Word: essay
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South African Novelist Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, died of cancer last week. The book was an early expression of the developing racial anguish in South Africa and has become an international classic. Earlier this year, had asked him to write an essay about South Africa today. Two days after | his death, Paton's widow Anne forwarded the incomplete typescript with a note: "I am very sorry he never finished it, but it was almost done, and during the last few days before he went into the hospital he was just too tired. In any case...
...Memos for the Next Millenium is a slim and dense book. Calvino discusses every form of narrative, from the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the micro-essays of Jorge Luis Borges (quickness) to the encyclopedic and incomplete novels of Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda (multiplicity). He addresses a variety of literary problems. In his essay on visibility, for example, he contrasts visual and verbal imaginations, examining the prefabricated images of the mass media and their control over how we create pictures from words and words from pictures...
...essay on exactitude, he arrives at a sensible and workaday solution to Jacques Derrida's worries about language as a representation of absence rather than presence: "the proper use of language... is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words...
...essay on multiplicity meditates on technology and literature, considering several encyclopedic writers (he includes Proust as an early borderline example) who have tried to create a coherent vision of a world in which scientific knowledge is too large for any single human understanding...
...since established herself as a major artist on the strength of her burnished tone and fiery passagework. Chung is a performer of great interpretative range and insight who can light up the night with a blazing Tchaikovsky concerto, probe the intimate, sorrowing mysteries of Alban Berg's twelve-tone essay in the form, or tackle Sir Edward Elgar's king-and-country Violin Concerto with equal aplomb. She also plays in a chamber trio with her sister Myung-Wha, a cellist, and her brother Myung-Whun, a pianist now making a career as a conductor...