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Word Pearls Level 275 Literature And Writing Answers

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POPUP, PRINT
PHRASE, BALLAD, POETRY
FANTASY, PICTURE

Or : 4 Letters

BOOK, PAGE, PLOT
TITLE, COLON, COMMA, DRAMA
BALLAD, PHRASE, PERIOD, READER
BIOGRAPHY, PARAGRAPH
PAGE, PLOT, BOOK, NOTE
STORY, VERSE
CHAPTER, FANTASY
POPUP, GUIDE, THEME
BALLAD, PHRASE, PERIOD
QUESTION, DIALOGUE
PLOT, DASH, PULP
VERSE, NOVEL
TRAGEDY, ROMANCE
BIOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE
DASH, POEM, TEXT, WORD, PLOT
COVER, TITLE
MYTH, PAGE, TEXT
THEME, COMIC, TITLE
PERIOD, AUTHOR, POETRY, BALLAD, PHRASE
PAGE, PLOT, POEM, TEXT
COMIC, NOVEL
BALLAD, PHRASE, PERIOD, WRITER
MYTH, PULP, NOTE
PRINT, GUIDE
WRITER, AUTHOR, READER
QUESTION, LIMERICK
BIOGRAPHY, ADVENTURE
WORD, DASH, NOTE
COLON, VERSE, STORY, PROSE, COVER
ASTERISK, LIMERICK
STORY, PRINT, QUOTE, COMIC
READER, POETRY, AUTHOR
FANTASY, CHAPTER
TEXT, PLOT, NOTE, BOOK
COLON, THEME, PROSE, STORY, PRINT, POPUP
PICTURE, FICTION

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Pearl and the Pearl Poet

A. C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A critical study CUP 70 E. Wilson MAE 40 71 Word Play & Pearl L. Blenkner SP 68 71 Trad. images in Pearl B. Nolan & D. Farley-Hills RES 22 71 Authorship of Pearl: 3 notes [attrib. to Mascy/ Massey] J. W. Earl MP 70 72 St Margaret & the pearl maiden Ann Wood PQ 52 73 Pearl-dreamer & hyne in parable L. M. Sklute PQ 52 73 Expectation & fulfillment in Pearl R. J. Blanch Nott. MS 17 73 Colour Symbolism in Pearl J. Gatta MP 71 73-4 Transformation symbolism & liturgy of mass in Pearl C. J. Peterson RES 25 74 Pearl poet, St. Erkenwald, Massey - 2 articles W. A. Davenport ES 55 74 Pearl 19-22: desolation not consolation J. Finlayson SP 71 74 Pearl: landscape and vision W. Vantuono MS 37 75 A name in Nero A. x (Macy) Goran Kjellmer, Did Pearl Poet write Pearl? Gothenburg St. in Eng. 30 75 T. Turville-Petre & E. Wilson RES 26 75 Hoccleve, maister Massy & the Pearl poet [also p. 451] T. A. Reisner MP 72 75 Cortaysye sequence in Pearl: a legal interp. L. Eldredge Viator 6 75 State of Pearl Studies since 1933 C. Peterson & E. Wilson RES 28 77 Hoccleve, MS Cotton Nero A. x & the Pearl Poet Robt. Levine M&H 8 77 Pearl-child: topos & archetype in Pearl Jennifer Lee St. Icon 3 77 Illustrations of MS Cotton Nero A. x C. Luttrell MAE 47 78 Introduction to the dream in Pearl M. Tajima ES 59 78 Syntactical evidence against common authorship of MS Cotton Nero A. x Malcolm Andrew (ed.), Gawain-poet: annot. bibliog Garland 79 Anne Schotter StN 51 79 Function of allit. formulas of clothing in Pearl W. A. Davenport, Art of the Gawain-poet Athlone 80 Muriel Whitaker Viator 12 81 Pearl & some illustrated Apocalypse MSS A. D. Horgan RES 32 81 Justice in Pearl Eliz. Petroff ChauR 16 81 Landscape in Pearl: transformation of nature Jill Mann SAC 5 83 Satisfaction & payment Ian Bishop NQ 31 84 Pearl and letters of Ed. III concerning death of his daughter Ann Chalmers Watts PMLA 99 84 Pearl, inexpressibility & poems of human loss Denise Baker Viator 15 84 Dialectic form in Pearl & PP A. P. Baldwin Tripartite reformation of the soul in Hilton, Pearl and PP In M. Glasscoe (ed.), The Mystical Trad. in England Brewer 84 L. S. Johnson, The voice of the Gawain-poet Wisconsin 84 J. W. Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Courtesy books & the Gawain-poet Brewer 85 Heather Phillips MS 47 85 Eucharistic allusions in Pearl Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable Penn State 86 Sarah Horrall Manuscripta 30 86 Notes on Cotton Nero A. x Rosalind Field MLR 81 86 The heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl Hugh White RES 38 87 Blood in Pearl Ian Bishop Relatives at the Court of Heaven, in PP & Pearl In Cottle F/S 87 Morton Donner ChauR 22 87-88 A grammatical perspective on wordplay in Pearl Warren Ginsberg ELH 55 88 Place & dialectic in Pearl & Dante's Paradiso D. Pearsall & R. A. Cooper RES 39 88 The Gawain-Poems: A Statistical Approach to the Question of Common Authorship S. Stanbury M&H 16 88 Pearl and the idea of Jerusalem Morton Donner ChauR 24 89-90 Word play & word form in Pearl R. J. Blanch et al (ed.), Text & matter: new critical perspectives on the Pearl poet 90 Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-poet: desc. & the art of perception Penn 91 Lawrence Clopper Viator 23 92 Pearl & the consolation of Scripture M. G. Champion Neoph. 76 92 Reception-theory and Pearl Kevin Marti Viator 24 93 Characteristics of the resurrected body in Pearl D. Aers Spec. 68 93 The self mourning: reflections on Pearl G. Roper ChauR 28 93 Pearl, penitence & recovery of self Sandra Prior, Pearl-poet revisited Twayne 94 J. Rhodes SAC 16 94 Dreamer redeemed in Pearl J. Bowers SAC 17 95 Pearl in its Ricardian context J. Bowers Exemplaria 7 95 Politics of Pearl Santha Bhattacharji MAE 64 95 Pearl and the liturgical `Common of Virgins' J. Watkins ChYb 2 95 Pearl and late med. individualism Sandra P. Prior, Fayre formes of Pearl-poet MSU 96 D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds.), Companion to the Gawain-poet Brewer 96 L. M. Clopper MP 94 96-7 The God of the Gawain-poet T. Turville-Petre Burrow Essays 1997 The Pearl-Poet and his "fayre regioun" [pride in locality] Susanna Fein Spec. 72 97 12-line stanza-forms in ME and the date of Pearl Paul Reichardt StIcon 18 97 `Several illuminations, coarsely executed': the illustrations of the Pearl-MS Catherine Cox ChauR 32 97-8 Gender, language, difference in Pearl E. Condren Viator 30 99 Numerical proportion as aesthetic strategy in Pearl- MS Helen Barr MAE 69 00 Pearl, or `The Jeweller's Tale' L. Staley Pearl & the contingencies of love & piety In Pearsall essays 00 M. Andrew Setting & context in the Gawain-poet Waldron essays 00 J. Allan Mitchell ChauR 35 00 Pearl - figuring the unfigurable David DeVries ChauR 35 00 Unde dicitur: observations on the poetic distinctiones of the Pearl-poet Ad Putter & Myra Stokes Parergon 18 00 Spelling, grammar & metre in the works of the Gawain-poet

Mary Carruthers - "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions"
Benson - Chaucer's Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics
Richard Firth Green - The Sexual Normality of Chaucer's Pardoner
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Kittredge - Chaucer's Pardoner
Monica E. McAlpine - "The Pardoner's Homosexuality and How It Matters"
Lee W. Patterson - "Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature and the Pardoner"
Albert H. Silverman - "Sex and Money in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale"
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Derek Pearsall - "Chaucer's Pardoner: The Death of a Salesman"

John Steinbeck

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on John Steinbeck's The Pearl . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Pearl: Introduction

The pearl: plot summary, the pearl: detailed summary & analysis, the pearl: themes, the pearl: quotes, the pearl: characters, the pearl: symbols, the pearl: theme wheel, brief biography of john steinbeck.

Historical Context of The Pearl

Other books related to the pearl.

