Word: working
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conventional distinction between illusion and reality as well as authorial omniscience--the whole business of tyrannically driving "his" creations along to some preordained point. This prefigures what may be postmodernism's most interesting idea: it is the reader, not the writer, who is the final arbiter of a work's meaning. Which, naturally, renders meaning itself indeterminate...
...Ulysses is published. So is T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Some claim it is a hoax, a parody of modernism's obscurantist tendencies. Others see its analogies to Joyce's work. Both are inferentially portraits of a pullulating urban landscape; both wear their classical erudition boldly. Which is to say, both writers embrace modernism's most basic hallmark--self- and cultural awareness--and know exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down...
...Giotto painted his Bible stories and tales of saints across the cathedral walls of Italy. Yet we see his brilliance today in a bare handful of surviving documented works. The famous 28 scenes of St. Francis' life adorning the Upper Church in Assisi--to most of us the embodiment of his work--are of hotly disputed authorship. Yet many experts still believe no other known hand could have created the economical drama, narrative power and intense depiction of human emotion that mark the best of them...
Alas, indignant--or prurient--revisionism does not work with a fine pencil. Thomas Jefferson amounted to something infinitely more important--and more interesting--than one would know from the noise and scandal obscuring his achievement...
Shortly before his completed Bible was released, Gutenberg was forced to turn over his shop and at least some of his equipment to his creditor Fust, who carried on the work, alone at first and later with the assistance of his son-in-law Peter Schoffer. The monopoly they may have had on Gutenberg's methods did not last long. Presses adapted to print from movable type rapidly spread across Europe. By 1500 an estimated 30,000 titles had been published...