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Author

Author

An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. This can be short or long, fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, technical or literature. In particular, the word is used to refer to a person doing it for pay (as a profession).

Role in critical theory

One key issue in literary theory is the relationship between the meaning of a literary text and its author's conscious intent.
- The phrase "Death of the Author" was popularized by Roland Barthes in his 1968 essay with the same name. It is used to convey the idea that texts have meaning and an independent existence outside that intended by the author, depending on the context and reader.
- The death of the author is in self-conscious opposition to the New Criticism, a literary critical movement popular in England and America in the first half of the 20th century. According to this movement, the author's intent is assumed to be quite clear to the author and it becomes the critic's task to understand this intent.

Book

:This page is about bound sheets of paper. For the graph theory concept, see Book (graph theory). For the musical theater meaning, see Book (musical theater). A book is a collection of leaves of paper, parchment or other material, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph to distinguish it from serial publications such as magazines, journals or newspapers. Publishers may produce low-cost, pre-proof editions known as galleys for promotional purposes, such as generating reviews in advance of publication. Galleys are usually made as cheaply as possible, since they are not intended for sale. A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist, or, more informally, a bookworm. A book may be studied by students in the form of a book report. It may also be covered by a professional writer as a book review to introduce a new book.
History
book review.]] The oral account (word of mouth, tradition, hearsay) is the oldest carrier of messages and stories. When writing systems were invented in ancient civilizations, clay tablets or parchment scrolls were used as, for example, in the library of Alexandria. Scrolls were later phased out in favor of the codex, a bound book with pages and a spine, the form of most books today. The codex was invented in the first few centuries A.D. or earlier. Some have said that Julius Caesar invented the first codex during the Gallic Wars. He would issue scrolls folded up accordion style and use the "pages" as reference points. Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were copied by hand, which made books comparatively expensive and rare. During the early Middle Ages, when only churches, universities, and rich noblemen could typically afford books, they were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. The first books used parchment or vellum (calf skin) for the pages, which was later replaced with paper. In the mid 15th century books began to be produced by block printing in western Europe (the technique had been known in the East centuries earlier). In block printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved out of wood. It could then be inked and used to reproduce many copies of that page. Creating an entire book, however, was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each page. Also, the wood blocks were not terribly durable and could easily wear out or crack. The oldest dated book printed by the method of block printing is The Diamond Sutra. There is a wood block printed copy in the British Library which, although not the earliest example of block printing, is the earliest example which bears an actual date. It was found in 1907 by the archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein in a walled-up cave near Dunhuang, in northwest China. The colophon, at the inner end, reads: Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11th May, CE 868 ]. The Chinese inventor Pi Sheng made moveable type of earthenware circa 1045, but we have no surviving examples of his printing. He embedded the characters, face up, in a shallow tray lined with warm wax. He laid a board across them and pressed it down until all the characters were at exactly the same level. When the wax cooled he used his letter tray to print whole pages. It was not until Johann Gutenberg popularized the printing press with metal moveable type in the 15th century that books started to be affordable and widely available. This upset the status quo, leading to remarks such as "The printing press will allow books to get into the hands of people who have no business reading books." It is estimated that in Europe about 1,000 various books were created per year before the invention of the printing press. With the rise of printing in the fifteenth century, books were published in limited numbers and were quite valuable. The need to protect these precious commodities was evident. One of the earliest references to the use of bookmarks was in 1584 when the Queen's Printer, Christopher Barker, presented Queen Elizabeth I with a fringed silk bookmark. Common bookmarks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were narrow silk ribbons bound into the book at the top of the spine and extended below the lower edge of the page. The first detachable bookmarks began appearing in the 1850's and were made from silk or embroidered fabrics. Not until the 1880's, did paper and other materials become more common. The following centuries were spent on improving both the printing press and the conditions for freedom of the press through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, Europe book production has risen to over 200,000 titles per year.
Structure of book
Depending of book's purpose or type (i.e. Encyclopedia , Dictionary, Textbook, Monograph) structure could vary, but some common (traditional) structural parts of the book usually are: #Book cover (hard or soft, fancy-looking, with illustration) #Title page (shows title and author, often with small illustration or icon) #Metrics page #(sometimes - dedication page) #Table of contents #Preface #Text of contents of that book #Index (publishing) #Back cover (hard or soft, fancy-looking, with illustration)
Conservation issues
In the mid-19th century, papers made from pulp (cellulose, wood) were introduced because it was cheaper than cloth-based papers (i.e. vellum or parchment). Pulp based paper made cheap novels, cheap school text books and cheap books of all kinds available to the general public. This paved the way for huge leaps in the rate of literacy in industrialised nations and eased the spread of information during the Second Industrial Revolution. However, this pulp paper contained acid that causes a sort of slow fires that eventually destroys the paper from within. Earlier techniques for making paper used limestone rollers which neutralized the acid in the pulp. Libraries today have to consider mass deacidification of their older collections. Books printed from 1850-1950 are at risk; more recent books are often printed on acid-free or alkaline paper. The proper care of books takes into account the possibility of chemical changes to the cover and text. Books are best stored in reduced lighting, definitely out of direct sunlight, at cool temperatures, and at moderate humidity. Books, especially heavy ones, need the support of surrounding volumes to maintain their shape. It is desirable for that reason to group books by size.
Collections of books
alkaline Maintaining a library used to be the privilege of princes, the wealthy, monasteries and other religious institutions, and universities. The growth of a public library system in the United States started in the late 19th century and was much helped by donations from Andrew Carnegie. This reflected classes in a society: The poor or the middle class had to share most books through a public library or by other means while the rich could afford to have a private library built into their homes. The advent of paperback books in the 20th century led to an explosion of popular publishing. Paperback books made owning books affordable for many people. Paperback books often included works from genres that had previously been published mostly in pulp magazines. As a result of the low cost of such books and the spread of bookstores filled with them (in addition to the creation of a smaller market of extremely cheap used paperbacks) owning a private library ceased to be a status symbol for the rich. While a small collection of books, or one to be used by a small number of people, can be stored in any way convenient to the owners, a large or public collection requires a catalogue and some means of consulting it. Often codes or other marks have to be added to the books to speed the process of relating them to the catalogue and their correct shelf position. Where these identify a volume uniquely, they are referred to as "call numbers". In large libraries this call number is usually based on a Library classification system. The call number is placed inside the book and on the spine of the book, normally a short distance before the bottom, in accordance with institutional or national standards such as ANSI/NISO Z39.41 - 1997. This short (7 pages) standard also establishes the correct way to place information (such as the title or the name of the author) on book spines and on "shelvable" book-like objects such as containers for DVDs, video tapes and software. In library and booksellers' catalogues, it is common to include an abbreviation such as "Crown 8vo" to indicate the paper size from which the book is made. When rows of books are lined on a bookshelf, bookends are sometimes needed to keep them from slanting.
Keeping track of books
One of the earliest and most widely known systems of cataloguing books is the Dewey Decimal System. This system has fallen out of use in some places, mainly because of a Eurocentric bias and other difficulties applying the system to modern libraries. However, it is still used by most public libraries in America. Another popular classification system is the Library of Congress system, which is more popular in university libraries. All books of the world are said to constitute the Gutenberg Galaxy, or, to use a term coined by eBook author Rick Sutcliffe in the early 1980s, the Metalibrary. For the entire 20th century most librarians concerned with offering proper library services to the public (or a smaller subset such as students) worried about keeping track of the books being added yearly to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Through a global society called the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) they devised a series of tools such as the International Standard Book Description or ISBD. Besides, each book is specified by a International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, which is unique to every book produced by participating publishers, world wide. It is managed by the ISBN Society. It has four parts. The first part is the country code, the second the publisher code, and the third the title code. The last part is a checksum or a check digit and can take values from 0-9 and X (10). The EAN Barcodes numbers for books are derived from the ISBN by prefixing 978, for Bookland and calculating a new check digit. Many government publishers, in industrial countries as well as in developing countries, do not participate fully in the ISBN system. They often produce books which do not have ISBNs. In certain industrialized countries large classes of commercial books, such as novels, textbooks and other non-fiction books, are nearly always given ISBNs by publishers, thus giving the illusion to many customers that the ISBN is an international and complete system, with no exceptions.
Transition to digital format
The term e-book (electronic book) in the broad sense is an amount of information like a conventional book, but in digital form. It is made available through internet, CD-ROM, etc. In the popular press the term eBook sometimes refers to a device such as the Sony Librie EBR-1000EP, which is meant to read the digital form and present it to a human being. Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes called an information explosion. The advent of electronic publishing and the Internet means that much new information is not printed in paper books, but is made available online e.g. through a digital library, on CD-ROM, or in the form of e-books. On the other hand, though books are nowadays produced using a digital version of the content, for most books such a version is not available to the public (i.e. neither in the library nor on internet), and there is no decline in the rate of paper publishing. There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. The effort is spearheaded by Project Gutenberg combined with Distributed Proofreaders. There have also been new developments in the process of publishing books. Technologies such as print on demand have made it easier for less known authors to make their work available to a larger audience.
Related articles and lists

