Where the Past Begins

FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AMY TAN, A MEMOIR ON HER LIFE AS A WRITER, HER CHILDHOOD, AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION AND EMOTIONAL MEMORY In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The ...

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Ecco

ISBN: 0062319299

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 224

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Where the Past Begins

Filled with hard-won insights on the nature of creativity, this is a unique look into the mind of an extraordinary storyteller and an exploration of all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become one of America's ...

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Fourth Estate

ISBN: 0007585578

Category: Novelists, American

Page: 368

View: 122

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Amy of Tan's gifts, the ability to layer images, to command your attention, to shock you with a sudden slipping in of the knife are on display here' Amy Tan's past was gathered together in seven plastic boxes in the corner of her office. They were filled with wedding announcements and condolence cards ; babies' handprints and locks of hair ; the letters from her mother, brimming with anger, heartache and love. In Where the Past Begins, Tan unpacks the vivid memories of her traumatic childhood to reveal the powerful connections between truth and imagination - the spark that has inspired her most beloved novels. Filled with hard-won insights on the nature of creativity, this is a unique look into the mind of an extraordinary storyteller and an exploration of all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become one of America's greatest living writers.
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Saving Fish from Drowning

Through twists of fate, curses, and just plain human error, they find themselves deep in the jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting the return of the leader and the mythical book of wisdom that will protect them from the ravages and ...

Author: Amy Tan

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 9781440627606

Category: Fiction

Page: 496

View: 332

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A provocative novel from the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter. On an ill-fated art expedition into the southern Shan state of Burma, eleven Americans leave their Floating Island Resort for a Christmas-morning tour and disappear. Through twists of fate, curses, and just plain human error, they find themselves deep in the jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting the return of the leader and the mythical book of wisdom that will protect them from the ravages and destruction of the Myanmar military regime. Saving Fish from Drowning seduces the reader with a fagade of Buddhist illusions, magician's tricks, and light comedy, even as the absurd and picaresque spiral into a gripping morality tale about the consequences of intentions—both good and bad—and about the shared responsibility that individuals must accept for the actions of others. A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes."
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Twentieth Century American Fiction in Circulation

5 Amy Tan, Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (New York: Ecco, 2017), 39. 6 Tan, Where the Past Begins, 38. 7 Amy Tan, “Required Reading and Other ...

Author: Matthew James Vechinski

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781000734010

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 190

View: 442

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Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation is a study of the twentieth-century linked story collection in the United States. It emphasizes how the fictional form grew out of an established publishing model—individual stories printed in magazines, revised and expanded into single-author volumes that resemble novels—which creates multiple contexts for the reception of this literature. By acknowledging the prior appearance of stories in periodicals, the book examines textual variants and the role of editorial emendation, drawing on archival records (drafts and correspondence) whenever possible. It also considers how the pages of magazines create a context for the reception of short stories that differs significantly from that of the single-author book. The chapters explore how short stories, appearing separately then linked together, excel at representing the discontinuity of modern American life; convey the multifaceted identity of a character across episodes; mimic the qualities of oral storytelling; and illustrate struggles of belonging within and across communities. The book explains the appearance and prevalence of these narrative strategies at particular cultural moments in the evolution of the American magazine, examining a range of periodicals such as The Masses, Saturday Evening Post, Partisan Review, Esquire, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The primary linked story collections studied are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938), Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942), John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1988).
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The Immoderate Past

... time and history in a position where the past begins to haunt the imagination and where understanding what that past was becomes peculiarly essential.

Author: C. Hugh Holman

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

ISBN: 9780820333571

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 132

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The Immoderate Past deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history, concentrating on representative novelists from three major periods. Finding the origins of this preoccupation in the antebellum period, when most American novelists wrote in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, C. Hugh Holman examines the Revolutionary romances of William Gilmore Simms. With the coming of realism to American fiction after the Civil War, the southern writer turned to a combination of the realistic method with the novel of manners in order to describe the way of life in the South during the nineteenth century. The Civil War replaced the American Revolution as the crucial event in the novels of this second period and was seen as disrupting the quality and texture of antebellum southern life. To illustrate the southern novel in the realistic tradition, Holman discusses Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground, DuBose Heyward's Peter Ashley, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, Allen Tate's The Fathers, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and Margaret Walker's Jubilee. Since the 1930s writers in the region have experimented with modernistic techniques distorting reality in order to make special statement about the nature and meaning of the southern experience. To illustrate this latest development in southern writing, Holman turns to William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!; Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, Brother to Dragons, and Wilderness; and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner. The Immoderate Past closes with a consideration of the extent to which southern novelists have persisted in using time as a major dimension in their fiction, whereas time has tended to be displaced by space in the standard American novel.
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The Art of Harmony

The first step to detachment begins with the truth: the past is only in our memory and the future is only in our anticipation. Both exist solely in our mind ...

