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Category "Critique"

Pebbles in the Shoe: Pico Iyer’s Encounters with “Mystery”

November 2, 2008 by · No comments

Barry George Photo: The Wandering Angel About midway through his essays in Sun after Dark (2004), Pico Iyer refers to the Tibetan travels of the early-twentieth-century adventurer Alexandra David-Neel. According to Iyer, the French woman described herself as “a Westerner, a disciple of Descartes,” an expression which Iyer paraphrases by saying she was “committed, in […]

Alliteration, Allusion, and Repetition in J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar”

October 19, 2008 by · 1 comment

Brian Russell Photo: indi.ca J.R. Moehringer’s lyrical and deeply moving memoir, “The Tender Bar,” employs great use of wordplay – including literary allusions, alliteration, repetition, and reversals. The title itself is the first example of Moehringer’s love of words and wordplay in that it is a play on the word “bartender,” flipping the two words […]

Shifting and Layering of Tone in Maureen Morehead’s “My Mother Is a Hand”

October 8, 2008 by · 2 comments

Barbara Sabol Photo: Rene Ehrhardt In Maureen Morehead’s “My Mother Is a Hand,” from her collection, A Sense of Time Left, the memory of a childhood visit to the speaker’s grandmother’s house is described, in two voices and from two subtly but significantly different perspectives. The memory of the speaker as a child and, later […]

Three “Sketches from Life” in Ueda’s Modern Japanese Tanka

October 5, 2008 by · 1 comment

Barry George Photo: OiMax Japanese tanka is often regarded as poetry of strong emotion and self-revelation. From the earliest poems of courtly love to the impassioned verse the early 20th Century reformer Tekkan Yosano heralded as jiga no shi (the poetry of self), tanka poets have exhibited a wide range of feelings: joy, sadness, longing, […]

Welcome to Public Republic!

September 14, 2008 by · 1 comment

Dear friends, We are now “officially” starting our Public Republic project in English! Encouraged by the exciting success of the journal in Bulgaria (www.public-republic.com) and by the enthusiasm of our US-editor Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, we prepared the site in a similarly broad manner as the Bulgarian edition. We believe, we will soon have many contributions, a […]