- Author
- Bookbinding
- Bookselling
- List of books by title
- List of books by author
- List of books by genre or type
- List of books by award or notoriety
- List of books by year of publication
- List of banned books
- List of fictional books
- Metasearch engine sites search multiple online bookstore sites. Some require separate searches for new or used books.
- Addall.com
- BookFinder.com
- Online bookstores
- Abebooks
- Alibris
- Amazon.com
- Biblio.com
- BibliOZ
- Barnes & Noble
- Borders
- Powell's City of Books
- Book Sense
- Thriftbooks
Online book databases and lists

- The Internet Book Database of Fiction
- Internet Book List
- ISBNdb.com, books database built from libraries data
External links

- [http://headlesschicken.ca/eng204/ The History & Future of the Book - course syllabus & extensive bibliography]
- [http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/search/books_authors/index.jsp The Book Standard Books & Authors Database]
- Category:Documents ja:本 simple:Book tokipona:lipu toki

Profession

:This is the article about work professions. For religious professions, see Profession (religious). A profession is an occupation that requires extensive training and the study and mastery of specialized knowledge, and usually has a professional association, ethical code and process of certification or licensing. Examples are law, medicine, finance, the military, nursing, the clergy and engineering. Classically, there were only four professions: the church, the military, medicine, and law. All these held a specific code of ethics, and members were almost universally required to swear some form of oath to uphold those ethics. Each profession also provided and required extensive training in the meaning, value and importance of that oath in the practice of the profession. Sociologists have been known to define professionalism as self-defined power elitism or as organised exclusivity along guild lines, much in the sense that George Bernard Shaw characterised all professions as "conspiracies against the laity". Sociological definitions of professionalism involving checklists of perceived or claimed characteristics (altruism, self-governance, esoteric knowledge, special skills, ethical behavior, etc.) became less fashionable in the late 20th century. A member of a profession is termed a professional. However, professional is also used for the acceptance of payment for an activity, in contrast to amateur. A professional sportsperson, for example, is one who receives payment for participating in sport, but sport is not generally considered a profession.

