Adam S Curse

Taking its title from a poem of William Butler Yeats, this collection of essays focuses on "Adam’s Curse"—the burdens and harsh conditions that, as Denis Donoghue underscores throughout, make any human achievement difficult. As he says, those "conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather." But hope is never ruled out, as Donoghue reminds us of "the possibility of putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account." It is the "putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account"—a post-lapsarian struggle fraught with religious questions—that most interests Donoghue. These essays, which are explorations of both faith and literary works that engage faith, address a dazzling range of texts and writers: Yeats, Milton, Larkin, Heaney, Emmanuel Levinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Crowe Ransom, Henry Adams, William Lynch’s Christ and Apollo, and Robert Bellah’s Beyond Belief, among others. Common to all is an alertness to the social bearing of literature and the role it plays in relation to politics, religion, and especially ethics. What emerges, for Donoghue, is the need to restore the primacy of theology and church doctrine without evading the "dark parts" of the Old and New Testaments. Through his probing, reflective encounters with philosophical and religious issues, we witness a magisterial intelligence at work.

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck (Department of English), course: The Irish Literary Revival, - entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: William Butler Yeats’s poem Adam’s Curse is about the difficulty of creating something beautiful, society’s lacking understanding of the work of an author and poet and the sincere expression of love. Yeats being identical with the speaker sits together with two other persons on a day in late summer. This paper is the attempt to give a detailed interpretation on William Butler Yeats's "Adam's Curse".

Genetically speaking, the only difference between men and women is that where women have two X chromosomes, men have one X and one Y. It is surprising that one chromosome difference out of our total of forty-six can have such an important consequence, but it does. Is this relatively small genetic variance really sufficient to explain the huge differences between the sexes, not just the physical but the psychological, social, even cultural? Drawing on his own work at the forefront of modern genetics and the exciting theories of evolutionary biology, Bryan Sykes explores the mysteries of the science of sex and gender, and takes a scientific look at what makes men tick. He addresses the most basic issues of why there are only two sexes in humans and, even, why there is sex at all. He also raises more far-reaching questions, such as: Is there a genetic cause for men's greed, aggression and promiscuity? Is there such a thing as the male homosexual gene? And what do genes tell us about the future for men? Sykes's conclusions will surprise some people and are bound to cause controversy. The all-important male Y chromosome is getting smaller and, as the generations pass, the female genome is taking over as it cannibalizes parts of the Y chromosome. Women are winning the evolutionary battle of the sexes. The shocking conclusion is that men, slowly but surely, are headed for extinction.

"In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age" is a 1903 collection of poetry by W. B. Yeats. It represents the first book of Yeats' "middle period", within which he moved away from his earlier Romantic ideals and pre-Raphaelite imagery, turning instead towards an obviously more space and anti-romantic position much like Walter Savage Landor. The poem in this collection most often included in anthologies, however, is "Adam's Curse", which contains much of his old ideals. Also included in this volume is the play: "On Baile's Strand: A Play". William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the most prolific literary figures of the 20th-century. At the forefront of both the British and Irish literary movements, he co-founded the Abbey Theatre and was, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In his later life, Yeats also served as a Senator in Ireland. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts. Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience. Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions of major books by over thirty writers—ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel to Tony Kushner, Hannah Arendt to Judith Plaskow—he argues that literature offers a new way to think about what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. With a wide scope and diverse, original observations, Kirsch draws fascinating parallels between familiar writers and their less familiar counterparts. While everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank, for example, few outside of Israel have read the diary of Hannah Senesh. Kirsch sheds new light on the literature of the Holocaust through the work of Primo Levi, explores the emergence of America as a Jewish home through the stories of Bernard Malamud, and shows how Yehuda Amichai captured the paradoxes of Israeli identity. An insightful and engaging work from "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal), The Blessing and the Curse brings the Jewish experience vividly to life.

This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and written conditions of reading, and on such current forces as technology and computers that impinge on the very idea of reading. Finally he examines certain works of literature: Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a passage from Wordsworth's The Prelude, a chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" and "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian demonstrating what these texts have in common and how they must be differentiated through a sympathetic, imaginative, and informed reading.

“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” —James Longenbach, The Nation With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from “the emanation of a dead star still alive” to the “pinhole iris of your mortal eye.” What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.

W. B. Yeats is usually seen as a great innovator who put his stamp so decisively on modern Irish literature that most of his successors worked in his shadow. R. F. Foster's eloquent and authoritative book weaves together literature and history to present an alternative perspective. By returning to the rich seed-bed of nineteenth-century Irish writing, Words Alone charts some of the influences, including romantic 'national tales' in post-Union Ireland, the poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural novels of Sheridan LeFanu, William Carleton's 'peasant fictions', and fairy-lore and folktale collectors that created the unique and powerful Yeatsian voice of the decade from 1885 to 1895. As well as placing these literary movements in a vivid contemporary context of politics, polemic and social tension, Foster discusses recent critical and interpretive approaches to these phenomena. He shows that the use Yeats made of his predecessors during his apprenticeship, and the part that a self-conscious use of Irish literary tradition played in the construction of his path-breaking early work as he attempted to 'hammer his thoughts into a unity' made him an inheritor as much as an inventor.