The Silent Cry. A Novel by Kenzaburo Oe
The Global Cry…., June 24, 2000
Let me discuss “The Silent Cry” and Oe’s work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe’s literary interests.
No other Japanese writer has seen as deeply into Mishima’s suicide and the “vacuum” of modern Japanese life as has the […]
Bitter Winds. A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag. Harry Wu.
Bitter Winds, Indeed…., April 20, 2000
Returning in 1994 from China as a Fulbright Scholar, I could not shake China off. It has become part of my consciousness forever. After writing an essay on classical and modern Chinese literature, with Confucius, Tu Fu, Lu Xun, […]
Modernity and the Millennium : The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East Juan R. I. Cole. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Respecting the Conscience of Man…., June 27, 2000
In his conclusion, which would never have passed the system of censorship, “Bahai review,” that the UHJ imposes on all publications brought out under its […]
Fang Lizhi and Human Rights in China, April 13, 2000
Since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Fang Lizhi has often been regarded as the foremost advocate of human rights in China. As one might well imagine, his championing of democracy and human rights has a long history going back as far as thirty years […]
William Garlington. The Bahai Faith in America. Praeger. 2005. c.221p. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-275-98413-3. $39.95.
The American Bahai Mixture.
After becoming a Bahai in the 1960s, William Garlington moved to Australia, where he wrote his dissertation on Bahai mass teaching in Malwa, India, eventually returning to the United States. For over twenty-five years, he taught religious […]
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude. University of Chicago Press, 1986.
In an 1856 letter Baudelaire complains of “the great heresy of our times… the suppression of the concept of original sin” and insists “the whole of nature participates in original sin.” Baudelaire, however, does not defend the account in Genesis. For him […]
Saul Bellow. Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories. 1984.
More than any other novelist of our time, Saul Bellow has been aware of the event that Jacques Derrida has called “the rupture.” And more than any other novelist, Bellow has crafted rich and strange mimetic confrontations with the chaos of the external, […]
Gerald Graff. Literature Against Itself. Literary Ideas in Modern Society. 1979.
Postmodern literature and critical theory have shattered and discarded the ancient metaphor that literature is a mirror held up to the world. Among some thinkers the figure itself is considered passe. They loathe not only the metaphor but the very belief that reality exists. Such […]
I wearied long ago of submitting to magazines and waiting for months on editors who couldn’t understand where I was coming from and whose views I didn’t share…. Amazon was for a few years a new forum and technology that seemed promising but soon proved too commercial, lacking discriminating taste and reflection. My MCRI blog […]