History

Historically, the number of professions was limited: members of the clergy, medical doctors, and lawyers held the monopoly on professional status and on professional education, with military officers occasionally recognised as social equals. Self-governing bodies such as guilds or colleges, backed by state-granted charters guaranteeing monopolies, limited access to and behaviour within such professions. With the rise of technology and occupational specialisation in the 19th century, other bodies began to claim "professional" status: engineers, paramedics, educationalists and even accountants, until today almost any occupational group can -- at least unofficially -- aspire to professional rank and cachet, and popular recognition of this trend has made possible the widespread recognition of prostitution as "the oldest profession".

Common qualities of professions

In modern usage, professions tend to have certain qualities in common. A profession is always held by a person, and it is generally that person's way of generating income. Membership in the profession is usually restricted and regulated by a professional association. For example, lawyers regulate themselves through a bar association and restrict membership through licensing and accreditation of law schools. Hence, professions also typically have a great deal of autonomy, setting rules and enforcing discipline themselves. Professions are also generally exclusive, which means that laymen are either legally prohibited from or lack the wherewithal to practice the profession. For example, people are generally prohibited by law from practicing medicine without a license, and would likely be unable to practice well without the acquired skills of a physician. Professions also require rigorous training and schooling beyond a basic college degree. Lastly, because entrance into professions is so competitive, their members typically have above average mental skills. There is no standard definition of a modern professional, however. Beyond the classical examples (lawyers, doctors, etc.) there are many groups that claim status as a profession, and many who would dispute that status. For example, school teachers often refer to their occupation as a profession, even though it is not exclusive (people teach others outside of the traditional school environment), nor is entrance competitive, nor are they self-regulating (laypeople in state legislatures or on boards of education typically set the rules for and regulate teachers). The existence of a traceable historical record of notable members of the profession can serve as an indicator of a profession. Often, these historic professionals have become well known to laypersons outside the field, for example, Clarence Darrow (law), Edward Jenner (medicine), and Florence Nightingale (nursing). In modern times, however, there is no standard definition.

Text

In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something. In linguistics a text is a communicative act, fulfilling the seven constitutive and the three regulative principles of textuality. Both speech and written language, or language in other media can be seen as a text within linguistics. In literary theory a text is the object being studied, whether it be a novel, a poem, a film, an advertisement, or anything else with a linguistic component. The broad use of the term derives from the rise of semiotics in the 1960s and was solidified by the later cultural studies of the 1980s, which brought a corresponding broadening of what it was one could talk about when talking about literature; see also discourse. In mobile phone communication, a text (or text message) is a short digital message between devices, typically using SMS (short message service). In computing, text refers to character data, or to one of the segments of a program in memory. In academics, text is often used as a short form for textbook.

References

- Mowitt, John. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Category:Discourse analysis ja:テキスト

Death of the author

Death of the author is a theory proposed by French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1968. It states that the intentions of the author are meaningless to the interpretation of a text. According to this theory, any given text consists not of one authorial voice but of multiple genres, outside influences, subconscious drives, and preexisting texts that constantly shape and inform all communication. For this reason, Barthes argues, critics should use texts as a space for free "play" that cannot be defined by any univocal statement of right or wrong with regard to the author. Rather, interaction with the text generates its own pleasure in an act that, for Barthes, closely mirrors sexual intercourse. Breaking away from the rigid and moralistic confines of formalism, Barthes hints at the savory imperfections, gaps, and opportunities for creative revision and interplay that textual analysis entails.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician.

Life

Barthes (pronounced BART) was born in Cherbourg, Manche. His father died while Barthes was young, and he and his mother moved to Paris in 1924, his mother working as a bookbinder. Barthes studied at the Sorbonne. In 1934 he became infected with tuberculosis. From 1939 to 1949, he lived in sanatoriums and taught intermittently in schools at Biarritz, Bayonne, Paris, and Bucharest (1939-1949). From 1949 he moved into teaching in higher education. In 1980, he met his death on a Parisian street, run over by a laundry van.

Description of his work

His long, productive career reached from the early days of structuralist linguistics in France up to the peak of post-structuralism, and Barthes' works are considered key texts of both structuralism and post-structuralism. Because Barthes was gay, although not openly so until late in his life, some take him as an antecedent for queer theory. In addition, the autobiographical and aesthetic qualities of many of Barthes' texts make them literature in their own right, and have been claimed by those interested in fashioning a new performative writing. In his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," Barthes made a strong, polemical argument against the centrality of the figure of the author in literary study, ending with the much-quoted phrase "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." By giving the reader a greater role in the creation of meaning, Barthes saw 'works' of literature as analogous to 'works' of music--structures to be played and created as they were interpreted. (Michel Foucault's later article What is an Author? responded to Barthes's polemic with an analysis of the social and literary "author-function.") In his 1971 essay "From Work to Text", Barthes takes this idea further, arguing that while a 'work' (such as a book or a film) contains meanings that are unproblematically traceable back to the author (and therefore closed), a text (the same book or film) is actually something that remains open. The resulting concept of intertextuality implies that meaning is brought to a cultural object by its audience and does not intrinsically reside in the object. Barthes' book S/Z is often called the masterpiece of post-structuralist literary criticism. In S/Z, Barthes dissects the story "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac at length, proceeding sentence by sentence, assigning each word and sentence to one or several "codes" and levels of meaning within the story. In S/Z Barthes also introduced the concepts of lisible and scriptable (readable and writable) works. Barthes' earlier structuralist cultural criticism, published in volumes including Mythologies, is one of the key antecedents for later cultural studies, the application of techniques of literary and social criticism to mass culture. Mythologies is a collection of extremely brief, clever analyses of cultural objects from zoos to museums to fashion (a topic Barthes later took up in detail with The Fashion System). Some of Barthes' later work, while it remains critical, is also personal and emotional. Most famously, his book Roland Barthes (often known as Barthes by Barthes) is a theoretical autobiography, organized in alphabetical sections rather than chronological ones. His last book, Camera Lucida, is a personal memoir, an epitaph for his mother (and himself), and a study of photography. (Jacques Derrida wrote about Camera Lucida, in his essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes", that its "time and tempo accompanied his death as no other book, I believe, has ever kept vigil over its author.") A posthumous book came out in 1987 in English, Incidents, which contained fragments from his journals: his Soires de Paris (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier diary he kept (his erotic encounters with boys in Morocco); and Light of the Sud Ouest (his childhood memories of rural French life).

