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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard
Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard
English Faculty Publications
Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.
Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee
Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee
English Faculty Publications
By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal …