by Mariel Osetinsky Max Weber was a German sociologist, economist, and politician of the 19th and early 20th century. Although his passions were varied, Weber achieved a phenomenal level of influence in every area of work in which he became involved. He served in a number of positions, including hospital orderly in World War I… Continue Reading Science as a Vocation
Tag: 1917
Edward Thomas
Biography by Emily Cersonsky Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is best known as a poet, despite the fact that he wrote all of his poems during the years 1914-17, and spent most of his life trying to eke a living from his work as a literary critic and writer of the English countryside. Born in London to… Continue Reading Edward Thomas
Fountain
by Pericles Lewis The most famous dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, living in New York, submitted to an exhibition a piece entitled “Fountain” (1917). One of his “ready-mades,” or mass-produced objects that he purchased and presented as art, “Fountain” was a urinal, turned upside down and signed “R. Mutt.” Duchamp was claiming, in effect, that he… Continue Reading Fountain
The Breasts of Tiresias
by Pericles Lewis Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealist” for his play, The Breasts of Tiresias (1917). In the play, set in Africa, a Frenchwoman, Thérèse, decides to become a man, and her breasts float away like two balloons; she is renamed Tiresias and becomes a general and a member of parliament. Between the first… Continue Reading The Breasts of Tiresias
Poems of War and Patriotism
by Pericles Lewis Among Thomas Hardy‘s “Poems of War and Patriotism,” collected in Moments of Vision (1917), some date to as early as the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. On September 2, 1914, Cabinet Minister C. F. G. Masterman invited Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, H.… Continue Reading Poems of War and Patriotism
La Figlia Che Piange
by Sam Alexander “La Figlia Che Piange” (“young girl weeping”) is the final poem in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). This short (24-line) poem describes a lovers’ parting, but its speaker plays a curious dual role. He not only describes his lover and the feelings aroused by remembering her, but also directs her–… Continue Reading La Figlia Che Piange
The Shadow-Line
by Anthony Domestico In a 1924 TLS tribute upon the death of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf wrote, “He must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good… Continue Reading The Shadow-Line