Education
Street John"s College.
(Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth c...)
Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Wood offers a wealth of insight into the nature of film, considering its role and impact on society as well as its future in the digital age. As Wood notes, film is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often quite false, frankly and beautifully fantastic, and they are sometimes insistently said to be true. Indeed, many condemn movies as an instrument of illusion, an emphatic way of seeing what is not there. And others celebrate the reverse: that film brings us closest to the world as it actually is. "Photography is truth," a character says in a film by Jean-Luc Godard. "And cinema is the truth twenty-four times per second." But they are stories in either case, and there are very few films, Wood observes, even in avant-garde art, that don't imply or quietly slip into narrative.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192803530/?tag=2022091-20
(The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our t...)
The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. W.B. Yeats, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W.B. Yeats 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199557667/?tag=2022091-20
(What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of ...)
What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book answers and prolongs these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction. Examples range from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521606535/?tag=2022091-20
( Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times ...)
Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times of need. This fascinating exploration of the enduring popularity of oracles examines how they are interpreted and why. Taking examples from literature and history, from the oracles at Delphi to those in Macbeth, and further still to the works of Kafka and Bob Dylan, and even in the film The Matrix, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide a lively account of humanity's persistent faith in signs, which continues to exert an important influence on the course of civilization.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312423071/?tag=2022091-20
Street John"s College.
He is one of the foremost literary and cultural critics in the English-speaking world, and is an author of critical and scholarly books as well as a highly respected writer of reviews, review articles, and columns. He writes in literary publications such as The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where he is also an editorial board member and where his column, "At the Movies", is highly regarded. Wood also teaches at Middlebury College"s Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont during the summers.
Prior to teaching at Princeton, he taught at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, and then took the chair of English at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.
He was a modern languages undergraduate at Saint John"s College, at the University of Cambridge. A specialist in French and German, he studied under J. P. Stern and went on as a graduate student at Cambridge as well as a prize fellowship
In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the transport-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez and West. B. Yeats.
(What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of ...)
(The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our t...)
(Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth c...)
( Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times ...)
(Book by Wood, Michael)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.