On Beauty
''On Beauty'' is a 2005 novel by British author Zadie Smith, loosely based on ''Howards End'' by E. M. Forster. The story follows the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States, addresses ethnic and cultural differences in both the USA and the UK, as well as the nature of beauty, and the clash between liberal and conservative academic values. It takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry—"On Beauty and Being Just". ''The Observer'' described the novel as a "transatlantic comic saga". The novel was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize on 8 September 2005. Smith won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction and Orange Prize for Fiction in June 2006. Plot summary ''On Beauty'' centres around two families and their different yet increasingly intertwined lives. The Belsey family consists of university professor Howard, a white Englishman and a scholar of Rembrandt; his African-American wife Kiki; and their children, Jerome, Zora and Levi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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WikiProject Novels
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Conservatism
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as organized religion, parliamentary government, and property rights. Conservatives tend to favor institutions and practices that guarantee stability and evolved gradually. Adherents of conservatism often oppose modernism and seek a return to traditional values, though different groups of conservatives may choose different traditional values to preserve. The first established use of the term in a political context originated in 1818 with François-René de Chateaubriand during the period of Bourbon Restoration that sought to roll back the policies of the French Revolution. Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term ha ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hysterical Realism
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood (critic), James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism. History Wood introduced the term in an essay on Zadie Smith's ''White Teeth'', which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of ''The New Republic''. Wood uses the term pejoratively to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being." He decried the genre as an attempt to "turn fiction into social theory," and an attempt to tell readers "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." Wood points to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as the forefathers of the g ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lolita
''Lolita'' is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores, is what he calls her privately. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia Press. The novel has been twice adapted into film: first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. It has been included in many lists of best books, such as '' Time'' List of the 100 Best Novels, '' Le Monde'' 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Leland De La Durantaye
Leland de la Durantaye (born 1972) is a writer, critic, translator and professor of comparative literature. He has taught at the École normale supérieure and Harvard University and is currently Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a DAAD fellow, a Mellon fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a fellow of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. De la Durantaye is the author of three books and over eighty articles on topics in philosophy, French literature, German literature, Italian literature, anglophone literature and the visual arts. His translation of Jacques Jouet’s ''Upstaged'' was a finalist for the PEN Best Translated Book of 2012. His nonfiction books are ''Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov'' (2007), ''Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction'' (2009), and ''Beckett’s Art of Mismaking'' (2016). His articles have appeared in ''The New York Time ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Free Indirect Speech
Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, ''discours indirect libre''. Free indirect speech has been described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author" (or, reversing the emphasis, "that the character speaks through the voice of the narrator") with the voices effectively merged. It has also been described as "the illusion by which third-person narrative comes to express...the intimate subjectivity of fictional characters." The word "free" in the phrase is used to capture the fact that with this technique, the author can "roam from viewpoint to viewpoint" instead of being fixed with one character or with the narrator. According to British philologist Roy Pascal, Goethe and Jane Austen were the first novelists to use thi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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List Of Alfred Hitchcock Cameo Appearances
English film director Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in 40 of his 54 surviving major films (his second film, ''The Mountain Eagle'', is lost). For the films in which he appeared, he would be seen for a brief moment in a non-speaking part as an extra, such as boarding a bus, crossing in front of a building, standing in an apartment across the courtyard, or even appearing in a newspaper photograph (as seen in the film ''Lifeboat'', which otherwise provided no other opportunity for him to appear). During the filming of '' The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog'', Hitchcock later said his cameo came about at the last minute because the actor who was supposed to play the bit part of a telephone operator failed to show up, so Hitchcock filled in for him. This playful gesture became one of Hitchcock's trademark signatures; and fans would make a sport of trying to spot his cameos. As a recurring theme, he would carry a musical instrument– especially memorable was the double bass ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Radcliffe Institute
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is a part of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, and professions. It is the successor institution to the former Radcliffe College, originally a women's college connected with Harvard. The institute comprises three programs: * The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly selective fellowship that supports the work of 50 artists and scholars each year. * The Academic Ventures program is for collaborative research projects and hosts lectures and conferences. * The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America documents the lives of American women of the past and present for the future. The Radcliffe Institute often hosts public events, many of which can be watched online. It is a member of the Some Institutes for Advanced Study consortium. Prof. To ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. It is one of two de jure county seats of Middlesex County, although the county's executive government was abolished in 1997. Situated directly north of Boston, across the Charles River, it was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, once also an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult International Business School are in Cambridge, as was Radcliffe College before it merged with Harvard. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet" owing to the high concentration of successful startups that have emerged in the vicinity ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious and highly ranked universities in the world. The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and other faculties offer only graduate degrees, including professional degrees. Harvard has three main campuses: the Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area. Harvard's endowment is valued at $50.9 billion, making it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Endowment inco ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Haiti–United States Relations
Haiti–United States relations are bilateral relations between Haiti and the United States. Succeeding U.S. presidents refused to recognize Haiti until Abraham Lincoln. The U.S. tried to establish a military base in Haiti and invaded. It withdrew in 1934 but continued to intervene in Haiti during subsequent decades. According to the 2011 U.S. Global Leadership Report, 79% of Haitians approved of U.S. leadership, with 18% disapproving and 3% uncertain, the highest rating for any surveyed country in the Americas. Because of Haiti's location, Haiti has the potential to affect the stability of the Caribbean and Latin America and is therefore strategically important to the United States. Historically, the United States viewed Haiti as a counterbalance to Communist leaders in Cuba. Haiti's potential as a trading partner and an actor in the drug trade makes the nation strategically important to the United States. Moreover, both nations are tied by a large Haitian diaspora residin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Slavery in the United States, enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the majority of first generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the U.S. after White Americans, as well as the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West Africa, West/Central Africa, Central African with some European descent; some also have Native Americans in th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |