Results for: “Juvenile Nonfiction”

BAREFOOTED boys scud up the street,

Or skurry under sheltering sheds;

And schoolgirl faces, pale and sweet,

Gleam from the shawls about their heads.

Doors bang; and mother-voices call

From alien homes; and rusty gates

Are slammed; and high above it all,

The thunder grim reverberates.

And then, abrupt,—the rain! the rain!—

The earth lies gasping; and the eyes

Behind the streaming window-pane

Smile at the trouble of the skies.

The highway smokes; sharp echoes ring;

The cattle bawl and cowbells clank;

And into town comes galloping

The farmer’s horse, with streaming flank.

The swallow dips beneath the eaves,

And flirts his plumes and folds his wings;

And under the catawba leaves

The caterpillar curls and clings.

The bumble-bee is pelted down

The wet stem of the hollyhock;

And sullenly, in spattered brown,

The cricket leaps the garden walk.

Within, the baby claps his hands

Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools

Darlene Harbour Unrue

In the summer of 1962, after Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools had been published the previous April to enthusiastic reviews and for many weeks had sat comfortably on the bestseller list of the New York Times Book Review, the influential American critic Wayne Booth posed the question others had indirectly raised: Is Ship of Fools really a novel? Investigating Booth’s question and some answers proffered by Booth and other critics—and even by Porter herself—helps us classify and sub-classify Ship of Fools and by extension reach a better understanding of it. In the process we discover that Porter’s only long novel encapsulates her artistic canon and much of her life, marked in the novel not only by obvious autobiographical elements but also by private reprisals and jokes.

By implicitly asking the question "How can we tell what a work means, let alone whether it’s good or bad, if we don’t know what it is to begin with?" Booth took for granted the formalist assumptions that all of literature can be first divided into kinds and then into sub-kinds and that every work can be evaluated according to the degree to which it incorporates genre requirements. Booth answered his own question of whether Ship of Fools is really a novel by invoking F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition and rather tepidly concluding that Ship of Fools is "not quite Leavis’s idea. . . of what the novel ought to be" (637). Because it also ran afoul of Booth’s own narrow definition of "novel" and his bias for a tightly woven plot, Ship of Fools was not quite Booth’s idea of a novel either.

easy peasy

Yo-Yo Garland

What Do I Need?

•Fabric scraps slightly larger than the pattern pieces (approximately 8˝ × 8˝ for the large yo-yo and 6˝ × 6˝ for the small yo-yo)

• Basic sewing supplies

TIP

I have included patterns for 2 different sizes of yo-yo circles just in case you want to vary the design of the garland a little. The large finished yo-yo is approximately 3¼˝ in diameter, and the small finished yo-yo is approximately 2¼˝ in diameter.

special skills

•Refer to The Rules of Sewing

• Making and using templates

• Sewing a running stitch

• Sewing a whipstitch

Prepare the Pieces

Trace the large and small yo-yo template patterns on paper and cut out. Use the patterns to cut a few circles out of fabric in varying sizes.

Let’s Make It

1.Thread an arm’s length of button thread into the needle and knot the end about 2˝ from the end.

Ship of Fools

Alexandra Subramanian

When Ship of Fools was published on April Fool’s Day, 1962, Porter knew that her honeymoon with the critics was over. "[L]et it [come]," she had told her publisher, Seymour Lawrence.^{1 Indeed, since its publication Ship of Fools has invited admiration but also biting criticism from friends, critics, and biographers alike. Some of the criticism, moreover, has been highly personal, highlighting Porter’s own faults, prejudices, and shortcomings, at times disregarding her complex humanity, which included a capacity for kindness that cannot be easily dismissed. Theodore Solotaroff, writing a review of Ship of Fools in Commentary in 1962, summed up the prevailing feeling against the novel. He virtually decimates it from almost every angle, claiming that the "soul of humanity is lacking."2}

This paper argues against those who have judged Ship of Fools as marred by cynicism, prejudice, and the author’s darkened view of humanity. The novel will be analyzed, rather, in light of Porter’s debilitating sensitivity, deep understanding of human behavior and motives, and acute awareness of the consequences of casual or calculated cruelty, misogyny, and violence. Porter was attuned to the suffering of the vulnerable, whether afflicted by poverty, parental cruelty and neglect, or disability. To Porter’s mind, acts of unkindness, insensitivity, and a failure to take responsibility, especially regarding the weak and vulnerable, created a tragic and unnecessary cycle of violence, alienation, and despair.

Paratexts and the Rhetorical Factor in Literature

Joachim Knape

As a rhetorician, I did not take Thomas Austenfeld’s invitation to compare Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools (1962) for granted. When working within a strictly defined theoretical framework of rhetoric, it is not obvious that rhetorical analysis is appropriate for the fields of art and literature. If it is, then such an analysis must deal with a series of specific theoretical problems and challenges. In what follows, I will raise a few fundamental questions:

And finally, a methodological problem:

My essay is an attempt to find initial answers to these questions. In this introduction I can only briefly touch on the problems listed above; I have written more extensively elsewhere.^{1 First, the general question about communication. Within the construct of modern aesthetics, it is not self-evident that literature is both an art and a communicative fact. Since the beginning of the so-called Art Period in the eighteenth century and the emergence of the l’art pour l’art ideology, an idea of the autonomy of artistic work has developed. This has culminated in the contemporary idea of performance: that the meaning and purpose of an artistic work only emerges in the moment of its performance. Artistic messages are thus a phenomenon of a situatively linked emergence.2 With reference to literature, this means that poets write only for themselves and then leave us their texts as mere stimuli for our own individual games. In this way, perhaps literature that has been fully detached from its author, like every other form of art, leads to an original experience of being.}