Works

- A Barthes Reader
- Camera Lucida
- Critical Essays
- The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies
- Elements of Semiology
- The Empire of the Signs
- The Fashion System
- The Grain of the Voice
- Image-Music-Text
- Incidents
- A Lover's Discourse. A beautiful and original work that stands somewhere between poetry and criticism. It is considered a novel by some.
- Michelet
- Mythologies. A particularly pleasant starting point, especially the famous first (The World of Wrestling) and last (Myth Today) essays.
- New Critical Essays
- On Racine
- The Pleasure of the Text
- The Responsibility of Forms
- Roland Barthes (book)
- The Rustle of Language
- Sade /Fourier /Loyola
- The Semiotic Challenge
- S/Z: An Essay ISBN 0374521670
- Writing Degree Zero ISBN 0374521395

Works on Roland Barthes

Calvet, Louis-Jean. trans Sarah Wykes. Roland Barthes: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994. (This is a fine popular biography)

External links

- [http://www.incipitblog.com/index.php/2005/09/13/ro land-barthes-mythologies-le-vin-et-le-lait-le-bifteck-et-les-frites-1957/ Audio Book (mp3)]: two excerpts from Mythologies: Le vin et le lait, Le bifteck et les frites (Wine and milk, Steak and french fries)
- [http://jacketmagazine.com/23/purdy-barthes.ht ml "Between Zero and a Hard Place"] by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. Essay on Barthes' Writing Degree Zero.
- [http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/roland_barthes.html Barthes page from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory]
- [http://www.lichtensteiger.de/methoden.html Das "Anrennen gegen die Grenzen der Sprache" - Methoden des Schreibens und Strategien des Lesens by Ralph Lichtensteiger]
- [http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett/Barthes.htm Roland Barthes and Photography] by Ron Burnett
- [http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/barthes-wt.html "From Work to Text"] Essay written by Barthes.
- [http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/rbwres.htm "Wrestling"] Excerpt from Mythologies.
- [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/toys.html "Toys"] Another excerpt from Mythologies. Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland ja:ロラン・バルト

1968

1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar).

Events

January

- January 5 - Alexander Dubček elected as the leader of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party - the "Prague Spring" begins in Czechoslovakia.
- January 15 - An earthquake occurs in Sicily - 231 dead, 262 injured.
- January 21 - US B-52 Stratofortress crashes in Greenland and in the process discharges four nuclear bombs.
- January 23 - North Korea seizes the USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying.
- January 25 - The Israeli Submarine Dakar sinks in the Mediterranean Sea - 69 dead.
- January 27 - French submarine sinks in the Mediterranean with 52 men.
- January 30 - Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.
- January 31 - Viet Cong soldiers attack the United States embassy in Saigon.
- January 31 - Nauru's president Hammer DeRoburt declares independence from Australia.

February

- February - Classical Gas by Mason Williams is released.
- February 1 - Vietnam War: A Viet Cong officer is executed by Nguyen Ngoc Loan a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The execution was videotaped and photographed and helped sway public opinion against the war.
- February 8 - Boeing 747 made its maiden flight.
- February 8 - American civil rights movement: A civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina is broken-up by highway patrolmen leading to the deaths of three college students.
- February 11 - Israeli-Jordan border clashes.
- February 11 - Madison Square Garden III closes, Madison Square Garden IV opens in New York.
- February 13 - Civil rights disturbances at the University of Wisconsin and University of North Carolina.
- February 16 - In Haleyville, Alabama the first 9-1-1 emergency telephone system goes into service.
- February 18 - British Standard Time introduced.
- February 24 - Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive is halted - South Vietnam recaptures Hué.
- February 28 - Ex-singer Frankie Lymon is found dead from heroin overdose.

March

- March 7 - Vietnam War: The First Battle of Saigon begins.
- March 12 - Mauritius achieves independence from British Rule.
- March 14 - Nerve gas leaks from US Army Dugway Proving Ground near Skull Valley, Utah.
- March 15 - George Brown, British Foreign Secretary, resigns.
- March 16 - Vietnam War: My Lai massacre American troops kills scores of women and children.
- March 17 - A demonstration in London's Grosvenor Square against US involvement in the Vietnam War leads to violence - 91 police injured, 200 demonstrators arrested.
- March 18 - Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.
- March 27 - Russian space pioneer Yuri Gagarin killed in a crash during a training flight.
- March 31 - American President Lyndon Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.

