... literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of television or rock music or ... Anim... more ... literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of television or rock music or ... Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot: they are said to move in droves, herds, swarms, or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects when they ...
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Jun 1, 2017
23 july 1912 . 21 april 2015Meyer Howard ("Mike") Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of En... more 23 july 1912 . 21 april 2015Meyer Howard ("Mike") Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus, who died in Ithaca at age 102, was one of the most distinguished and influential scholars produced by the American academy and an almost mythical figure in literary studies- and not just because he remained intellectually active to the end (Norton published his The Fourth Dimension of a Poem in his 100th year). He was the inventor and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the first and dominant anthology presenting the literary canon, and for nearly 50 years, he presided over the gradual expansion of that canon. He was also, as Wayne Booth of the University of Chicago hyperbolically put it, "the best historian of ideas, as ideas relate to literature and literary criticism, that the world has known."A beloved teacher of undergraduates and mentor to graduate students, Mike spent his entire academic career at Cornell and was a fervent Cornellian: a devoted supporter of Cornell athletics, especially the football team, and a generous benefactor of the Johnson Museum and the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscript Library.Mike Abrams was born in 1912-long enough ago to remember hearing a speech by President Wilson. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the seaside town of Long Branch, New Jersey, where his father owned a house painting business. During his school years, his parents insisted that he concentrate on his studies above all else, and although photographs of the time show a muscular young man, his interest in sports did not develop until his college years. He was, from his earliest days, an avid reader; in an interview in 2001, he recalled:I used to devour books as a kid; it never occurred to me that I would write one. There was a time when I read three novels a day. I read fast; sometimes if I really enjoyed a novel I read it three times in one day, the same novel. It was during the Depression that I was in college, and there was no living to be made in anything really, so I thought I'd start doing something I enjoyed rather than something I didn't enjoy.He entered Harvard in 1930 as a scholarship student and in 1934 won the prize for best honors thesis in English, which Harvard published in a run of 350 copies. The Milk of Paradise, later published with a new preface in the 1960s, concerned the relationship between opium and the literary imagination in several romantic writers.Graduating from Harvard in 1934, Mike won a Henry Fellowship to study at Cambridge University with the critic I. A. Richards and attended seminars by such distinguished philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, C. D. Broad, and G. E. Moore. Mike's celebrated gifts of stylistic clarity and precise distinctions may owe something to virtues emphasized by British philosophers. During his year in England, he traveled to Germany and Italy and witnessed firsthand the rise of fascism.Mike returned to Harvard for graduate work in English and in 1937 married Ruth Gaynes, also from Long Branch. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940 with a dissertation, now in Kroch Library, that was inspired in part by Richards' interest in the functioning of metaphors in systems of thought by examining the metaphors structuring romantic critical theory. The two fat volumes of The Mirror and the Lamp would soon be transformed into a revolutionary and prize-winning book.In 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II, Mike joined the team of the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in Cambridge, under the direction of the Harvard psychologist S. S. Stevens, which was charged by the government to solve the problem of vocal communications in noisy environments. Mike and his colleagues developed the "Abel, Baker, Charlie" code, which consists of English words least likely to be garbled or mistaken for each other. After the war, when the group's reports were no longer secret, Mike published two of them-his first professional publications, which as it turned out, were in a scientific rather than a literary field. …
Rhythm works to seduce readers and make poems memorable. Although the distinction between rhythm ... more Rhythm works to seduce readers and make poems memorable. Although the distinction between rhythm and meter is a slippery one, it seems essential since the traditional foot-scansion of metrical analysis proves inadequate to the experience of rhythm, treating some simple rhythms as complex or marginally acceptable and failing to capture rhythmically-important differences. Although accounts of rhythm by such critics as Attridge, Aviram, and Blasing differ significantly, they contribute to a discussion of poetry that helps to account for the pleasure it affords and might help improve the teaching of poetry..
... literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of television or rock music or ... Anim... more ... literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of television or rock music or ... Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot: they are said to move in droves, herds, swarms, or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects when they ...
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Jun 1, 2017
23 july 1912 . 21 april 2015Meyer Howard ("Mike") Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of En... more 23 july 1912 . 21 april 2015Meyer Howard ("Mike") Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus, who died in Ithaca at age 102, was one of the most distinguished and influential scholars produced by the American academy and an almost mythical figure in literary studies- and not just because he remained intellectually active to the end (Norton published his The Fourth Dimension of a Poem in his 100th year). He was the inventor and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the first and dominant anthology presenting the literary canon, and for nearly 50 years, he presided over the gradual expansion of that canon. He was also, as Wayne Booth of the University of Chicago hyperbolically put it, "the best historian of ideas, as ideas relate to literature and literary criticism, that the world has known."A beloved teacher of undergraduates and mentor to graduate students, Mike spent his entire academic career at Cornell and was a fervent Cornellian: a devoted supporter of Cornell athletics, especially the football team, and a generous benefactor of the Johnson Museum and the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscript Library.Mike Abrams was born in 1912-long enough ago to remember hearing a speech by President Wilson. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the seaside town of Long Branch, New Jersey, where his father owned a house painting business. During his school years, his parents insisted that he concentrate on his studies above all else, and although photographs of the time show a muscular young man, his interest in sports did not develop until his college years. He was, from his earliest days, an avid reader; in an interview in 2001, he recalled:I used to devour books as a kid; it never occurred to me that I would write one. There was a time when I read three novels a day. I read fast; sometimes if I really enjoyed a novel I read it three times in one day, the same novel. It was during the Depression that I was in college, and there was no living to be made in anything really, so I thought I'd start doing something I enjoyed rather than something I didn't enjoy.He entered Harvard in 1930 as a scholarship student and in 1934 won the prize for best honors thesis in English, which Harvard published in a run of 350 copies. The Milk of Paradise, later published with a new preface in the 1960s, concerned the relationship between opium and the literary imagination in several romantic writers.Graduating from Harvard in 1934, Mike won a Henry Fellowship to study at Cambridge University with the critic I. A. Richards and attended seminars by such distinguished philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, C. D. Broad, and G. E. Moore. Mike's celebrated gifts of stylistic clarity and precise distinctions may owe something to virtues emphasized by British philosophers. During his year in England, he traveled to Germany and Italy and witnessed firsthand the rise of fascism.Mike returned to Harvard for graduate work in English and in 1937 married Ruth Gaynes, also from Long Branch. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940 with a dissertation, now in Kroch Library, that was inspired in part by Richards' interest in the functioning of metaphors in systems of thought by examining the metaphors structuring romantic critical theory. The two fat volumes of The Mirror and the Lamp would soon be transformed into a revolutionary and prize-winning book.In 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II, Mike joined the team of the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in Cambridge, under the direction of the Harvard psychologist S. S. Stevens, which was charged by the government to solve the problem of vocal communications in noisy environments. Mike and his colleagues developed the "Abel, Baker, Charlie" code, which consists of English words least likely to be garbled or mistaken for each other. After the war, when the group's reports were no longer secret, Mike published two of them-his first professional publications, which as it turned out, were in a scientific rather than a literary field. …
Rhythm works to seduce readers and make poems memorable. Although the distinction between rhythm ... more Rhythm works to seduce readers and make poems memorable. Although the distinction between rhythm and meter is a slippery one, it seems essential since the traditional foot-scansion of metrical analysis proves inadequate to the experience of rhythm, treating some simple rhythms as complex or marginally acceptable and failing to capture rhythmically-important differences. Although accounts of rhythm by such critics as Attridge, Aviram, and Blasing differ significantly, they contribute to a discussion of poetry that helps to account for the pleasure it affords and might help improve the teaching of poetry..
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