Full Title: The Pearl
When Written: 1944
Where Written: California
When Published: 1947
Literary Period: Modernist novel
Genre: Novella/ Parable
Setting: La Paz, Baja California Sur
Climax: Kino’s beating of Juana and his killing of a man in protection of the pearl
Point of View: Third person (from the perspective of the villagers who pass down the tale through generations)

Themes and Analysis

By john steinbeck.

'The Pearl' by John Steinbeck is a short novel beautifully told in oratory style and laced with many lessons for readers and topics for critics.

Article written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

‘ The Pearl ‘ by John Steinbeck explores themes like greed and exploitation to give insight into ethical issues facing humanity in the context of ethnic and economic divisions. It also has symbols that further drive the themes of the story and is written with a lyrical flow that makes it a delight to readers .

Some of the themes in ‘ The Pearl ‘ by John Steinbeck are greed, exploitation, and fate. And these are discussed here.

The discovery of the pearl triggered greed in Kino. He used to be a contented family man, totally loving of his wife Juana and his son Coyotito and would do anything to protect and provide for them. But as he discovers the pearl, it rouses a desire in him for money and status. All of a sudden, everything becomes subverted to this new-found desire for money and status, including his family’s safety.

This driving greed almost magically transmutes him into a brute and a criminal, capable of manslaughter. As a result, he becomes a wanted man and is on the run for his life, dragging his family along, whose prior simple and quiet life he had upset by his implacable ambition and greed. It is also on account of the pearl that he has the course to abuse his wife for the first time. And all because his wife had seen the destructive potential of the pearl and attempted to get rid of it so that she could have her once peaceful and quiet life back.

In a way, it is not so much that the pearl is innately a destructive influence. Rather, it is Kino’s greed that perverts what might easily have been the natural salutary utility of the pearl, corrupting it into something ugly and malevolent. He had the opportunity to exchange the pearl for a modest price and continue his simple life with his wife, but his ambition was beyond what the buyers offered. In the upshot, he loses his only son and is constrained to get rid of the pearl as his wife had earlier suggested.

We also see greed in other characters , like the doctor and the priest, who suddenly begin to give Kino attention because of what they stand to gain from the acquisition of the pearl.

Another theme that runs through the novella is the working of fate in the affairs of humans. In the story, the human beings are seen to be initially taking charge of their own lives and destiny, and negotiating their daily survival and sustenance as best they can. But on the other hand, some other equally key aspects of their lives are not strictly within their power to control.

Take the sea, for example. The lowly pearl divers and fishermen depend solely on the sea to be able to eke out their daily living and be able to provide for their families. But what each passing day will bring and whether the sea will yield them anything worthwhile for all their striving and effort is entirely out of the purview of their power to control.

It may happen that after a long day of strenuous striving, the sea yields nothing, or it may yield something utterly not commensurate to the effort that one had invested. And even when fate seems to be favourable and yields a fortune, as in Kino’s finding a huge pearl, there is still no guarantee that this fortune will not be, in turn, fated to ruin the life of the character who has found it in other unforeseen ways.

Exploitation

The theme of oppression and exploitation is the other key theme in the story. This manifests in several ways, for example, in the career of the doctor. His relationship with Kino and his kind is purely exploitative and predatory. It is for this reason that he refuses to treat Coyotito even though he can see that the poor child is in danger of death from a scorpion’s venom. And all because Kino cannot afford to pay for the medical treatment the boy so urgently requires. But the moment Kino finds the pearl, the doctor quickly switches and declares the sick boy his patient, and visits Kino’s brush house himself to treat him.

However, his real interest is not really in treating the boy but in the possibility of getting a share of the money that Kino’s pearl promises to bring. The same thing applies to the priest as well as the pearl dealers and all the attackers who try to steal the pearl from Kino.

Analysis of Key Moments

Kino enjoys a peaceful morning with the monotonous routine of his family as his wife Juana prepares breakfast and his child Coyotito rocks in his crib. But the peaceful morning is disrupted as a spider stings Coyotito.
Juana tries to suck the venom from the scorpion sting as neighbours gather around them while Kino crushes the Scorpion in rage.
Juana decides that they must take Coyotito to the doctor, and all the neighbours and beggars in the town join them as they walk to the doctor’s house. But on getting there, the doctor refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino does not have any money to pay him.
Kino and his family return home, and as they take their boat out to hunt for pearls, Juana gets some medicinal seaweed and places it on Coyotito’s wound while she prays that Kino would find a pearl that would make them rich enough to afford the doctor’s services.
Kino’s venture yields a big beautiful pearl, and they are happy. The news of Kino’s pearl travel across town, neighbours troop in to visit him, and he shares his grand plans about what he will do with the fortune he makes from the pearl.
The doctor, who had hitherto refused to treat Coyotito, visits Kino’s home and offers his services without any prompting from Kino. Even the priest visits Kino and urges them to bring gifts of thanks to the church.
Kino’s home is attacked by a thief that night, but Kino, in his alertness, strikes the thief with his knife, and the thief flees.
The next morning, Kino goes to sell the pearl, but the pearl dealers offer him a price that is far less than what it is worth. Sensing that he is being cheated, Kino refuses to sell the pearl and returns home with it.
That night, Juana tries to throw the pearl back into the sea because she believes it will bring an evil that will destroy their family. But Kino gets to her before she completes the task and beats her viciously.
Another set of thieves attacked Kino’s home again. Kino kills one of them and tries to escape with his family, but they realize that their boat has been destroyed. The thieves set Kino’s home ablaze, and Kino hides with his family at his brother’s house.
At night, Kino flees with his family with hopes of getting to the capital, selling the pearl at a profitable rate, and beginning a new life.
But enemies follow Kino’s tracks and try to hunt him down. The trackers set up camp at some point, and Kino decides to attack them. But before Kino can strike, Coyotito cries in the distance, and the trackers shoot at him thinking it is a Coyote.
Kino kills the trackers but is left with his wailing wife and his dead child.
Defeated, Kino and Juana, return to their small town, and Kino casts the pearl back into the ocean.

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language

John Steinbeck’s style of writing in ‘The Pearl’ is rather oratorical. That is to say that the general rhythm of the narrative makes it sound as if the story is being told orally. This is probably not surprising since, as has been observed, the story is modelled after an ancient Mexican parable, and a parable originally is a short didactic tale passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. It is this oral feature that the novella imbibes. As a result, its style is conversational, the flow repetitious with a certain monotony of rhythm, giving the general aura of a tale being told around a campfire.

One way in which this writing style is observed is in the frequent occurrence of the conjunction ‘and’ in the course of the narration. For example: ‘Kino held the great pearl in his hand, and it was warm and alive . . .’ ‘Kino looked into his pearl, and Juana cast her eyelashes down…’ and so on. In this way, the author cuts down on the use of the gerund form, colons, and lengthy sentences in general, thereby retaining the ordinary repetitive style of a parable. Also, the relatively short length of the novella rebounds to the general oral bent of the narrative. But it is altogether a simple and unambiguous style.

The tone is moralistic as there is that overriding sense of a repudiation of greed and all the ills that come with it by the narrative voice. And by that same token, a reader is sucked into that same mood whereby he perceives the unfolding sequence from the narrator’s general point of view. The tone also gets despondent, particularly when it dawns on the characters that all the pearl can ever breed is evil, strife, envy, and avarice of murderous dimensions. It is probably in such a state of mind that Juana implores Kino to get rid of the pearl.

One of the dominant figurative languages in the novella includes personification. For example, the narrator uses the expression ‘the wind cried’ at one point, thereby infusing the wind, which is ordinarily a non-sentient entity with a capacity for feeling and emotiveness.

Imagery is another figurative language that features in the novella. This is seen, for example, in the manner in which the narrator captures Kino’s reaction when he is roused from sleep to discover that his wife Juana is sneaking out of their brush house with an end to going to the sea to get rid of the pearl since he has refused her plea to get rid of it. This is how it reads:

And rage surged in Kino. He rolled up to his feet and followed her as silently as she had gone, and he could hear her quick footsteps going toward the shore. Quietly he tracked her, and his brain was red with anger. Chapter V, pp 31

In the quote above , In one breath, the reader perceives Kino’s anger as a rage surging and a substance that gives a certain touch of redness to his brain.

Analysis of Symbols

The pearl itself is easily the single important symbol in the novella. It is difficult to delimit its meaning and significance to just one thing only. When it is first discovered by Kino, it is clearly considered to be a fortune. To that extent, therefore, it is a representation of divine providence in the life of Kino and his family. And going by the order of the incidents in the novella, it, in a way, also represents a divine compensation to Kino for the misfortune of the scorpion sting which had befallen his child, Coyotito, prior to the discovery of the pearl.

