...Jeffrey Mehlman The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s , by Sollors Werner . Harvard University Press , 2014 . 400 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2016 The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s , the title of Werner Sollors’s distinguished volume devoted...

...Tim Clarke This essay frames Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood as an attempt to overcome an impasse between the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair in an interwar period in many ways preoccupied with questions of mortality. Synthesizing Decadent aesthetics and elements of Spinoza’s...

...—love or despair, engagement or withdrawal, affirmation or negation—of their contending interpretive and moral claims, they force us to revise, to choose, to see ourselves for who we are. Which feels like fairly urgent business these days, as it always has been. Forty-four years after his death, we...

... with the relative straightfor- wardness and didacticism of the work that followed, particularly in those poems that she revised for her 1951 Collected Poems.3 Various persuasive explanations, including Moore’s despair at the rise of fascism and her own mother’s decade of ill health and 1947 death, have...

... the erosion of national identity and the loss of long-held assumptions about what characterized their community. The Waves appeared at a time when British politics and culture were shaped by experiences of loss and despair, but Woolf’s diary indicates that this was also a period of personal...

... out that “it is in Kafka where one feels with the greatest intensity the Jewish despair at the loss of God. Clarice Lispector’s renunciation of God, in this context, was no more than a reflection of a loss that the Jewish world as a whole had experienced. And it was all the more cruelly ironic...

... Moravagine from memory (he claims, though he has a copy in front of him): 104 Blaise Cendrars and Henry Miller “I tell you of things that brought some relief at the start. There was also the water, gurgling at intervals, in the water- closet pipes__ A boundless despair possessed...

... of politics. Scheingold’s late-modern novels of political estrangement exemplify Howe’s dynamic between the literary and the political imaginaries, but they also, crucially, demonstrate late-modernism’s existential despair and alienation from politics. Indeed, Scheingold surmises that Howe “is sim...

...-Emancipation Jamaican setting of Wide Sargasso Sea as one of despair subverts a conventional, progressive conception of history: that the end of slavery marked a triumph of good- will over vicious greed and a spiritual and ethical advance for mankind. In the novel, the locus of despondency is Antoinette...

... authenticity ostensibly derives from self-disgust. As Sartre (2007 : 40) puts it, for consciousness to confront itself, the thinking self often first falls into despair. Existentialism may be a humanism, but it’s also a philosophically justified form of self-loathing. If Head falls into despair after...

... in recognizing a sense of weariness and despair in Nostromo, but his explanation for it is, and so is his discussion of Conrad’s philosophy in relation to that of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and even Slavoj Zizek. In the study’s final chapter, Adams turns to Virginia Woolf, analyz­...

..., no despair, just hats and caps and shoes. (Elizabeth 4) Her lecture, on the other hand, wonders about the final destination of this novelistic confidence about implicit meanings in the fabular prose of Kafka, and specifically his “Report to an Academy,” in which Red Peter the ape delivers...

... of a myth of origins. But I tell it as a way of suggesting the extent to which this book is one replete with personal emotions—with a desire to finally understand the country I have often despaired for and even hated, as well a yearning for a new country, full of fresh po­...

... welled up,” but it is reduced to a simple needShe owes me something to eat,’ he said,‘She owes it to me’” (363). Having lost the real Carrie, Hurstwood is reduced to negotiating with her sign. While his confusion signals the depth of his disorientation and despair, it also points to how...

..., with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned. — Sullivan’s Travels Everything belongs to me because I am poor. —Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody In June 1950, at William S. Burroughs’s...

... the text’s multiplicities into single strands and instead elucidates how “despair and hope, anxiety and comedy, horror and irony” are as complementary as Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, the hero and sad sack spotlighted in the novel’s opening set piece (122).This section is a passionately written...

... declares the style of the nineteenth-century masters of fiction superior to “any other ism” (4), especially modernism, whose contemporary culture heroes Camus, Sartre, Genet, and Beckett she excoriates for engaging in what she calls, echoing Lukács, “the pleasurable luxury of despair” (11). While...

... to paralysis and despair, Woolf ’s characters cultivate and commemorate lyrical moments of stability, palliative flashes of affect that stand apart from what Thomas Hardy called narrative’s “tragic machinery” ([1895] 1999: 7). As the centerpieces of her fiction, such “moments of being” or “scenes” (Woolf [1972...

... in textual indeterminacy gives way to a marked openness to it. Indeed, in light of the other prose material on writing and reading that Bishop produced or noted during this time, I read the story against a deep-grooved critical grain. I don’t think we can read it as a “despair- ing fable” about...

.... That decline is punctu- ated by a few last poems that, while diamond-like as those before, are cold hard gems encapsulating struggle with despair. In Mariani’s narrative, as in Hopkins’s final journals and letters, we find a perhaps not unfamiliar story: a scholar and artist bleeding out his days...