April

- April - Carl Brashear, the first African American United States Navy diver, becomes the first amputee certified to make diving missions, after a long battle which started with the accident which amputated his leg in 1966.
- April 2 - Bombs placed by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin explode at midnight in two department stores in Frankfurt-am-Main - 3 dead. Culprits are later arrested and sentenced for arson.
- April 4 - Martin Luther King, Jr assassinated.
- April 7 - Racing driver Jim Clark killed in a Formula 2 race at Hockenheim.
- April 11 - London Bridge sold to Robert McCullough for £1 million. It is later re-erected in Arizona.
- April 11 - Joseph Bachmann tries to assassinate Rudi Dutschke, leader of a left-wing movement.APO in Germany and tries to commit suicide afterwards – failing in both.
- April 11 - German left-wing students blockade the Springer Press HQ in Berlin and many are arrested - one of them Ulrike Meinhof.
- April 20 - Pierre Elliott Trudeau becomes Canada's fifteenth prime minister.
- April 20 - English politician Enoch Powell makes controversial Rivers of Blood Speech.
- April 23-April 30 - Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
- April 23 - Mobutu releases captured mercenaries in Congo.
- April 23 - Surgeons at the Hopital de la Pitie, Paris, perform Europe's first heart transplant on Clovis Roblain.
- April 29 - Official opening of the musical Hair on Broadway.

May-June

- May - "May of 68" is a symbol of the resistance of that generation. Agitations and strikes in Paris leads many young to believe that a revolution is starting. Student and worker strikes sometimes referred to as the French May nearly bring down the French government.
- May 1 - Professor Giorgios Rosas declares independence of his platform nation Isle of the Roses off Rimini, Italy. Italian troops demolish it two months later.
- May 2 - The Israel Broadcasting Authority commence television broadcasts.
- May 22 - The US nuclear-powered submarine the USS Scorpion sinks with 99 men aboard 400 miles southwest of the Azores.
- June 1 - Helen Keller dies in her sleep in Connecticut.
- June 3 - Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.
- June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy died from his injuries the next day.
- June 8 - James Earl Ray is arrested for the murder of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.
- June 10 - Italy beat Yugoslavia 2-0 in a replay to win the 1968 European Championship. The original final on June 8 ended 1-1.
- June 20 - Austin Currie, Member of Parliament (MP) at Stormont in Northern Ireland, along with others, squats a house in Caledon to protest discrimination in housing allocations.
- June 23 - Soccer stampede in Buenos Aires - 74 dead, 150 injured.
- June 29 - Pope Paul VI announces an encyclical entitled "Humanae Vitae", condemning birth control.

July-September

- July 1 - The CIA's Phoenix Program is officially established.
- July 4 - 59-year-old Yachtsman Alec Rose received a hero's welcome as he sailed into Portsmouth after his 354-day round-the-world trip.
- July 15 - The soap opera One Life to Live premieres on the ABC network.
- July 17 - Saddam Hussein becomes the Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq after a coup d'état.
- July 23-July 28 - African American militants led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans engage in a fierce gunfight with police in the Glenville Shootout of Cleveland, Ohio
- July 26 - Vietnam War: South Vietnamese opposition leader Truong Dinh Dzu is sentenced to five years hard labor for advocating the formation of a coalition government as a way to move toward an end to the war.
- July 29 - Arenal Volcano erupts in Costa Rica for the first time for centuries.
- August 20 - 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization.
- August 22-August 30 - Police clash with antiwar protesters in Chicago, Illinois outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
- September 6 - Swaziland becomes independent.
- September 17 - the D'Oliveira Affair - Marylebone Cricket Club tour of South Africa is cancelled when the South Africans refuse to accept the presence of Basil D'Oliveira, a Cape Coloured, in the side.
- September 27 - Marcelo Caetano becomes prime minister of Portugal.
- September 29 - A referendum in Greece gives more power to the military junta.

October

- October 2 - A student demonstration ends in a massacre at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, Mexico ten days before the inauguration of the 1968 Summer Olympics.
- October 5 - A civil rights march in Derry, (of the six counties of northern) Ireland, which included several Stormont and British MPs, is batoned off the streets by the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
- October 8 - Vietnam War: Operation Sealords - United States and South Vietnamese forces launched a new operation in the Mekong Delta.
- October 11 - Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham aboard. Goals for the mission include the first live television broadcast from orbit and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.
- October 12 - The Games of the XIX Olympiad in Mexico City, Mexico is inaugurated. The games concludes October 27th.
- October 14 - Vietnam War: The United States Department of Defense announces that the United States Army and United States Marines will be sending about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours.
- October 16 - Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-Americans competing in the Olympic 200 meter run, raise their arms in a black power salute after winning the gold and bronze medals for first and third place.
- October 16 - Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney Riots, inspired by the banning of Walter Rodney from the country.
- October 19 - Cool dela Peña is born in Paniqui, Tarlac.
- October 20 - Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy marry on the Greek island of Skorpios.
- October 31 - Vietnam War: Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson.announces to the nation that he has ordered a complete cessation of "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam" effective November 1.