But on the other hand, the pearl becomes a corrupting influence, infecting the owner, as well as all the other people who hope to gain something out of it, with murderous greed. Thus, it is as much a symbol of good fortune as it is a symbol of a fall from a state of innocence to decadence.

The Scorpion

The scorpion in the story is a symbol of arbitrary misfortune and evil. Coyotito is a mere baby when the scorpion stings him, and it is significant that while the scorpion crawls up towards the child, he innocently giggles at it and reaches out to grab it. In other words, the child’s innocence and seeming gesture of cordiality towards the scorpion does not stop it from stinging him and leaving him poisoned with its lethal venom.

That is a veritable image of the relationship between good and evil. It evokes the old problem of what exactly might be the trigger or rationale of evil in the order of things in the first place. Evil seems to be an irruptive phenomenon, without any real reason or motivation, something commonly explored in the tragic sequence in art.

The boat in ‘ The Pearl ‘ symbolizes a cultural essence and a delicate heritage to be preserved. Kino’s boat was passed down from generation to generation until it got to him, and he cared for it with utmost care and pride. The destruction of the boat is seen as a worse evil than the killing of a man because a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat cannot heal.

Why did Juana want to throw away the pearl?

Juana wanted to throw away the pearl because she believed that the pearl had an inherent evil that would upset the peaceful order of their family life and destroy them all.

What is the climax of ‘ The Pearl ‘?

A climax is the highest point of tension in a story. The climax of ‘ The Pearl’ by John Steinbeck is the shooting of Coyotito by the trackers and Kino’s subsequent attack on them.

What does the doctor symbolize in ‘ The Pearl ‘?

In John Steinbeck’s ‘ The Pearl,’ the doctor is both a character and a symbol. The doctor symbolizes, decadence, imperialism, greed, and wickedness. He is also a symbol of the exploitation of the colonialists.

What is the moral of the story of ‘The Pearl’ ?

One of the morals of the story is the dangers of greed. There are also lessons about injustice, luck, and exploitation. However, the author expressly states at the beginning of the narration that it is at the discretion of the reader to draw their own morals from the story.

What does the rifle symbolize in ‘The Pearl’ ?

The rifle symbolizes power in the story. The use of the rifle and the application of the power it symbolizes changes with whoever possesses it. For Kino’s neighbours and kinsmen, they perceive the rifle as a tool of oppression which the colonialists used to subdue them. For Kino, when he began to have grand designs for himself and his family, he began to perceive the rifle as a symbol of protection and luxury.

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About Israel Njoku

Israel loves to delve into rigorous analysis of themes with broader implications. As a passionate book lover and reviewer, Israel aims to contribute meaningful insights into broader discussions.

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The Literature

This Month's Videos on Eyetube.net

Residents And Fellows | Jul 2014

10 pearls for writing manuscripts.

Winston D. Chamberlain, MD, PhD

https://crstoday.com/articles/2014-jul/10-pearls-for-writing-manuscripts link

Where do I start writing my manuscript? What journal should I submit to? Writing an excellent manuscript is an art that can take years to learn. Most of us approach this exercise with a fair amount of trepidation. In this installment of “Residents and Fellows,” Win Chamberlain lays out a blueprint on how to approach manuscript writing. The pearls he highlights are an excellent starting point for writing manuscripts, both for the seasoned author as well as the novice! —Sumit “Sam” Garg, MD, section editor

“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” —Sidney Sheldon

Staring at the blank Microscoft Word screen on your laptop begins the process and can create a sense of dread or excitement. Filling that void with something meaningful and original is a daunting task accomplished with skills that are refined by repetition and persistence.

The author Edgar Rice Burroughs said, “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” The written manuscript is an important means by which we physicians contribute to our profession. In my opinion, it is one of the noblest and mentally challenging things we do. The ability to lay out new ideas or add to old ones from our experience or observations is powerful. I would like to share a few tips on how I approach writing.

PEARL No. 1

Thoroughly Review the Literature

There are many ways to construct a manuscript, but first, you have to have an idea, a destination, and some understanding of what others have accomplished. A thorough literature review is an important start. It will help you to refine your ideas and to avoid reinventing the wheel. It may also force you to go back and collect more data or reanalyze your current findings. You can gain a lot of information from abstracts on PubMed and get new ideas. Take notes as you go, because this information will frame your introduction and guide your discussion sections.

PEARL No. 2

Know the Requirements of the Journals Where You Want Your Article to Appear

It is a hard and painful process to carve away at an article once it is complete. Far better is to know the parameters in advance. I find it easier to add to an article than to take away.

PEARL No. 3

Just Start Writing

This is easier said than done. You will learn to write your article as you start writing it. Jack London said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Do not hesitate just to put something on paper or the computer screen. Give yourself some material to revise; it is your weapon against writer’s block. Outlining your main points is an essential preliminary step.

PEARL No. 4

Start With Materials and Methods

I find “materials and methods” a good place to start. It is often the easiest portion to write, because it is really just a straightforward account of your patient population and/or experimental methods and statistical analysis. Write it in the past tense. It is important to describe what you have done clearly and concisely, because this is a blueprint for the reader of how to re-create your study. Do not provide extraneous details, just what is needed to reproduce your data. If human subjects are involved, mention something about the institutional review board process, and provide a statement of ethics that conforms to the Declaration of Helsinki. 1

PEARL No. 5

Your Results Section Is Your Entire Story. Everything Hangs on This

Write your results section next. It is the basis of everything you write in your discussion and introduction. This portion is your story. Look at your data, and construct grafts, tables, and figures that illustrate your data in a clear fashion. The reader should be able to look at your figures and tables and understand what you accomplished even if he or she does not look at any other part of the article. This section will give you the material with which to construct the rest of the manuscript.

PEARL No. 6

Make the Discussion Section Fun

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”

Write the discussion section after the results section. The former is where you review your findings, tie them in with what is known, and speculate on what they mean to the current understanding of the topic. In this section, you can comment on the grander implications of your data. You may also want to include ideas for future studies or put forth unanswered questions.

PEARL No. 7

Save the Introduction for Last

A good introduction is a hook with which to draw the reader into the significance of your work. It presents a brief but interesting background for the field you are addressing. It guides the reader painlessly through a briar patch of literature and lays a groundwork for your study. It points out the gaps in previous studies and unanswered questions that your results section will address. In short, your introduction is setting the stage for your study.

PEARL No. 8

The Abstract Is the Final Word

The very last thing you will write is the abstract, which summarizes your entire paper. Keep in mind that, as people review the literature, your abstract is the only portion of your article they may ever read. In fact, they may only read the abstract’s conclusion section. Make it clear, concise, and accurate, and make sure it delivers the same message as your entire article.

PEARL No. 9

Do Not Be Discouraged by Revisions and Rejections

“Half my life is an act of revision,” said John Irving. I recommend treating the editorial review of your paper as an independent expert panel that is giving you critical feedback. Although the tedious process of rewriting and resubmitting can be frustrating, reviewers often notice things that escaped your focused lens. They can provide comments that make your article more broadly applicable and readable to a larger audience, so try to see reviews as a refining process rather than an assault on your efforts. Even if that is not the intention of the reviewers, they have given you points for improvement for the next submission.

PEARL No. 10

A Word About Plagiarism—Be Careful About Your Source of Wording

“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research,” said the playwright Wilson Mizner.

I have intentionally quoted many authors in this article, but I have credited them all. Plagiarism is not new, but it is arguably easier with the Internet and copy-and-paste computer functions. Resist the intellectually lazy route. Engage your project; put your own thoughts and words on the page. It is okay to use others’ ideas, but always give proper credit. Remember that many journals are now using plagiarism detection software.

Section Editor Sumit “Sam“ Garg, MD, is the medical director, vice chair of clinical ophthalmology, and an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. He also serves on the ASCRS Young Physicians and Residents Clinical Committee and is involved in residents’ and fellows’ education. Dr. Garg may be reached at [email protected] .

Winston D. Chamberlain, MD, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and the chief of the Division of Cornea and Refractive Surgery at the Casey Eye Institute, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland. Dr. Chamberlain may be reached at [email protected] .

1. Ndebele P. The Declaration of Helsinki, 50 years later. JAMA. 2013;310(20):2145-2146.

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SPECIAL ARTICLE

A string of pearls: lessons for medical writing and submitting for publication.

