "Les Guérillères" (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism. Biography. Monique Wittig was born in 1935 in Dannemarie, Haut-Rhin, France. In 1950 she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In 1964 she published her first novel, "L'Opoponax" which won her immediate attention in France. After the novel was translated into English, Wittig achieved international recognition. She was one of the founders of the "Mouvement de libération des femmes" (MLF) (Women's Liberation Movement). In 1969 she published what is arguably her most influential work, "Les Guérillères", which is today considered a revolutionary and controversial source for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. Its publication is also considered to be the founding event of French feminism. Wittig earned her Ph.D. from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, after completing a thesis titled "Le Chantier littéraire". Wittig was a central figure in lesbian and feminist movements in France. In 1971, she was a founding member of the "Gouines rouges" ("Red Dykes"), the first lesbian group in Paris. She was also involved in the "Féministes Révolutionnaires" ("Revolutionary feminists"), a radical feminist group. She published various other works, some of which include the 1973 "Le Corps lesbien" (or "The Lesbian Body") and the 1976 "Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes" (or "Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary"), which her partner, Sande Zeig, coauthored. In 1976 Wittig and Zeig moved to the United States where Wittig focused on producing work of gender theory. Her works, ranging from the philosophical essay "The Straight Mind" to parables such as "Les Tchiches et les Tchouches", explored the interconnectedness and intersection of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form. With various editorial positions both in France and in the United States, Wittig's works became internationally recognized and were commonly published in both French and English. She continued to work as a visiting professor in various universities across the nation, including the University of California, Berkeley, Vassar College and the University of Arizona in Tucson. She taught a course in materialist thought through Women's Studies programs, wherein her students were immersed in the process of correcting the American translation of "The Lesbian Body". She died of a heart attack on January 3, 2003. Writing style. Wittig had a materialist approach in her works (evident in "Les Guérillères"). She also demonstrated a very critical theoretical approach (evident in her essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman"). "The Straight Mind". While Wittig depicted only women in her literature, she abhorred the idea that she was a "women's writer". Monique Wittig called herself a "radical lesbian." Moreover, for Wittig, the category "woman" exists only through its relation to the category "man," and the "women" without relation to "men" would cease to exist. She advocated a strong universalist position, saying that the expression of one's identity and the liberation of desire require the abolition of gender categories. Wittig identified herself as a radical lesbian. In her work "The Straight Mind", she argued that lesbians are not women because to be a lesbian is to step outside of the heterosexual norm of women, as defined by men for men's ends. Wittig also developed a critical view of Marxism which obstructed feminist struggle, but also of feminism itself which does not question the heterosexual dogma. A theorist of materialist feminism, she stigmatised the myth of "the woman", called heterosexuality a political regime, and outlined the basis for a social contract which lesbians refuse. Theoretical views. Wittig's essays call into question some of the basic premises of contemporary feminist theory. Wittig was one of the first feminist theorists to interrogate heterosexuality as not just sexuality, but as a political regime. Defining herself as a radical lesbian, she and other lesbians during the early 1980s in France and Quebec reached a consensus that "radical lesbianism" posits heterosexuality as a political regime that must be overthrown. Wittig criticized contemporary feminism for not questioning this heterosexual political regime and believed that contemporary feminism proposed to rearrange rather than eliminate the system. While a critique of heterosexuality as a "political institution" had been laid by certain lesbian separatists in the United States, American lesbian separatism did not posit heterosexuality as a regime to be overthrown. Rather, the aim was to develop within an essentialist framework new lesbian values within lesbian communities. Wittig was a theorist of materialist feminism. She believed that it is the historical task of feminists to define oppression in materialist terms. It is necessary to make clear that women are a class, and to recognize the category of "woman" as well as the category of "man" as political and economic categories. Wittig acknowledges that these two social classes exist because of the social relationship between men and women. However, women as a class will disappear when man as a class disappears. Just as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men. The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. The category of "man" and "woman" exists only in a heterosexual system, and to destroy the heterosexual system will end the categories of men and women. Linguistics. Wittig states that "Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes." Only one gender exists: the feminine, the masculine not being a gender. The masculine is not the masculine but the general, as the masculine experience is normalized over the experience of the feminine. Feminine is the concrete as denoted through sex in language, whereas only the masculine as general is the abstract. Wittig lauds Djuna Barnes and Marcel Proust for universalizing the feminine by making no gendered difference in the way they describe characters. As taking the point of view of a lesbian, Wittig finds it necessary to suppress genders in the same way Djuna Barnes cancels out genders by making them obsolete. "Les Guérillères". "Les Guérillères", published in 1969, five years after Wittig's first novel, revolves around the "elles", women warriors who have created their own sovereign state by overthrowing the patriarchal world. The novel is structured through a series of prose poems. "Elles are not 'the women'--a mistranslation that often surfaces in David Le Vay's English rendition--but rather the universal 'they,' a linguistic assault on the masculine collective pronoun ils." The novel initially describes the world that the "elles" have created and ends with members recounting the days of war that led to the sovereign state. Bibliography. Short fiction. Most collected in Paris-la-Politique. Paris: P.O.L., 1999 Essays and criticisms. Most collected in La Pensée straight. Paris: Balland, 2001 and in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992