November-December

- November 5 - U.S. presidential election, 1968: In one of the closest elections in US history, Republican challenger Richard M. Nixon defeats Vice President Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace.
- November 5 - Luis A. Ferre is elected Governor of Puerto Rico.
- December 6 - Donald Crowhurst leaves to sail around the globe in hopes of winning Golden Globe award of Sunday Times.
- November 11 - Vietnam War: Operation Commando Hunt initiated to interdict men and supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos into South Vietnam. By the end of the operation, 3 million tons of bombs are dropped on Laos, slowing but not seriously disrupting trail operations.
- November 11 - A second republic is declared in the Maldives.
- November 14 - Yale University announced it is going co-educational.
- November 26 - Vietnam War: United States Air Force 1st Lt. and Bell UH-1F helicopter pilot James P. Fleming rescues an Army Special Forces unit pinned down by Viet Cong fire, earning a Medal of Honor for his bravery.
- December 9 - Douglas Engelbart publicly demonstrates his pioneering hypertext system, NLS, in San Francisco.
- December 13 - Nichols Hall on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas burns to the ground precipitating the use of the Wabash Cannonball as a KSU fight song.
- December 24 - US spacecraft Apollo 8 enters orbit around the moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders become the first humans to see the far side of the moon and planet earth as a whole.

Undated

- Booker Prize for Fiction is established by Booker plc.
- 1968 is known as the year of the Prague Spring and also the year of the Paris riots.
- The ASCII character code is standardized as ANSI Standard X3.4.
- Nauru adopt its national anthem of the Nauru Bwiema.
- The Hong Kong Flu pandemic begins in Hong Kong.
- The International Baccalaureate Organisation is founded.
- Equatorial Guinea became independent from Spain.
- In Panama Gen. Omar Torrijos with a coupe d`etat became president and leader.

Births

January-March

- January 2 - Cuba Gooding Jr., American actor
- January 6 - John Singleton, American film director and writer
- January 14 - LL Cool J, American rapper and actor
- January 24 - Mary Lou Retton, American gymnast
- January 27 - Mike Patton, American singer
- January 28 - Sarah McLachlan, Canadian singer
- January 29 - Edward Burns, American actor
- February 1 - Lisa Marie Presley, American actress
- February 3 - Oscar Cabot, Vice-President Bonicca Natural Body Care
- February 5 - Roberto Alomar, baseball player
- February 8 - Gary Coleman, American actor
- February 10 - Atika Suri, Indonesian television newscaster
- February 14 - Jules Asner, American model and television personality
- February 22 - Brad Nowell, American musician (d. 1996)
- February 22 - Jeri Ryan, American actress
- February 27 - Matt Stairs, baseball player
- March 4 - Patsy Kensit, English actress
- March 11 - Lisa Loeb, American singer
- March 15 - Mark McGrath, American musician (Sugar Ray)
- March 23 - Mike Atherton, English cricketer
- March 23 - Damon Albarn, English musician (Blur and Gorillaz)
- March 26 - Kenny Chesney, American musician
- March 26 - James Iha, American musician (Smashing Pumpkins)
- March 28 - Iris Chang, American author (d. 2004)
- March 28 - Nasser Hussain, English cricketer
- March 29 - Lucy Lawless, New Zealand actress and singer
- March 30 - Céline Dion, Canadian singer

April-June

- April 3 - Sebastian Bach, West Indian-born musician (Skid Row)
- April 8 - Patricia Arquette, American actress
- April 15 - Stacey Williams, American model
- April 19 - Ashley Judd, American actress
- April 23 - Timothy McVeigh, American terrorist
- May 1 - D'Arcy Wretzky, American musician
- May 7 - Traci Lords, American actress
- May 9 - Marie-José Perec, French athlete
- May 12 - Tony Hawk, American skateboarder
- May 26 - Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark
- May 27 - Jeff Bagwell, baseball player
- May 27 - Frank Thomas, baseball player
- May 28 - Kylie Minogue, Australian actress and singer
- June 4 - Rachel Griffiths, Australian actress
- June 20 - Peter Paige, American actor
- June 26 - Shannon Sharpe, American football player and commentator
- June 28 - Adam Woodyatt, British actor
- June 29 - Theoren Fleury, Canadian hockey player
- June 30 - Philip Anselmo, American musician

July-September

- July 7 - Jorja Fox, American actress
- July 10 - Hassiba Boulmerka, Algerian athlete
- July 15 - Stan Kirsch, American actor
- July 16 - Dhanraj Pillay, Indian field hockey player
- July 16 - Barry Sanders, American football player
- July 27 - Julian McMahon, Australian actor
- July 30 - Robert Korzeniowski, Polish racewalker
- August 9 - Gillian Anderson, American actress
- August 9 - Eric Bana, Australian actor
- August 17 - Ed McCaffrey, American football player
- August 31 - Todd Carty, British actor
- September 1 - Mohamed Atta al Sayed, Egyptian terrorist
- September 4 - Mike Piazza, baseball player
- September 7 - Marcel Desailly, French footballer
- September 11 - Kay Hanley, American musician
- September 18 - Toni Kukoc, Croatian basketball player
- September 20 - Darrell Russell, race car driver (d. 2004)
- September 25 - Will Smith, American rapper and actor
- September 26 - James Caviezel, American actor
- September 28 - Naomi Watts, English-born actress, star of Peter Jackson's King Kong

October-December

- October 7 - Toni Braxton, American singer
- October 10 - Bart Brentjens, Dutch mountainbiker
- October 11 - Jane Krakowski, American actress
- October 12 - Hugh Jackman, Australian actor
- October 31 - Vanilla Ice, American rapper
- November 4 - Lee Germon, New Zealand cricket captains
- November 8 - Zara Whites, Dutch actress
- November 9 - Nazzareno Carusi, Italian pianist
- November 12 - Sammy Sosa, Dominican Major League Baseball player
- November 13 - Pat Hentgen, baseball player
- November 15 - Jennifer Charles, American singer
- November 15 - Ol' Dirty Bastard, American rapper (d. 2004)
- November 18 - Owen Wilson, American actor
- November 23 - Hamid Hassani, Iranian scholar
- November 27 - Michael Vartan, French actor
- December 2 - Lucy Liu, American actress
- December 8 - Mike Mussina, baseball player
- December 9 - Kurt Angle, American amateur and professional wrestler
- December 12 - Rory Kennedy, son of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy
- December 17 - Paul Tracy, Canadian race car driver

