The recording machine

Sample

Jean Kennedy

"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.

Sample

John Berger

"The principal action in A Painter of Our Time takes place across a stretch of some four years in the life of the fictional Hungarian painter Janos Lavin. The story is told in part by Lavin’s friend John, who resembles John Berger in several ways--not least in his being an art critic during this period--and who has discovered Lavin’s journal in the latter’s studio after his return to Budapest in October, 1956. The text alternates between passages from the journal and the interpolations of John, who fills in the gaps, narrating more fully the events surrounding the reflections recorded in the journal"--Summary taken from enotes website.

Sample

Brenda Daly

Joyce Carol Oates's authorial voice is lavishly diverse. In her works she divides herself into many voices, many persons. This up-to-date examination of Oates's novels argues that the father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers. Oates's struggle to resist and transform male-defined literary conventions is often mirrored by the struggles of her female characters to resist and transform social conventions.

Sample

Sharyn R. Udall

The Southwest has long beckoned the artist. But too often, art made by Euro-Americans drawn to this region has either "basked in the sunny celebration of the picturesque, the exotic, and the sentimental" or appropriated the myths and art of Native Americans. In this collection of essays, Sharyn R. Udall explores the work of some of the painters who have found stimulus in the ideas, people, and myths of the Southwest, among them Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Page Allen, and Woody Gwyn. They saw the Southwest in new ways, drawing inspiration from the very light and topography of the region. Udall's goal is to open and enlarge the discussion by rejecting the "neat, circumscribed way of seeing" common to traditional art history. Thus, she declares, one is able to encourage a fresh look at these painters and their work, and at the larger relationships of nature and culture in the Southwest.