Author: Sang H. Kim

Publisher: Turtle Press

ISBN: 188033660X

Category: Philosophy

Page: 288

View: 911

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This collection of inspirational passages and anecdotes blends the common-sense thinking of western philosophy and the mystical wisdom of eastern disciplines. It is based on the belief that our journey through life is most peaceful and fulfilling when we learn to recognise and take charge of our chosen destiny, knowing when to direct the flow and when to yield to it. Organised in an easy-to-read format and grouped by subjects such as truth, chaos, freedom and wisdom, this book encourages each reader to freely discover his or her own road to inner harmony.
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To Build and Be Built

The consciousness of textuality in the poem begins to account for the audibly nostalgic sigh in the Wnal stanza and the reference to days past.

Author: Eric Zakim

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

ISBN: 9780812239034

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 250

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Eric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan "to build and be built" from its conceptual origin in reaction to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938. "Draining the swamps" and "making the desert bloom," the Jewish settlers imagined themselves as performing "miracles" on the land. By these acts, they were also meant to reinvent the very notion of what it was to be a Jew in the modern world. As Jewish settlers reshaped nature in the Holy Land by turning it from one thing into another, they too were newly constructed. Zakim argues that in the period leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel, the action of working the land and building its cities in order to transform both into something essentially Jewish increasingly came to mark a turn inward toward the reclamation of a Jewish subject tied to the very soil of Palestine. To Build and Be Built radically recontextualizes modernist Hebrew literature to demonstrate how literary aesthetics of nature formed the very political discourse they nominally reflected. Zakim's work sees no division between politics and representation. Instead, the depiction of nature in literature, art, and architecture became constitutive of a political and social understanding of the Jew's place in the Middle East. By refusing to acknowledge the disciplinary boundaries of standard works on literature, history, and political thought, To Build and Be Built challenges the methodological certainties that have guided popular and academic understandings of the development of Zionist involvement in the land of Israel. For this reason, To Build and Be Built will be of interest to people beyond literature, in particular those working in history and those outside of Israel studies who have an interest in modernism and the representation of nature in the history of culture.
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What Is Film Theory

One way to put this is to think that the crystal-image demonstrates how difficult it is to know where the present ends and where the past begins, ...

Author: Rushton, Richard

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

ISBN: 9780335234233

Category: Performing Arts

Page: 211

View: 128

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'What is Film Theory? is an introduction to the key elements of film theory. So, what is film theory as a subject? Film studies is divided in to key subjects and themes: there's film art which looks at the aesthetics of film; cinema studies which looks at institutions, films themeselves and the industry; film theory which looks at the concepts, philosophies and disciplines which underline film studies. As such, the book will look at subjects including semiotics and strucutalism, psychoanalysis, formalist film theory, cognitive approaches and neoformalism. In the light of the readers' reports it will also address more 'cultural' issues such as queer theory, ethnicity, postcolonialism and world cinema..
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Nietzsche s Zarathustra

“The past” and “the future” are only relative designations on Nietzsche's ... as the time between past and future, but as the point where the past begins ...

Author: Kathleen Marie Higgins

Publisher: Lexington Books

ISBN: 9780739120866

Category: Philosophy

Page: 225

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"The publication of the revised edition of Kathleen Marie Higgins's Nicizscbe's Zarathustra is a great boon to Nietzsche scholars and Zarathustra specialists alike, for Higgins's consistently subtle analysis of Nietzsche's bold experiment in philosophical writing---especially her groundbreaking interpretation of Zamthustra, part IV---is replete with invaluable insights More than twenty years after its initial appearance, Nietzsche's Zarathustra remains an indispensable point of reference for philosophers and critics who take seriously Nietzsche's judgment that Zamthustra is his most significant work."---Robert Gooding-Williams, University of Chicago "This Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most popular and yet least comprehensible book Many have left the matter there, deriding both the author and his public. Kathleen Marie Higgins refuses to take this easy path. She reveals the complexities underlying the work's apparent lack of organization and argues that these complexities, far from being gratuicous, are telling and significant. She argues that Zarathustra breaks the boundaries that separate a number of genres from one another. Her own interpretation, reflecting the features of its subject, breaks the boundaries that separate a number of academic disciplines. Higgins has written an engaging book that will prove indispensable to Nietzsche's many readers."---Alexander Nehamas, University of Pennsylvania "Nietzsche thought that philosophy chairs would be offered for the best interpretations of This Spoke Zarathustra one hundred years after its publication. Professor Higgins's treatment of Nietzsche's thought, which most writers on Nietzsche ignore, neglect, deny, or don't even see." ---Joan Stambaugh. Hunter College With an interdisciplinary approach to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Kathleen Marie Higgins's Nietzsche's Zarathustra focuses on the philosophical function of its literary techniques and its fictional mode of presentation. Now appearing after twenty years as a revised edition, this valuable roadmap to Zaratbustra argues that the fictional format is essential to Nietzsche's philosophical message in his work. There is always a discrepancy between the living philosophical insight and any attempt to articulate it, and Nietzsche portrays the philosopher's task as an on-going balancing act in which folly is a means to further insight.
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A Psychology of Orientation