Deaths

January-April

- January 11 - Isidor Isaac Rabi, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898)
- January 19 - Ray Harroun, American race car driver (b. 1879)
- January 21 - Will Lang Jr., Chief Regional Director of Life (magazine)
- January 22 - Duke Kahanamoku, American swimmer (b. 1890)
- January 26 - Merrill C. Meigs, American newspaper publisher and aviation promoter (b. 1883)
- February 4 - Neal Cassady, American writer (b. 1926)
- February 11 - Howard Lindsay, American playwright (b. 1888)
- February 20 - Anthony Asquith, British director and writer (b. 1902)
- February 21 - Howard Walter Florey, Australian-born pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (b. 1898)
- February 22 - Peter Arno, American cartoonist (b. 1904)
- February 27 - Frankie Lymon, American singer (b. 1942)
- February 29 - Tore Ørjasæter, Norwegian poet (b. 1886)
- March 16 - Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Italian composer (b. 1895)
- March 27 - Yuri Gagarin, cosmonaut (b. 1934)
- April 1 - Lev Davidovich Landau, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1908)
- April 4 - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., American civil rights activist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (assassinated) (b. 1929)
- April 7 - Jimmy Clark, Scottish race car driver (b. 1936)
- April 10 - Gustavs Celmins, Latvian politician (b. 1899)
- April 14 - Al Benton, baseball player (b. 1911)
- April 22 - Stephen H. Sholes, American record executive (b. 1911)
- April 25 - John Tewksbury, American athlete (b. 1876)

May-December

- May 7 - Mike Spence British race car driver (b. 1936)
- May 9 - Mercedes de Acosta, American poet, playwright, costume designer, and socialite (b. 1893)
- May 14 - Husband E. Kimmel, American admiral (b. 1882)
- June 1 - Helen Keller, American spokeswoman for deaf and blind (b. 1880)
- June 6 - Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Senator and U.S. Attorney General (assassinated) (b. 1925)
- June 14 - Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1901)
- June 15 - Sam Crawford, baseball player (b. 1880)
- July 11 - Mervyn Peake, British writer and illustrator (b. 1911)
- July 18 - Corneille Heymans, Belgian physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1892)
- July 23 - Henry Hallett Dale, English scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1875)
- July 28 - Otto Hahn, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1879)
- August 19 - George Gamow, Ukrainian-born physicist (b. 1904)
- August 27 - Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent (b. 1906)
- August 29 - Ulysses S. Grant III, American soldier and planner (b. 1881)
- September 12 - Tommy Armour, Scottish golfer (b. 1894)
- October 2 - Marcel Duchamp, French artist (b. 1887)
- October 13 - Bea Benaderet, American actress (b. 1906)
- October 30 - Rose Wilder Lane, American author and reporter (b. 1886)
- November 4 - Michel Kikoine, Belarusian painter (b. 1892)
- November 6 - Charles Munch, French conductor and violinist (b. 1891)
- November 25 - Upton Sinclair, American writer (b. 1878)
- November 26 - Arnold Zweig, German writer (b. 1887)
- December 10 - Karl Barth, German protestant theologian (b. 1888)
- December 10 - Thomas Merton, American author (b. 1915)
- December 12 - Tallulah Bankhead, American actress (b. 1902)
- December 19 - Norman Thomas, American politician (b. 1884)
- December 20 - John Steinbeck, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
- December 30 - Trygve Lie, first United Nations Secretary General (b. 1896)
- December 30 - Vladimir Peter Tytla, American animator (b. 1904)

Month/day unknown

- Berthold Bartosch, Czech animator (b. 1893)
- Robert Wood Johnson, American business leader and philanthropist (b. 1893)
- Jouett Shouse, American politician (b. 1879).

Nobel Prizes

- Physics - Luis Walter Alvarez
- Chemistry - Lars Onsager
- Physiology or Medicine - Robert W. Holley, Har Gobind Khorana, Marshall W. Nirenberg
- Literature - Yasunari Kawabata
- Peace - René Cassin

New Criticism

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. At their best, New Critical readings were brilliant, articulately argued, and broad in scope, but sometimes they were idiosyncratic and moralistic.

Key concepts

The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several promiment New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a "text" can display multiple simultaneous meanings. In the 1930s, I.A. Richards borrowed Sigmund Freud's term "overdetermination" (which Louis Althusser would later revive in Marxist political theory) to refer to the multiple meanings which he believed were always simultaneously present in language. To Richards, claiming that a work has "One And Only One True Meaning" is an act of superstition (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 39). In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled "The intentional fallacy", in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author's intention, or "intended meaning." For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central tenet of New Criticism. Because New Critics admit no information other than that contained in the "text" which they study, no proper New Critical investigation should include biographical information on the author. Furthermore, studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style requires careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself, since after all no other information source is permissable - a rigid attitude for which the New Critics were often scolded in later times: their immanent readings may also be taken as a conservative attempt to isolate the text as a solid, immutable entity, shielded from any external influences. Nevertheless, immanent reading or close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read. They look at, for example, theme, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, meter, etc. Besides the names mentioned above, other prominent New Critical figures include the following:
- T.S. Eliot
- F.R. Leavis
- William Empson
- Robert Penn Warren
- John Crowe Ransom
- Cleanth Brooks Not all the thoughts and works stemming from these individuals fall within the New Critical camp. For example, Eliot’s relationship with New Criticism was rather complicated. In 1956, he claimed that he failed “to see any school of criticism which can be said to derive from myself,” referring to the New Criticism as “the lemon-squeezer school of criticism." He never understood the ways that the New Critics had come to interpret The Waste Land, noting in “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931) that “when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." A New Critic might respond that paying Eliot any mind would fall into the "intentional fallacy". Empson, too, attempted to distance himself from the New Criticism, and was particularly critical of Wimsatt. His last book, Using Biography, was largely an attempt to refute the doctrine of the "intentional fallacy."

