Remembered Words

Remembered Words is a selection of Alastair Fowler's essays on genre, realism, and the emblem (three interrelated subjects), published over six decades. It offers readers a way to arrive at a sense of how approaches to these subjects have changed over that period. Specifically, it shows how genre has come to be understood in terms of family resemblance theory. Remembered Words argues that realism can be seen as altering historically, so that Renaissance realism, for example, differs from those of later periods. Similar changes are traced in the emblem, which Fowler shows to be not only a particular genre, but an element of various kinds of realism. Famous passages in ancient literature are remembered in the familiar emblems of the Renaissance; and Renaissance emblems form the basis of metaphors in later literature. Meanwhile, the general approach of the critic and the reader has been altering over the years--as becomes evident when one takes into account the time-scale of sixty years (an unusually long working life for a critic). Modern theoretical approaches--which are often casually regarded as self-evident--may appear less inevitable and more arbitrary. This is not to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that they need to be argued for. Remembered Words is intended for senior undergraduates and for graduate students, who may use it to form ideas of Fowler's approach and that of his contemporaries and predecessors over the last half century.

Remembered Words is the title of a series of watercolor paintings that Roni Horn (born 1955) created in 2013 and 2014. An important part of Horn's work revolves around language. In this new series she pairs "remembered words" with dots, adding the words to the dots like footnotes or captions, creating a kind of personal, even autobiographical dictionary. The combination of the dots--which are sometimes properly arranged in color-coordinated rows, or in other drawings distributed in a random and overlapping manner, wild and out of control--with the words creates unexpected relations and meanings, long strings of associations, absurd and beautiful simultaneously.

With a delightfully edited collection of children's quotes paired with exquisite, fanciful collage artwork, this lovely keepsake journal serves as a lasting keepsake of children's observations that are brilliant, hilarious, and wonderful.

A dying girl gives a boy the strength to live in this lyrical novel that will break your heart and lift your spirit Peter Stone’s parents and siblings are extroverts, musicians, and yellers—and the louder they get, the less Peter talks, or even moves, until he practically fits his last name. When his family moves to the Texas Hill Country, though, Peter finds a tranquil, natural valley where he can, at last, hear himself think. There, he meets a girl his age: Annie Blythe. Annie tells Peter she’s a “wish girl.” But Annie isn’t just any wish girl; she’s a “Make-A-Wish Girl.” And in two weeks she will begin a dangerous treatment to try and stop her cancer from spreading. Left alone, the disease will kill her. But the treatment may cause serious, lasting damage to her brain. Annie and Peter hatch a plan to escape into the valley, which they begin to think is magical. But the pair soon discovers that the valley—and life—may have other plans for them. And sometimes wishes come true in ways they would never expect.