[PDF] The Muse Of The Maze eBook

Author : Peter Turchi
Publisher : Trinity University Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 41,71 MB
Release : 2014-11-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1595341943

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With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians. In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process. With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer’s relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty. While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D’Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title’s double entendre, A Muse and a Maze. With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell’s famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today’s latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.

Author : Darren G. Davis
Publisher : Storm
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 28,57 MB
Release : 2016-01-23
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 0966473744

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10th Muse Volume One

Author : Penelope Reed Doob
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 20,51 MB
Release : 2019-03-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 150173847X

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Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

Author : Veronica Cummer
Publisher : Pendraig Publishing
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 46,3 MB
Release : 2009-02
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 0982031831

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Who is the Muse? Why do we need Her? How do we tap into that shining current of inspiration and create something never before seen, something beautiful and terrible, fantastical and infinitely real. The Muse is as vital to our lives today as She was in ancient times. She changes as we change and Her Arts are continually in flux, Arts that we simply cannot live without...or that we wouldn't want to. Among other things, they are tools to make and re-make our world even as we work with Fate to weave the web of life and death, of creation and destruction. Through four faces, four masks of the Muse, this book explores different aspects of inspiration, creativity, and magick. Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Ariadne, and the Lady of the Lake await--each to teach us of the Arts and what we are capable of at our very best. By the poetry, prayer, invocation, and ritual contained within we can come to know the Muse and so know ourselves and the gifts we all have within us that demand recognition and expression. The path of the Muse may not always be an easy or a safe one, but anything worth having is worth paying the price for. Who is the Muse? Who are we? This book is a journey, one that we must dare to take and dare to take hold of what is revealed.. As we must return to the well of memory, the depths of the ocean, and the currents below the earth, there to claim what was ours all along.

Author : David Thewlis
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 41,12 MB
Release : 2007-11-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1416554262

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Hector Kipling is a famous artist. But Hector is not as famous as his best friend, Lenny Snook. And as they are standing in the Tate Gallery one afternoon, Hector's life begins to unravel. For a painter, this existential crisis is the place from which great art is born. If the painter happens to be a forty-three-year-old man with a girlfriend away from home, it is the recipe for disaster. Soon it's all Hector can do to keep it together -- between his therapist who shows up drunk at a party and introduces herself to his parents, an irresistible young female poet with a terrifying taste for S&M, and a deranged stalker with an oil-and-canvas-inspired vendetta, just trying to cope is enough to make a man cry. As the events in his life threaten to drive him toward full-blown dementia, Hector finds himself in a bizarre and murderous pursuit of a man threatening to kill him in return, spiraling into a hysterically surreal Hitchcocklike thriller -- the story of how a man can become desperate enough to shoot his way out of a midlife crisis. At turns warm, witty, and joyfully absurd, David Thewlis's wicked comedy marks the debut of a savagely funny and observant literary talent.

Author : Nick Montfort
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 41,50 MB
Release : 2012-11-23
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0262304570

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A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.

Author : Thomas J. Misuraca
Publisher : Turtleback
Page : pages
File Size : 25,63 MB
Release : 2003-04
Category :
ISBN : 9780613896702

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In Greek mythology, there were nine muses, all of them daughters of Zeus. But the legends forgot the 10th Muse--the Muse of Justice. This is Emma Sonnet's birthright. When students on the swim team go missing, Emma (as the 10th Muse) must solve the puzzle of the Minotaur in time to save them.