Satire

The New Criticism is one of the concepts satirized in Isaac Asimov's short story "The Immortal Bard" (1954), in which a physics professor learns the secret of time travel and tries bringing prominent individuals from the past into the present. After failing with notable scientists like Archimedes and Galileo, who are not adaptable enough to cope with 20th-century society, he tries retrieving William Shakespeare, who he hopes can understand human beings of any time. Shakespeare becomes ravenous to learn what posterity made of his work, so the professor enrolls him in a colleague's evening-extension class on Shakespeare, with less than stellar results. "God ha' mercy!" cries Asimov's Shakespeare. "What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!"

Works

- Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral are among the preeminent New Critical works. Their broad taxonomic ambition, in both cases, ranges over a good portion of the literary canon in an attempt to define a literary device or trope.
- Richards's Practical Criticism is one of the most "theoretical" works of the New Criticism; that is, it is a reflection on critical method.
- Wimsatt and Beardsley concisely defined the two anathemas of the New Criticism in their well-known essays "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy."
- Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn is among the best-known examples of New Critical poetry explication. Also often referenced for its essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and its discussion of paradox in literature.
- Ransom's essay "The New Criticism," from which the movement received its name.

External links

- [http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/new_criticism.html New Criticism from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory]
- [http://www.cosmoetica.com/D20-DES14.htm Criticism of New Criticism] Category:New Criticism Category:literary criticism Category:English literature

Writer

The term writer can apply to anyone who creates a written work, but the word more usually designates those who write creatively or professionally, or those who have written in many different forms. Skilled writers demonstrate skills in using language to portray ideas and images, whether producing fiction or non-fiction. A writer may compose in many different forms, including (but not limited to): poetry, prose, music. Accordingly, a writer in specialist mode may rank as a poet, novelist, composer, lyricist, playwright, mythographer, journalist, film scriptwriter, etc. (See also: creative writing, technical writing and academic papers). Writers' output frequently contributes to the cultural content of a society, and that society may value its writerly corpus -- or literature -- as an art much like the visual arts (see painting, sculpture, photography), music, craft and performance art (see: drama, theatre, opera, musical).

Alternative uses of "writer"

Practitioners within some specialized fields also use the term "writer" to describe their arts. For instance, advertising creatives, gag-writers and graffiti artists also refer to themselves as "writers." In these contexts, "writer" may be considered an alternative use of the term, rather than describing a so-called "literary" or "serious" writer as discussed above. A "writer" can also be mechanic. For example, court reporters often refer to their stenotype machine as a writer. Similarly, some word processors are called "writer", such as OpenOffice.org Writer and Nisus Writer.

External links

- [http://www.wga.org Writers Guild of America, west]
- [http://www.wgae.org Writers Guild of America, east]
- [http://www.writersguild.org.uk Writers' Guild of Great Britain]
- [http://www.writersguildofcanada.com/ Writers' Guild of Canada]
- [http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/ International PEN]
- [http://www.authorssociety.org/ Authors Society.org]
- [http://www.Writing.Com/ Writers] Category:Media occupations Category:Literature ja:著作家 ko:작가 th:นักเขียน

List of novelists

Well-known authors of novels, listed by country: See also: Lists of authors, List of poets, List of playwrights, List of short story authors

- Marcos Aguinis
- César Aira
- Federico Andahazi
- Roberto Arlt
- Adolfo Bioy Casares
- Abelardo Castillo
- Julio Cortázar, (1914 - 1984)
- Macedonio Fernandez
- Rodolfo Fogwill
- Ricardo Güiraldes, (1886-1927) Don Segundo Sombra
- Leopoldo Marechal
- Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman
- Andrés Rivera
- Juan José Saer
- Ernésto Sábato, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas (1961)

Armenia

- Alexander Shirvanzade

Australia

- Jessica Anderson
- Thea Astley
- Murray Bail
- Carmel Bird
- John Birmingham
- Rolf Boldrewood
- James Bradley
- Lily Brett, author of Just Like That (1994)
- Geraldine Brooks
- Peter Carey
- Marcus Clarke
- James Clavell, screenwriter, director (of the original The Fly among others), author of Shogun
-

Author

Role in critical theory

See also

Book

History

Structure of book

Conservation issues

Collections of books

Keeping track of books

Transition to digital format

Related articles and lists

Online book databases and lists

External links

Profession

History

Common qualities of professions

See also

Text

See also

References

Death of the author

See also

Roland Barthes

Life

Description of his work

Works

Works on Roland Barthes

External links

1968

Events

January

February

March

April

May-June

July-September

October

November-December

Undated

Births

January-March

April-June

July-September

October-December

Deaths

January-April

May-December

Month/day unknown

Nobel Prizes

Further reading

New Criticism

Key concepts

Satire

Works

External links

Writer

Alternative uses of "writer"

See also

External links

List of novelists

Albania

Algeria

Ancient Latin Authors

Angola

Argentina

Armenia

Australia