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Armen Avanessian Armen Avanessian (*1973 in Vienna) is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist. He has taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other institutions, and held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia University and Yale University. His work on Speculative realism and Accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. Life. Of Armenian descent, born 1973 in Vienna, Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science under Jacques Rancière in Paris. He completed his dissertation, 'Phenomenology of Ironic Spirit: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics in Modernity' , under the supervision of conservative theorist Karl Heinz Bohrer at the University of Bielefeld. For several years, he worked as a free-lance journalist, journal editor (Le Philosophoire, Paris), and in the publishing industry in London. From 2007 to 2014, he taught in the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. In 2011 he was a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and in 2012 in the German Department at Yale University. Since 2013, he has held visiting appointments at a number of art schools (in Nuremberg, Vienna, Basel, Copenhagen, California). In 2014, he became the chief editor at Merve Verlag, a Berlin publisher specializing in philosophy and political theory. In 2011, Armen Avanessian founded the bilingual research and publication platform Speculative Poetics that brings together philosophers, writers, and artists from across the world around the idea of a new theoretical discipline in the making. Career. Following his dissertation, which had already explored phenomena at the intersection of art, politics, and philosophy, Avanessian focused on developing a new approach in literary theory and philosophy of language. Collaborating with colleagues such as Anke Hennig, he began working in 2011 on connecting new speculative-ontological approaches with twentieth-century philosophies of language, which resulted most notably in two co-written books, 'Present Tense: A Poetics' (2012, English translation 2015) and 'Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain' (2014, English translation forthcoming 2016). Moreover, he played a central role in bringing accelerationism into German-language political philosophy. In 2015, Wired Magazine named him an intellectual innovator, noting in particular his concern with post-capitalist ideas. Avanessian's work has come to be situated primarily outside the academy. It includes widely discussed statements on current affairs such as the refugee crisis, numerous lectures in the international art and culture scene, as well as a large number of interviews and intellectual portraits. Beyond the classical academic mainstream, Avanessian has repeatedly managed to introduce new concepts and theoretical constellations into public discourse. These consist partly of neologisms, partly of concepts used in smaller circles, which Avanessian's work as editor re-produces for the German-language context. Examples include "speculative realism", "acceleration", "xenofeminism", "hyperstition", and, most recently, the concept of the "time complex: postcontemporary". Hyperstition, moreover, is not just another concept, it also designates a method, namely the actualization in the present, from out of the future, of ideas or fictions. Avanessian's books have been translated into several languages, including English, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, and French. Literary Studies. Avanessian's early publications are mostly scholarly books and essays on linguistics, semantics, and literary studies. His philosophical breakthrough came with the edited volumes on 'Speculative Realism' (Realism Now) and the German edition of the reader, '#Acceleration'. His move to Merve has emphasized his focus on editing current, not yet established philosophy, treating, in particular, questions in feminism, finance theory, and technology. He has also published books discussing the possibility of poeticizing philosophy. His book 'Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge, Poetics of Existence' (2015, English translation forthcoming) confronts the deplorable state of academia in an explicitly accelerationist way. Not limiting himself to mere criticism, Avanessian is constantly at work constructing alternative platforms such as the summer school he organized with Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, on "Emancipation as Navigation: From the Space of Reasons to the Space of Freedoms." Art. Avanessian can also be considered a postcontemporary artist. He uses not only classical publication formats but also art festivals and exhibitions. The 2015 gallery festival "Tomorrow Today / curated by_vienna" for example, was based on Avanessian's homonymous essay and combined the work of twenty curators with the idea of an actual post-capitalism. Within the framework of the ninth Berlin Biennale, Avanessian conducted a ten-day Young Curators Workshop on alternatives to the economic and political models of contemporary art. Avanessian is a regular contributor to art journals such as Spike, Texte zur Kunst, and DIS Magazine. He also writes frequently about art in philosophical contexts. For several years now, Avanessian has collaborated with the graphic artist, Andreas Töpfer, which has led to publications in print (with Merve and Sternberg Press) and on film. Radio. With columnist Georg Diez, media theorist Paul Feigelfeld, and author Julia Zange, Armen Avanessian hosts "60 Hertz", a talk show airing every Monday on Berlin Community Radio. The show is conceived as an artistic rendering, in interviews and conversations, of everyday life in the 2010s. Episodes are usually broadcast in a mix of English and German language. Film. With Berlin director Christopher Roth, he has produced the film "Hyperstition" (2016), which draws on ontology, science fiction, and sociology to question the concept of time. Screened at several festivals in Europe and the United States, the film consists of conversations with established as well as younger philosophers such as Nick Srnicek, Elie Ayache, Ray Brassier and others.