There were two points in life where the change appeared most pertinent : age 51 and over , where the past begins to surpass the present , and age 66 and ...

Author: Allen Jack Edwards

Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group

ISBN: 0275975568

Category: Psychology

Page: 278

View: 533

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Provides an overview of the extensive research on the role of time in human behavior and assesses its role in the study and treatment of dementia.
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Literature and the Child

Where the past begins is an intriguing question, but for the purposes of this chapter, historical fiction is writing set in a time that has already occurred ...

Author: Lee Galda

Publisher: Cengage Learning

ISBN: 9781305854987

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 560

View: 175

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LITERATURE AND THE CHILD, 9th Edition, offers thorough, concise coverage of the genres and formats of children’s literature and guidance on using literature in the classroom. With a focus on diverse award-winning titles, this market-leading text includes beautifully written and illustrated discussions of exemplary titles for readers in nursery school through middle school. A stunning design features interior illustrations by Lauren Stringer, an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. Each genre chapter contains criteria for evaluating literary quality, equipping students with a resource to guide text selection in the classroom. Practical, research-based information about teaching appears throughout, including sample teaching ideas and an emphasis on the importance of selecting and teaching complex texts. Extensive booklists provide excellent, ongoing resources and highlight texts that emphasize diversity. This text helps teachers understand how to select books that best serve their curriculum goals as well as the interests and needs of their students. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.
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The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory

5 Sandwiched in—between the servants' accounts there are passages which record Fraser's sessions in psychoanalysis, where the past begins to be ...

Author: Nancy Partner

Publisher: SAGE

ISBN: 9781412931144

Category: History

Page: 527

View: 388

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The editors introduce the core areas of current debate within historical theory, bringing the reader as up to date with continuing debates and current developments as is possible. This important handbook brings together in one volume discussions of the role of modernity, empiricism, realism, post-modernity and deconstruction in the historian’s craft. Chapters are written by leading writers from around the world and cover a wide spread of historical sub-disciplines, such as social history, intellectual history, narrative, gender, memory, psycho-analysis and cultural studies, taking in, along the way, the work of thinkers such as Paul Ricouer, Michel Foucault and Hayden White.
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The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies

The past gives us the evidence and the historian deploys reason and inference to make sense of it. The historian is not where the past begins, ...

Author: Alun Munslow

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781134667635

Category: History

Page: 288

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With twenty-nine new entries, and updated existing ones, this new edition provides a much-needed critical introduction to the key issues, historians and philosophers and their ideas and theories which have prompted the rethinking of history.
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Cow Defender

They had to come up. So they did. This is where the past begins. Dawn of the Past CD35:the Chemeests I sat through programming 61 The Past ...

Author: Steven Long

Publisher: Lulu.com

ISBN: 9781411676329

Category:

Page: 261

View: 354

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I've lived two lives:one as Steven Longone as Cow Defender
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The Radical Pursuit of Rest

C. S. Lewis suggests that in eternity the redeemed and the damned will share a similar bipolar view: “The good man's past begins to change so that his ...

Author: John Koessler

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

ISBN: 9780830899371

Category: Religion

Page: 176

View: 976

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Whether in our careers, churches, schools or families, busyness is the norm, and anything less makes us feel unproductive and anxious. John Koessler understands that rest is not automatic or easy to attain. With honest, biblical reflections on trends in our culture and churches, he presents a unique perspective on how pursuing rest leads us to the heart of God.
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Moments of Negotiation

... past and present in the writing of history , where the past begins to ... of estrangement against which the understanding of the present can begin.25 It ...

Author: Jürgen Pieters

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

ISBN: 9053565027

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 342

View: 737

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Moments of Negotiation offers the first book-length and indepth analysis of the New Historicist reading method, which the American Shakespeare-scholar Stephen Greenblatt introduced at the beginning of the 1980s. Ever since, Greenblatt has been hailed as the prime representative of this movement, whose critical acclaim has been one of the dominant trends in recent literary and cultural studies. In this new book, Jürgen Pieters attempts to fill a remarkable lacuna in the critical reception of Greenblatt's work. The book's aim is to provide a thorough analysis of the theoretical background of Greenblatt's method. This involves not only a close reading of Greenblatt's sources—the book offers introductory surveys of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Michel de Certeau, Jean-François Lyotard, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall—but also a critique of the way in which he adapts and transforms their original insights in the framework of his own interdisciplinary method. This book is of interest to students and scholars coming from a diverse range of fields: literary theory, cultural history, early modern studies, Shakespeare studies,theory and practice of history.
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The American Women s Almanac

In 2017, Tan published Where the Past Begins, a memoir that recounts her childhood, her relationship with her mother, and her evolution as a writer.

Author: Deborah G. Felder

Publisher: Visible Ink Press

ISBN: 9781578597116

Category: History

Page: 609

View: 290

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Celebrate the vital roles and vibrant experiences of women in America! The most complete and affordable single-volume reference on women’s history available today, The American Women’s Almanac: 500 Years of Vitality, Triumph and Excellence is a unique and valuable resource devoted to illustrating the moving and often lost history of women in America. It is a fascinating mix of biographies, little-known or misunderstood historical facts, enlightening essays on significant legislation and movements, and numerous photographs and illustrations. Honoring and celebrating achievements from the First Nations women and the French Huguenot Women of Fort Caroline to the unprecedented number of ethnically diverse women running for modern office, it provides insights on the long-ignored influence, inspiration, and impact of women on U.S. society and culture. From the first indigenous women in North America and the dangers and hardships of the 15th, 16th, and 17th century journeys to the New World to the continual push against patriarchal political, military, corporate, and societal systems and expectations, this essential book illustrates the important events and figures surrounding the suffrage movement; literature, art, and music; business leaders and breakthroughs; political history and office holders; advances in science and medicine; and other vital topics. Learn about the Nineteenth Amendment; Title IX; the legalization of birth control in 1966; the dramatic increase in women attending colleges and universities in the United States; the limitations of 19th-century women’s fashion on athletes; and so much more. The most illustrious figures, as well as less-known stars, are revealed in The American Women’s Almanac, including Abigail Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Susan B. Anthony, Ruth Asawa, Clara Barton, Sara Blakely, Nellie Bly, Tarana Burke, Annie Jump Cannon, Hattie Wyatt Caraway, Carrie Chapman Catt, Bessie Coleman, Rebecca Harding Davis, Maya Deren, Amelia Earhart, Sarah Emma Edmonds, Carly Fiorina, Dian Fossey, Helen Frankenthaler, Aretha Franklin, Temple Grandin, Mia Hamm, Anna Mae Hays, Grace Hopper, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Barbara Jordan, Helen Keller, Julie Krone, Juliette Gordon Low, Dolley Madison, Maria Montoya Martinez, Lucretia Mott, Sara Nelson, Lynn Nottage, Sandra Day O’Connor, Pocahontas, Letty Cotton Pogrebin, E. Annie Proulx, Sally Ride, Sacagawea, Bernice Sandler, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gloria Steinem, Lucy Stone, Pat Summitt, Amy Tan, Martha Washington, Randi Weingarten, Gladys West, Susan Wojcicki, Kristi Yamaguchi, and approximately 350 others. This important reference also has a helpful bibliography, an extensive index, a timeline, and 550 photos, adding to its usefulness. Commemorating and honoring the achievements, people, and essential influence of women in American history, The American Women’s Almanac brings to light all there is to admire and discover about these incredible women.
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Before Babylon Beyond Bitcoin

past: money. that. we. understand. Money is technologically equivalent to a primitive version ... This is the point where the past begins in our narrative.

Author: David Birch

Publisher: London Publishing Partnership

ISBN: 9781907994678

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 288

View: 482

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Technology is changing money: it has been transformed from physical objects to intangible information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone is a security device that can identify you – and link information about you to your money. To see where these developments might be taking us, David Birch looks back over the history of money, spanning thousands of years. He sees in the past, both recent and ancient, evidence for several possible futures. Looking further back to a world before cash and central banks, there were multiple ‘currencies’ operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter for transactions. Perhaps technology will take us back to the future, a future that began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by physical commodities of any kind. Since then, money has been bits. The author shows that these phenomena are not only possible in the future, but already upon us. We may well want to make transactions in Tesco points, Air Miles, Manchester United pounds, Microsoft dollars, Islamic e-gold or Cornish e-tin. The use of cash is already in decline, and is certain to vanish from polite society. The newest technologies will take money back to its origins: a substitute for memory, a record of mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities. This time though, money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.
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