Christy J.W. Ledford, PhD

PRiMER. 2020;4:1.

Published: 1/13/2020 | DOI: 10.22454/PRiMER.2020.574980

In family medicine, we talk about clinical pearls—clinically-relevant lessons we learn through experience or observation. Clinical pearls are small bits of information that are freestanding and self-contained. 1 That concept also translates to medical writing and publishing. The primary objective of publishing research is to share your findings with the scientific community—your peers. 2 Sharing your work, whether it was a successful patient intervention or you disproved a clinical hypothesis, is an important step in building the evidence base. Through publication, you help your peers see what has already been discovered or tried; it enables them to take the next step or to know what not to do in their own work. The submission and review process also enables continuous improvement of research quality as you receive critical feedback from your peers.

In 2016, Dr Alan Blum, professor and the Gerald Leon Wallace, MD, Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama, set out to collect pearls about writing and submitting articles to medical journals from the editors in our discipline. As a former editor himself ( Medical Journal of Australia and New York State Journal of Medicine ), he recognized a growing need for mentoring junior faculty, fellows, and residents in this essential but daunting part of academic life. Blum interviewed four editors of journals in family medicine to reach beyond the standard instructions to authors 3 and discover what elements of the hidden curriculum 4 exist in medical writing and editing.

The Editors

Teachers of family medicine look to peer-reviewed journals to learn about advances in the field and to share their own discoveries of how to improve our discipline. Each of these journals is led by an editor who plays multiple roles in the review and publishing process.

The editors interviewed for this project included:

Marjorie A. Bowman, MD, MPA Editor, Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine , 2003–present

Christopher P. Morley, PhD Editor in Chief, Peer-reviewed Reports in Medical Education Research (PRiMER) , 2017–present

John Saultz, MD Editor in Chief, Family Medicine , 2010–present

Kurt Stange, MD, PhD Editor, Annals of Family Medicine , 2002–2019

The editor plays three roles through the review process: gatekeeper, curator, and shepherd. As gatekeeper, an editor controls what appears in print by selecting which manuscripts are forwarded for peer review. 5 The role of gatekeeper is important for quality control. Editors protect reviewer time by only advancing complete, audience-appropriate papers through the review process. Editors also play the role of a curator, who carefully selects and organizes the intellectual ideas of a discipline. In describing a journal’s purpose, Saultz said, “a medical journal done properly is the diary of an intellectual or scholarly community.” Through guiding and directing authors in how to improve their work, editors also play the role of a shepherd. It is in this spirit that the following five pearls, distilled from the editor interviews, provide lessons for authors as they seek to share their work.

Pearl 1: Read the Literature

The first step in researching or practicing evidence-based medicine is reading the literature. 6 Bowman reported that “[the American Board of Family Medicine] encourages the people who are doing board certification to read journals and to participate in research.” Reading spurs your own creative thought and ability to write research questions. Spending time in the literature also immerses you in the structure and function of medical writing. 7

When you read current literature, you not only learn what investigators are contributing to the evidence base, you also see where gaps remain and what additional question needs to be asked. Saultz said, “My number one frustration is how badly read the field is. The main reason we reject papers is inadequate literature.” Your manuscript demonstrates how well you have read the literature. Include references that (1) provide background and support the rationale for the study in the introduction, and (2) situate your findings in a larger context in the discussion. Saultz is not alone; research shows that reviewers rank incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated review of the literature as one of the top 10 reasons a manuscript is rejected. 8 Maggio and colleagues provide concrete advice on writing a literature review throughout the research process. 9

Pearl 2: Work With a Team

The practice and teaching of family medicine relies on a team of clinical and educational professionals working together. 10 Writing for family medicine is no different. Research and writing is a complex undertaking that requires a variety of experiences and skills. 11 Bowman commented on the team nature of publications, “We have had lots of papers that are interdisciplinary, with authors who are anthropologists, sociologists, or mental health professionals.” Morley encouraged:

"This isn’t something you have to do on your own, nor should it be something you have to do on your own. Work in teams, find the collaboration you need, find the skill sets you need to build a team, and find the mentorship you need, because it is worth it and can build a whole new aspect to your professional life."

Writing in teams provides key opportunities for mentorship. 12 As faculty members develop and mature, they should move into mentor roles in writing teams. Saultz urged:

"You should stop writing papers on your own and start writing papers with young people… what I want to see is the number of single-author publications by assistant professors, and especially single-author publications by full and associate professors, to stop because if you are involving the young people in the department in your work, then everything gets leveraged and they learn habits from you that they can then teach to other people downstream."

Pearl 3: Target Journals When Submitting Papers

In any communication, a prime directive is: target your audience. 13,14 When researchers are ready to share their findings, they need to ask who needs this new information. 15 Each medical journal has aims and a scope—these help define the journal's audience. After you write the first draft of your manuscript, visit the website of potential target journals, and consider how well your manuscript aligns with each journal’s stated aims and scope. Stange summarized:

"I think there is a lot of overlap in all the journals, and all of them want to have the article that the clinician can use for the next patient they see in family practice… Family Medicine certainly is the place that publishes educational research, so we [ Annals ] tend to not do that. We don’t do case reports, but the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine does."

As the newest journal in family medicine, PRiMER provides an outlet for junior authors to share short articles about small studies. Morley elaborated, “The real focus is on original research about medical education specific to primary care. We want to make it an educational journal. We also want student and resident authors.”

In describing the complementary nature of the journals of family medicine, Saultz distinguished them by audience and purpose:

"For us [ Family Medicine ], the community that most of our papers is trying to communicate with is people who teach family medicine or one of the other primary care disciplines for a living. That is our core group. The readership of [ JABFM ] is the diplomates of the Board… Annals should be the cutting-edge research journal in primary care perhaps for the world and certainly for the western hemisphere."

Bowman echoed that description, “We are geared to what works for the clinical family physician and concurrently improve research in the field.”

Pearl 4: Learn From the Reviews You Receive, Make the Paper Better, and Try Again

After you submit a manuscript to a journal, if the editor decides the paper is a good fit for the journal, the editor sends it out for peer review. A scientific peer review is not like a grade—it’s not about passing or failing. Peer review is about finding out from your target audience what’s missing in your paper and how it can be better. One question they address is novelty. Saultz pointed out, “The peer review process is about your colleagues in your field who have expertise in that field determining whether your ideas are new and valid.”

Sometimes reviewers identify methodologic flaws that can only be fixed by collecting new data or running another analysis. But an editor’s decision to “revise and resubmit” provides feedback on how to better tell your story. 16 Editors use decision letters to help you. As Stange explained, “I try to frame things in terms of not as much criticism as why we didn’t accept it but as suggestions as to what they might do if they want to do something to improve it before they send it to another journal.”

Editors pay attention to who authors are and how they can help develop their skills. Bowman shared her approach:

"When we get papers from residents or medical students with a faculty member coauthor, I either write a review myself or get the paper reviewed even if we are pretty certain that it won’t hit the mark to get published. This is so that they get feedback on their papers. This is our mentorship."

Pearl 5: Be a Reviewer

When you review an article, you look for how the manuscript describes what we already know and how this manuscript will contribute to and extend that knowledge. 17 Too frequently in our own writing, we make mental assumptions that prevent us from seeing what’s missing in our work. The more you perform reviews for manuscripts, the more easily you can look at your own writing through a reviewer’s lens. You begin to anticipate what a reviewer might ask and include that information before you submit.

The peer review process relies on a community of peers. 18 This group of editors recognized that our discipline needs more experienced reviewers. Bowman said, “Trying to find people who know the subject area well enough on all the topics that we receive is not easy.” And it is not just about subject matter expertise. When those who receive their own reviews are writing reviews for others, a virtuous cycle is created, in which reviewers and authors edify each other to build a strong evidence base. Saultz observed, “There isn’t a sense of community if there is not peer review.”

Acknowledgments

Melani Harrell , Department of Family, Internal, and Rural Medicine of the University of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa, gave her time to transcribe the interviews.

Disclaimer : The views expressed within this publication represent those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the US Government, or the Department of Defense at large.

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Lead Author

Affiliations: Department of Family Medicine, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD

Corresponding Author

Correspondence: Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Department of Family Medicine, 4301 Jones Bridge Road, A1040U, Bethesda, MD 20814. 301-295-0703. Fax: 301-295-3100.

Email: [email protected]

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Marx and Engels On Literature and Art

Source : Marx Engels On Literature and Art . Progress Publishers. Moscow 1976; Transcribed : by Andy Blunden .

