The ultimate symbol for our times
By Sally Grant28th June 2021
For centuries, the window has been used by artists to help make sense of the world – and it s a potent symbol that resonates ever more strongly today, writes Sally Grant.
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In View from the Artist s Window (1978), the US painter Alice Neel captured an image familiar to New Yorkers (and other city-dwellers): that of the apartment building across from their own. For Neel, who is the subject of a retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, such scenes of New York City life drove her art. As she said of the space that was both her home and her studio, I really live out my front room windows, which face up Broadway from 107th Street. It s like having a street in your living room . With this comment, and this painting, Neel highlighted a motif that has long captivated artists – the view through a window to the outside world.
Consider the wide variety of LGBTQ fiction books published this year that showcase our diverse lives, and our diverse forms of storytelling, from mysteries to Young Adult, fantasy and classics rereleased.
Sex With Strangers: Stories (University of Wisconsin Press), the first short story collection by gay novelist and educator
Michael Lowenthal (
The Paternity Test and others) is populated with characters, gay ( Over Boy, Thieves, The Gift of Travel ) and straight ( You Are Here, Uncle Kent, Stud ), with sexual goals in common.
Canadian Y/A fantasy author
Ashley Shuttleworth makes their debut with
A Dark and Hollow Star (Margaret K. Elderry Books), an urban fantasy tale featuring four queer teens tasked with preventing a serial killer from revealing the concealed faery realm to humans.
Theory of the Novel
Instructors: Armstrong and Garréta
Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a concept-driven argument in relation to other disciplinary discourses, especially critical theory.
The course begins by considering a long and robust tradition of critical theory focused on the novel. Why does the attempt to think about the modern world in dialectical terms encounter some kind of historical limit where that thinking stalls or breaks down? On what basis do novels nevertheless continue to be written, taught in classrooms, and circulated for the pleasure and edification of literat
How music shaped Virginia Woolf’s writing
Music provided the author with a vocabulary to imagine and describe her creative practice and formal innovations. 4 hours ago Virginia Woolf listened to a wide variety of music, including Russian ballet music which she heard when the Ballets Russes visited London in 1912. | George Charles Beresford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Many of Virginia Woolf’s early reviewers noted parallels between her literary innovations and those of contemporary composers, such as Claude Debussy. Woolf’s interest in music was overlooked after her death. However, 80 years on, we are now beginning to explore how her extraordinary experimental uses of narrative perspective, repetition and variation derive from her close study of particular musical works and specific musical forms.