This volume offers the reader a selection of both excerpts and complete works and letters by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, giving their views on art and its place in society. Though it contains far from all that was written by the founders of scientific communism on this subject, it will nevertheless acquaint the reader with Marx’s and Engels’ most important ideas about artistic work.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had an excellent knowledge of world art and truly loved literature, classical music, and painting. In their youth both Marx and Engels wrote poetry; in fact Engels at one time seriously contemplated becoming a poet.

They were well acquainted not only with classical literature, but also with the works of less prominent and even of little known writers both among their contemporaries and those who lived and worked in more distant times. They admired Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dickens, Fielding, Goethe, Heine, Cervantes, Balzac, Dante, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, and mentioned many other less famous people who had also made their mark in the history of literature. They also displayed a great love for popular art, for the epics of various nations and other types of folklore: songs, tales, fables and proverbs.

Marx and Engels made extensive use of the treasures of world literature in their own works., Their repeated references to literary and mythological figures, and use of aphorisms, comparisons and direct quotations, masterfully woven into their works, are a distinctive feature of their style. The writings of Marx and Engels are notable not only for profundity of content, but also for their exceptional artistic merits. Wilhelm Liebknecht gave high praise to Marx’s style, citing his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as an example. “If ever hatred, scorn and passionate love of liberty were expressed in burning, devastating, lofty words,” wrote Liebknecht, “it is in The Eighteenth Brumaire, which combines the indignant severity of a Tacitus with the deadly satire of a Juvenal and the holy wrath of a Dante. Style here is the stilus that it was of old in the hand of the Romans, a sharp stiletto, used to write and to stab. Style is a dagger which strikes unerringly at the heart” ( Reminiscences of Marx and Engels , Moscow, 1956, p. 57).

Marx and Engels used artistic imagery to express their thoughts more forcefully and vividly in their journalistic and polemical works, and even in their fundamental theoretical works such as Capital and Anti-D�hring. Marx’s pamphlet Herr Vogt, directed against Karl Vogt who was slandering the proletarian party, is one of the most striking examples. The biting sarcasm of this pamphlet is particularly effective due to the author’s skilful use of works by classical writers such as Virgil, Plautus, and Persius, by the medieval German poets Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach, and also by such classics of world literature as Balzac, Dickens, Schiller and Heine.

Their superb knowledge of world art helped Marx and Engels to elaborate genuinely scientific aesthetic principles. The founders of scientific communism were thus not only able to answer the complex aesthetic questions of the previous age, but also to elaborate a fundamentally new system of aesthetic science. They did so only as a result of the great revolutionary upheaval they had brought about in philosophy by creating dialectical and historical materialism and laying down the foundations for the materialist conception of history. Though Marx and Engels have left no major writings on art, their views in this field, when collected together, form a harmonious whole which is a logical extension of their scientific and revolutionary Weltanschauung. They explained the nature of art and its paths of development, its tasks in society and social aims. Marxist aesthetics, like the whole teaching of Marx and Engels, are subordinated to the struggle for the communist reorganisation of society.

When developing their theory of aesthetics, Marx and Engels naturally based themselves on the achievements of their predecessors. But the main aesthetic problems — and above all the problem of the relationship between art and reality — were solved by them in a fundamentally new way, on the basis of materialist dialectics. Idealist aesthetics considered art as a reproduction of the ideal, standing over and* above actual reality. The origin of any art form, its development, flowering, and decay, all remained incomprehensible to the art theoreticians and historians of the pre-Marxian period, inasmuch as they studied these in isolation from man’s social existence.

Marx and Engels considered it absolutely impossible to understand art and literature proceeding only from their internal laws of development. In their opinion, the essence, origin, development, and social role of art could only be understood through analysis of the social system as a whole, within which the economic factor — the development, of productive forces in complex interaction with production relations — plays the decisive role. Thus art, as defined by Marx and Engels, is one of the forms of social consciousness and it therefore follows that the reasons for its changes should be sought in the social existence of men.

Marx and Engels revealed the social nature of art and its development in the course of history and showed that in a society with class antagonisms it was influenced by class ‘contradictions and by the politics and ideologies of particular classes.

Marx and Engels gave a materialist explanation of the origin of the aesthetic sense itself. They noted that man’s artistic abilities, his capacity for perceiving the world aesthetically, for comprehending its beauty and for creating works of art appeared as a result of the long development of human society and were the product of man’s labour. As early as in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 , Marx pointed to the role of labour in the development of man’s capacity to perceive and reproduce the beautiful and to form objects also “in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1975, p. 277).

This idea was later developed by Engels in his work Dialectics of Nature, in which he noted that efforts of toil “have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini” (see pp. 128-29 of this book). Thus both Marx and Engels emphasise that man’s aesthetic sense is not an inborn, but a socially-acquired quality.

The founders of Marxism extended their dialectical view of the nature of human thought to analysis of artistic creativity. In examining the development of art together with that of the material world and the history of society, they noted that the content and forms of art were not established firmly once and for all, but that they inevitably developed and changed according to definite laws along with the development of the material world and of human society. Each historical period has inherent aesthetic ideals and produces works of art corresponding to its particular character and unrepeatable under other conditions. Comparing, for example, the works of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, Marx and Engels emphasised that “Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice” (p. 177).

The fact that the level of development of society and its social structure determine the content of artistic works and the prevalence of any particular literary or artistic genre was seen by Marx as the main reason that art in different periods never repeats itself and, in particular, that there was no possibility to create the mythology or epic poetry similar to those of the ancient Greeks under the conditions of the nineteenth century. “Is the conception of nature and of social relations which underlies Greek imagination and therefore Greek (art),” wrote Marx, “possible when there are self-acting mules, railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs?” (p. 83).

It goes without saying that Marxism has a far from open-and-shut understanding of the relations between the forms of social consciousness (and of art in particular) and their economic basis. For Marx and Engels, any social formation constituted a complex and dynamic system of interacting elements, each influencing the other — a system in which the economic factor is the determining one only in the final analysis. They were in no way inclined to qualify art as a passive product of the economic system. On the contrary, they emphasised that the various forms of social consciousness — including, of course, artistic creation — actively influence the social reality from which they emerge.

As if to forestall sociological vulgarisations of the problems of artistic creation, Marx and Engels drew attention to the fact that social life and the ideology of particular classes are reflected in art in a far from mechanistic manner. Artistic creativity is subordinate to the general laws of social development but, being a special form of consciousness, has its own distinctive features and specific patterns.

One of art’s distinctive features is its relative independence as it develops. The fact that works of art are connected historically with particular social structures does not mean that they lose their significance when these social structures disappear. On this point Marx cites the art and epic poetry of the ancient Greeks which “still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal” (p. 84). He also provides a profound explanation for this phenomenon: Greek art reflected the naive and at the same time healthy, normal perception of reality characteristic of mankind in those early stages of its development, the period of its childhood; it reflected the striving for “natural veracity,” with its unique attractiveness and special charm for all (p. 84).

This example expresses an important Marxist aesthetic principle: in looking at works of art as basically reflections of particular social conditions and relationships, it is imperative also to see the features that make the lasting value of these works.

Marx and Engels considered as another particular feature of art the fact that its periods of upsurge do not automatically coincide with social progress in other fields, including that of material production. Thus Marx wrote in the Introduction to his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858: “ As regards art, it is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure” (p. 82 of this book). Marx and Engels saw the reason for this imbalance between the development of art and of society as a whole in the fact that the spiritual culture of any period is determined not only by the level of development of material production — the “material basis” of society — but also by the character of the social relations peculiar to that period. In other words, such factors as the specific character of social relations, the degree of development of class antagonisms and the existence in any period of specific conditions for the development of man’s individuality, all have an important bearing on art, determining its nature and development.

As far as capitalist society is concerned, this imbalance, according to Marx and Engels, must be considered as an expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction, the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private form of appropriation. From his analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, Marx draws a conclusion which is of extraordinary importance for aesthetics, namely that “capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry” (p. 141). This proposition in no way denies the development of literature and art under capitalism, but means that the very nature of the capitalist system of exploitation is in profound contradiction with the humanist ideals which inspire genuine artists. The more conscious artists are of the contradiction, between their ideals and the capitalist reality, the louder and clearer do their works (often despite the class origin of the very author) protest against the inhumanity of capitalist relations. Bourgeois society’s hostility towards art begets, even in bourgeois literature, criticism of capitalism in one form or another, with capitalist reality being depicted as one filled with tragic collisions. This, in Marx’s and Engels’ opinion, is a dialectical feature of the development of art under capitalism. It is for this very reason that bourgeois society has produced Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac and other writers of genius who were capable of rising above their epoch and class environment and condemning with immense artistic power the vices of the capitalist system of exploitation.

In their works, Marx and, Engels set forth a number of profound ideas on the class nature of art in a society of antagonisms. They showed that even great writers, who were able, often despite their own class positions, to give a true and vivid picture of real life, were, in a class society, pressured by the ideas and interests of the ruling classes and frequently made serious concessions to these in their works. Taking Goethe, Schiller, Balzac, and other writers as examples, Marx and Engels found that the contradictions peculiar to them were not the result of purely individual features of their psychological make-up, but an ideological reflection of real contradictions in the life of society.

The founders of Marxism emphasised that art was an important weapon in the ideological struggle between classes. It could reinforce just as it could undermine the power of the exploiters, could serve to defend class oppression or, on the contrary, contribute to the education and development of the consciousness of the toiling masses, bringing them closer to victory over their oppressors. Marx and Engels therefore called for a clear distinction to be made between progressive and reactionary phenomena in feudal and bourgeois culture and put forward the principle of the Party approach to art that it be evaluated from the position of the revolutionary class.

While showing that a link existed between art and the class struggle, Marx and Engels always fought against attempts to schematise this problem. They pointed out that classes were not static and unchangeable but that class interrelationships changed in the course of history, the role of the classes in the life of society undergoing complex metamorphoses. Thus, in the period of struggle against feudalism, the bourgeoisie was able to create considerable spiritual values, but having come to power as a result of the anti-feudal revolutions, it gradually began to reject the very weapon it had itself forged in the struggle against feudalism. The bourgeoisie accomplishes this break with its revolutionary past when a new force appears on the historical arena — the proletariat. Under these conditions, attempts by individual members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, in particular cultural and artistic figures, to gain a deeper understanding of reality, to go beyond the framework of bourgeois relations and express their protest against these in some art form, inevitably lead them to conflicts with official bourgeois society and to their departure from bourgeois positions.

Marx and Engels apply their dialectical and materialist theory of knowledge to analysis of art and literature. In their opinion, artistic creation is one of the ways of reflecting reality and, at the same time, of perceiving and apprehending it; it is also one of the strongest levers of influencing the spiritual development of humanity. This approach to art forms the basis of the materialist understanding of its social importance and prominent role in the progress of society.

Naturally enough, when examining literature and art, Marx and Engels concentrated their attention on the problem of realism — the most accurate depiction of reality in an artistic work.

They considered realism, as a trend in literature and a method of artistic creation, to be the supreme achievement of world art. Engels formulated what is generally recognised as the classical definition of realism. “Realism, to my mind,” he wrote, “implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (p. 90). Realistic representation, Marx and Engels emphasised, is by no means a mere copy of reality, but a way of penetrating into the very essence of a phenomenon, a method of artistic generalisation that makes it possible to disclose the typical traits of a particular age. This is what they valued in the work of the great realist writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin and others. Marx described the English realists of the 19th century — Dickens, Thackeray, the Bront�s, and Gaskell — as a brilliant pleiad of novelists “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together” (p. 339). Engels developed a similar line of thought when analysing the works of the great French realist writer Balzac. Writing about the Com�die humaine, he noted that Balzac gave the reader “a most wonderfully realistic history of French society ... from which, even in economic details (for instance the re-arrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (p. 91).

Marx and Engels set out some very important ideas about realism in their letters to Lassalle in the spring of 1859, in which they sharply criticise his historical drama Franz von Sickingen dealing with the knights’ rebellion of 1522-23, on the eve of the Peasant War in Germany. These two letters are of great. significance because they contain a statement of the fundamental principles of Marxist aesthetics (pp. 98-107).

Marx’s and Engels’ demands on the artist include truthfulness of depiction, a concrete historical approach to the events described and personages with live and individual traits reflecting typical aspects of the character and psychology of the class milieu to which they belong. The author of genuinely realistic works communicates his ideas to the reader not by didactic philosophising, but by vivid images which affect the reader’s consciousness and feelings by their artistic expressiveness. Marx and Engels considered that Lassalle had carried even further some of the weaknesses in the artistic method of the great German poet and playwright Schiller — in particular his penchant for abstract rhetoric, which resulted in his heroes becoming abstract and one-dimensional declaimers of certain ideas. In this regard they preferred Shakespeare’s realism to Schiller’s method. Both pointed out to Lassalle that, in imitating Schiller, he was forgetting the importance for the realist writer to* combine depth of content and lofty ideals with efforts to achieve a Shakespearian ability to depict genuine passions and the multiple facets of the human character.

In their letters to Lassalle, Marx and Engels also touched upon the question of the links between literature and life, between literature and the’ present day. Marx by no means condemned Lassalle for his intention to draw an analogy between the events of the 16th century described in the play and the situation in the mid-19th century, and to bring out the truly tragic collision which “spelled the doom ... of the revolutionary party of 1848-1849” (p. 98). He saw the author’s mistake in his incorrect, idealistic interpretation of this collision, in the reduction of the reasons for it to the allegedly age-old abstract “tragedy of revolution,” which lacks any concrete historical or class content. Marx criticised Lassalle not for the political tendency of his drama, but for the fact that it was essentially mistaken from the point of view of the materialist conception of history and of the world outlook of the proletarian revolutionaries. Marx and Engels were highly critical of attempts to place literature above politics and of the theory of “art for art’s sake.” They insisted that the works of realist writers should reflect a progressive world outlook, be permeated with progressive ideas and deal with truly topical problems. It was in this sense that they welcomed tendentiousness in literature, interpreted as ideological and political partisanship. “I am by no means opposed to tendentious poetry as such,” wrote Engels to the German writer Minna Kautsky on November 26, 1885. ‘Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, all write with a purpose” (p. 88). Marx and Engels were at the same time resolute opponents of stupid tendentiousness — bare-faced moralising, didacticism instead of artistic method, and abstract impersonations instead of live characters. They criticised the poets in the “Young Germany” literary movement for the artistic inferiority of their characters and attempts to make up for their lack of literary mastery with political arguments. Engels provides an apt definition of genuine tendentiousness in his letter to Minna Kautsky: “I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes” (p. 88).

Both Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that progressive literature had to reflect truthfully the deep-lying, vital processes of the day, to promulgate progressive ideas, and to defend the interests of the progressive forces in society. The modern term the Party spirit in literature expresses what they understood by this. They felt that the very quality that was lacking in Lassalle’s play — the organic unity of idea and artistry — was the sine qua non of genuinely realistic art.

In setting out the principles of materialist aesthetics and the fundamental and most general laws governing the development of art, the founders of scientific communism laid the basis of Marxist literary and art criticism and proposed the primary tenets of the materialist interpretation of the history of art and literature. In their works and correspondence, they threw new light on the most important questions of the historical and literary process and revealed such aspects in the works of both classical and contemporary writers which were beyond the comprehension of bourgeois literary historians. In the present collection, the reader will find Marx’s and Engels’ views of the artistic works of the most important ages in mankind’s history — their evaluation of art in ancient and medieval times, of Renaissance culture and literature, of literature in the period of the Enlightenment, and, finally, of the work of the romantic and realist writers of the 19th century. In addition, the reader will discover the attitude of the founders of Marxist aesthetics towards the main literary and artistic trends in general and their opinions on individual writers and other artists.

Marx’s and Engels’ view of ancient art has already been discussed briefly above. Let us now turn to their evaluation of the art of other ages.

Their genuinely scientific explanation of the specific features of the social system and culture of medieval times is of exceptional interest. Marx and Engels stripped away the romantic idealisation of the Middle Ages and, at the same time, demonstrated the inconsistency of the abstract view held by the Enlighteners that this was merely an age of social and cultural regression. They pointed out that the transition from slave-owning to feudal society was historically inevitable and showed that the establishment of the feudal mode of production was a step forward in the development of human society, compared to the reign of slavery which had preceded it. This enabled Marx and Engels to form a new approach to medieval culture and art and point out those features in them which reflected the progressive course of historical development. Engels wrote that “. . as a result of the intermingling of nations in the early Middle Ages new nationalities gradually developed” (Marx/Engels, Werke, Bd. 21, S. 395), the appearance of which was a prerequisite for further social and cultural development of mankind. Analysing various epic poems of the early Middle Ages such as the Elder Edda and other Icelandic and Irish sagas, Beowulf, the Lay of Hildebrand and the Chanson de Roland, Marx and Engels showed that they reflected the gradual transition from the earliest stages of the tribal system to new levels of social consciousness connected with the early period of the formation of European nationalities. The epic and national-heroic poetry of the Middle Ages is notable, as Engels pointed out, for characteristics which show their new cultural-historical and aesthetic quality, as compared with the classical epic poetry of the ancient world. The same also applies to the later lyric poetry of the feudal Middle Ages — the medieval romance lyrics, best exemplified by the works of the Provencal troubadours. In his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Engels wrote that “no such thing as individual sex love existed before the Middle Ages” (p. 215). For this reason, he said, the appearance and poetic glorification of individual love in the Middle Ages was a step forward compared to antiquity. Moreover, the medieval love poems influenced the following generations and prepared the ground for the flowering of poetry in the modern age.

Marx and Engels formulated and substantiated a new view of the Renaissance, one which differed radically from the views of earlier bourgeois cultural historians and also in many ways from those of contemporary and later bourgeois historiography. This new understanding of the basic historical meaning of the Renaissance in Western Europe was presented by Engels in its most developed form in 1875-76 in one of his versions for the Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature (pp. 251-53). Engels emphasised that, contrary to the traditional view of bourgeois science, the Renaissance must not be seen as merely an upheaval in the ideological and spiritual life of the times. The origins of this new age, he states, should be sought above all in the economic and political. changes that brought about the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Engels penetrated to the very essence of the phenomena which made possible the immense leap forward in the culture, literature and art of that period, some achievements of which remained unequal led even in the more mature bourgeois society. The art of the Renaissance, as Engels noted, developed not in a period of already settled bourgeois society but “in the midst of the general revolution” (Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, 1974, p. 21). Social relations were at that time in a state of constant flux and change and had not yet become, as they did in mature bourgeois society, a force which to a certain extent limited the development of personal initiative, talent and capabilities but, on the contrary, actively contributed to their development. Because of its revolutionary character this age, the one of “the greatest progressive revolution that mankind had so far experienced,” stated Engels, “called for giants and produced giants ... in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and learning.” This is why “the men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations” (pp. 252-53).

Engels also noted that “the heroes of that time were not yet in thrall to the division of labour, the restricting effects of which, with its production one-sidedness, we so often notice in their successors” (p. 253). To clarify his idea, Engels described Leonardo da Vinci who “was not only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanic and engineer, to whom the most diverse branches of physics are indebted for important discoveries” and reviewed the work of Albrecht D�rer, a “painter, engraver, sculptor, and architect” and inventor of a fortification system. Engels also pointed to the great diversity of interests and erudition of other Renaissance figures (p. 253).

Marx’s and Engels’ evaluation of the Renaissance as an age of “the general revolution,” “the greatest progressive revolution,” explains the warm sympathy they felt for the “giants” of that age. They saw the great men of the Renaissance not just as outstanding scholars, artists, or poets, but, at the same time, as great revolutionaries in world science and culture.

Engels considered the most important trait of the heroes of the Renaissance to be that “they almost all live And pursue their activities in the midst of the contemporary movements, in the practical struggle; they take sides and join in the fight, one by speaking and writing, another with the sword, many with both” (p. 253). It is not difficult to see that this was also what Engels expected of the artists of the future. Referring to the ability of the people of the Renaissance to live by the interests of their time, to “take sides,” Engels emphasised those traits which lifted them above the level of the professionally narrow, armchair science of the bourgeoisie, and above the level of the 19th-century bourgeois writers and artists who preached “non-partisanship” and “pure art.” These traits brought the great men of the Renaissance closer to the ideals of socialist culture and of the revolutionary movement of the working class.

Marx and Engels considered Dante one of the great writers whose works announced the transition from the

Middle Ages to the Renaissance. They saw him as a poet and thinker of genius and, at the same time, as an inflexible warrior whose poetic works were infused with Party spirit (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, Moscow! 1976, p. 271) and were inseparable from his political ideals and aspirations. According to Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx knew the Divina Commedia almost by heart and would often declaim whole sections of it aloud. Marx’s “Introduction” to Capital in fact ends with the great Florentine’s proud words: “Go your own way, and let people say what they will!” The author of Capital placed Dante among his most beloved poets — Goethe, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare. Engels called Dante a person of “unequalled classic perfection” (p. 247) and “a colossal figure” (p. 248). Marx and Engels held the great Spanish writer Cervantes in high esteem too. Paul Lafargue noted that Marx set the author of Don Quixote, together with Balzac, “above all other novelists” (p. 439). Finally, Marx’s and Engels’ admiration for Shakespeare, one of their most beloved writers, is known to all. Both considered his plays with their far-ranging depiction of the life of his time and their immortal characters to be classical examples of realist drama. Lafargue wrote that Marx “made a detailed study” of Shakespeare’s works. “His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist” (p. 438). Engels shared his friend’s views on Shakespeare. On December 10, 1873, he wrote to Marx. “There is more life and reality in the first act of the Merry Wives than in all German literature” (p. 260).

The most important comment by the founders of scientific communism about classicism, the literary movement of the 17th-18th centuries, was made by Marx in a letter to Lassalle on July 22, 1861 (p. 269). On the basis of a materialist understanding of the development of culture, Marx in his letter rejected the unhistorical idea that classicism was the result of a misunderstanding of the laws of classical drama and of classical aesthetics, with their famous principle of the three unities. He pointed out that, though the theoreticians of classicism had misunderstood classical Greek drama and Aristotle’s Poetics, this was no accident or a misunderstanding of history, but a historical inevitability. Classicist playwrights “misunderstood” Aristotle because the “misunderstood” Aristotle corresponded exactly to their taste in art and their aesthetic requirements, formed by the specific social and cultural conditions of the time.

Unlike previous historians of culture who were unable to understand the class content of ideas, Marx and Engels uncovered the social, class-historical basis of the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment. They showed that the Enlightenment was not just a movement in social thought, but an ideological expression of the interests of the progressive bourgeoisie, which was rising up to struggle against feudal absolutism on the eve of the Great French Revolution.

Marx and Engels held in high esteem the heritage of the English and French 18th-century Enlighteners including their fiction and works on aesthetics. Their comprehensive analysis of the activity of the Enlighteners explains its close links with the life of society and the class struggle during the preparation for the French bourgeois revolution and draws a line between the moderately bourgeois and the democratic elements in their heritage.

Marx’s and Engels’ works and letters show that they had a superb knowledge of both English and French philosophical and economic literature and fiction of the age of the Enlightenment. They do not merely mention Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, the Abb� Pr�vost, Beaumarchais, but give laconic and at the same time brilliantly profound and accurate evaluations of them, while also using their works to draw generalisations concerning the most important aspects of literary life in the age of the Enlightenment.

It should also be noted that Marx included Denis Diderot among his favourite writers. He delighted in Diderot’s novels, especially Le Neveu de Rameau, which he called a “unique masterpiece” (p. 279). Engels shared his friend’s

opinion on Diderot and wrote in 1886: “If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’ — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot, for instance” (p. 279).

Marx and Engels also wrote about the leading men of the Enlightenment in Germany — Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland. Revealing the economic and socio-political conditions in Germany, whose feudal division and reactionary small-power absolutist system had been hardened as a result of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), they showed that these conditions had made a definite mark on the ideas and feelings of the majority of the most prominent figures of the “great age of German literature” (p. 346). Together with the rebellious spirit and indignation at the social system of the time that were characteristic of German classical literature, it also reflected the feelings of the petty bourgeoisie (the predominating social stratum in Germany) whose inherent characteristic was admiration for and servility towards the powers that be. “Each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere,” Engels wrote about Goethe and Hegel, “yet neither of them ever quite freed himself from German Philistinism” (p. 349). In spotlighting not only the strong, but also the weaker points in Goethe, Schiller, and other German writers and thinkers of that period, Marx and Engels in no way sought to belittle their immense, world-wide importance. This is confirmed by Marx’s attitude towards Goethe, who, as already mentioned, was one of his most beloved poets. Contemporaries who knew Marx well stated that he was a constant reader of the great German poet’s works. In their writings and conversations, both Marx and Engels frequently quoted from Faust and other works by Goethe. In 1837 the young Marx, while still a student at Berlin University, wrote an epigram defending Goethe against the Lutheran pastor Pustkuchen, who was one of the leaders in the struggle of German reactionaries of the 1830s against the poet. Engels devoted one of his essays in literary criticism to an analysis of Goethe’s

work. This was “German Socialism in Verse and Prose” (pp. 361-74) in which he attacked the aesthetics of German philistine “true socialism.”

Marx’s and Engels’ analysis of West European romanticism is of great importance to the elaboration of a genuinely scientific history of literature. Considering romanticism a reflection of the age beginning after the Great French Revolution, of all its inherent social contradictions, they distinguished between revolutionary romanticism, which rejected capitalism and was striving towards the future, and romantic criticism of capitalism from the point of view of the past. They also differentiated between the romantic writers who idealised the pre-bourgeois social system: they valued those whose works concealed democratic and critical elements under a veneer of reactionary utopias and naive petty-bourgeois ideals, and criticised the reactionary romantics, whose sympathies for the past amounted to a defence of the interests of the nobility. Marx and Engels were especially fond of the ‘Works of such revolutionary romantics as Byron and Shelley.

Marx’s and Engels’ evaluation of the works of 19th-century realist writers has already been mentioned. Marx and Engels considered realist traditions to be the culmination of the whole of the previous literary process. Engels traced their development and enrichment in the works of Guy de Maupassant, of the creators of the Russian realist novel of the second half of the 19th century, and of Norway’s contemporary dramatists. Marx and Engels had a lively interest in Russia and attached great importance to the Russian revolutionary movement. To be better able to follow the development of the economic and social life of Russia, they both learnt Russian. They were well acquainted not only with socio-economic and journalistic writings in Russia, but also with the country’s fiction. They both read the works of Pushkin, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov in Russian, while Marx also read Gogol, Nekrasov, and Lermontov in the original. Engels was also acquainted with English translations of the works of Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Khemnitser, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, and Krylov. Marx and Engels thought Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to be an amazingly accurate depiction of Russian life in the first half of the 19th century. Both were especially fond of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. Engels considered these revolutionary writers “two socialist Lessings” (p. 414) and Marx called Chernyshevsky a “great Russian scholar and critic” (p. 415), while comparing Dobrolyubov “as a writer to Lessing and Diderot” (p. 415).

Characteristic of Marx and Engels was their profoundly internationalist approach to literature and art. They paid equal attention to the art of all nations, European and non, European, large and small, believing that every people makes its own unique contribution to the treasure-house of world art and literature. Their interests included the development of art and literature in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia as well as the artistic and cultural treasures of the East or of such small countries as Ireland, Iceland, and Norway. judging by their notes, the ancient cultures of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World also came within their field of vision.

Marx and Engels had a special attitude towards the democratic and revolutionary poets and writers who were close to the proletariat. Throughout their lives, they strove to draw the best progressive writers of their time to the side of the socialist movement and to educate and temper them, while helping them to overcome the weaker aspects of their work. Marx and Engels actively contributed to the formation of a proletarian revolutionary trend in literature.

Marx’s influence on the work of the great German revolutionary poet Heinrich Heine was immense. They met in Paris in 1843. The prime of Heine’s political lyrics and satire comes in 1843-44, when he was in close and friendly contact with Marx. Marx’s influence on Heine is clear in such remarkable works as his poems The Silesian Loom Workers and Germany. A Winter Tale. All his life Marx admired Heine, who was one of the favourite poets in Marx’s family. Engels was in complete agreement with his friend’s sympathies and considered Heine to be “the most eminent of all living German poets” (p. 375). In their struggle against German reaction, Marx and Engels often quoted from Heine’s bitingly satirical poems. Marx’s and Engels’ ideological influence played an exceptional role in Heine’s development as an artist and helped him to realise that the communist revolution would inevitably be victorious.

Marx and Engels were close friends of the German poets Georg Weerth and Ferdinand Freiligrath, with whom they worked side by side on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung during the revolution of 1848-1849, Engels called Weerth “the German proletariat’s first and most important poet” (p. 402). After Weerth’s death, Marx and Engels carefully collected his literary works. In the 1880s Engels vigorously promoted these in the German Social-Democratic press.

It was only thanks to ‘Marx’s and Engels’ influence that Freiligrath became, in 1848-49, one of the classics of German revolutionary poetry. His poems written at that time are closely linked to Marx’s and Engels’ ideas and are his best. The care and attention Marx and Engels showed for Freiligrath is a good example of their attitude towards revolutionary poets and of how they tried to help them in their noble cause. When Marx recommended Freiligrath to his comrade Joseph Weydemeyer, in 1852, for work on the journal Revolution, he specially asked Weydemeyer to write a friendly, praising letter to the poet to encourage him. It is no coincidence that Freiligrath’s importance as a poet began to decline as soon as he moved away from Marx and Engels in the 1850s.

Marx and Engels had close links with many French and English revolutionary writers, in particular with the Chartist leader Ernest Jones. His best poems, written in the latter 1840s, show the influence of Marx’s and Engels’ ideas.

After Marx’s death, Engels continued in the 1880s and 1890s to keep careful track of the revolutionary writings of those English authors who were ideologically close to the English socialist movement. This can be seen from Engels’ letter to the writer Margaret Harkness (pp. 89-92) who had sent him her short story “A Poor Girl,” his numerous comments about the plays of the English socialist Edward Aveling, and his notes on the ideological development of a number of other writers.

Important statements by Engels on the subject of proletarian art can also be found in his letters written toward the end of his life to German Social-Democratic leaders.

In this way, Marx and Engels strove to foster a new type of writer and artist who, assimilating the finest traditions of classical literature, would take an active, creative part in the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation, proceeding from a broad understanding of the experiences and the tasks of the revolutionary struggle.

This collection also contains valuable statements by Marx and Engels on the flowering of art in the future communist society. The founders of Marxism saw the contradictions in the development of art under capitalism as a manifestation of the antagonistic nature of bourgeois society as a whole and considered the solution of these problems to be possible only after the proletarian revolution and the social reorganisation of society.

Marx and Engels showed brilliant foresight in anticipating the basic traits of the new, communist society. Communism is above all true freedom for the all-round and harmonious development of the individual. “The realm of freedom,” said Marx, ‘actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases...” (p. 183).

Labour freed from exploitation becomes, under socialism, the source of all spiritual (and aesthetic) creativity. Marx and Engels point out that only given true economic, political, and spiritual freedom can man’s creative powers develop to the full and that only proletarian revolution offers unbounded opportunities of endless progress in the development of literature. The great historical mission of the proletariat consists in the communist rebuilding of the world. It was in the proletariat that Marx and Engels saw the social force which could change the world and provide for further progress not only in economics and politics, but also in culture, the force which would bring about the conditions required for the full realisation of mankind’s higher moral and aesthetic values.

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4.9. (8) $3.00. PDF. Twenty four definitions are listed as clues for this Crossword puzzle, requiring students to put in the vocabulary words. The words come directly from John Steinbeck's The Pearl. The Word Search is 38 items including character and setting details from The Pearl. KEYs are provided for each.
PDF A String of Pearls: Lessons for Medical Writing and Submitting for
the top 10 reasons a manuscript is rejected. Maggio and colleagues provide concrete advice on writing a literature review throughout the research process. Pearl 2: Work With a Team The practice and teaching of family medicine relies on a team of clinical and educational professionals working together. Writing for family medicine is no different.
Abraham Sutzkever
Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever was born on July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, now Smarhon, Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Omsk, Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother, Rayne (née Fainberg), moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder .
A String of Pearls: Lessons for Medical Writing and Submitting for
Pearl 2: Work With a Team. The practice and teaching of family medicine relies on a team of clinical and educational professionals working together. 10 Writing for family medicine is no different. Research and writing is a complex undertaking that requires a variety of experiences and skills. 11 Bowman commented on the team nature of ...
Marx and Engels On Literature and Art Preface.
Marx and Engels revealed the social nature of art and its development in the course of history and showed that in a society with class antagonisms it was influenced by class 'contradictions and by the politics and ideologies of particular classes. Marx and Engels gave a materialist explanation of the origin of the aesthetic sense itself.
La Pellegrina Pearl is One of the World's Most Lovely Pearls
For nearly a century there has been in Russia one of the most lovely pearls in the world; this is La Pellegrina Pearl, formerly owned by the Zozima brothers of Moscow, who were antiquarians of note in St. Petersburg. In 1818 a small book of forty-eight pages was written about this beautiful gem by G.Fisher de Waldheim, vice-president of the ...
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