Carvers father was a laborer and saw-sharpener, and his mother was a homemaker. His parents names were already literary material Clevie Raymond Carver and Ella Beatrice Casey. The author was born on May 25, 1938 in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, so the mythical material for a working-class writer was already there for the taking.
At heart, Ray Carver was a poet. His first two books were collections of poetry Near Klamath (1968) and Winter Insomnia (1970). The American literary marketplace, however, is not kind to poets, and if Carver had gone on writing only poetry he would not have achieved any measurable status. As a short-story writer, Carver is very much akin to Sherwood Anderson. Like his Anderson, Carvers characters are lower-middle class or lower class people who are marginal or isolated from the community. And the affect of a Carver story, just as with an Anderson tale, can be strange and unsettling. Most of Carvers stories are set in the Pacific Northwest, where he was born and raised by working-class parents. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver, a sawmill worker, taught the boy to fish and hunt, and entertained him by reading from Zane Grey novels. Shortly after graduating high school, Carver married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who was pregnant with the first of their two children. The couple struggled for many years, working odd jobs, and in the daytime Carver attended college he became serious about writing after taking a course taught by the late novelist John Gardner at Chico State College in California. A poet and recognized master of the short story, Carver published 10 books in a career shadowed by alcoholism, poverty, despair and a fractured marriage. His stories chronicled the lives of Americas working poor, and were effective---some critics contend---because that was a life Carver himself had known
Carver transferred to Californias Humboldt State College and continued to write, publishing his first poems and short stories while still a student there. He received his degree in 1963, packed up his family, and moved to Iowa to attend the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, but the money ran out after a year and the Carvers returned to California, where Raymond took a job as a hospital janitor.
In 1983, he quit teaching upon winning the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, which provided a tax-free stipend of 35,000 a year for five years. That same year he published a fifth story collection, Cathedral, to almost universal acclaim. In 1988, dying of cancer, Carver collected what he considered the best of his stories, plus seven new ones, in the collection Where Im Calling From. Shortly after that books publication he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
II Critic A
Robert Evans, an American writer examines and discusses the value of friendship in Hamlet. He also points out the role of friendship in the tragedy of Hamlet.
According to Evans, the of friendship is prevalent in Shakespeares works, from his comedies and romances to his histories and tragedies, and is personified in such pairs as Hamlet and Horatio of Hamlet, Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, and Hal and Falstaff in the Henry IV plays. Evans writes that much scholarly interest in the theme of Shakespearean friendship has been devoted to the dramatists treatment of the friendship-versus-love topos. According to Evans, a relatively common scheme in Renaissance literature, this pattern pits steadfast friends (usually males) against the threat of heterosexual union in marriage.
Evans states that as commentators have observed, marriage tends to win out in the end, but Shakespeare remains characteristically ambivalent as to whether love or friendship truly triumphs. And he added that this love-versus-friendship theme describes the central plot of one of Shakespeares early comedies, He also mentioned that the Two Gentlemen of Verona, as well as his late collaborative romance. He also added that Shakespeares detailed portrayals of false friendships have attracted the attention of scholars, most notably the fascinating relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff and the dramatists iconographic representation of false friendship in his late tragedy Timon of Athens.
Evans discusses that critics generally agree that Shakespeares most compelling and sustained depiction of friendship appears in the drama Hamlet. That having returned from Wittenberg to find his father dead and mother remarried to his uncle Claudius, Hamlet relies on the devoted friendship of Horatio and survives the poor advice of his dubious university companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Evans also provided the idea that critics have frequently contrasted the true and false friendships portrayed in the drama, and have endeavored to come to some final conclusion regarding Shakespeares musings on the subject of friendship in this tragic context.
Evan maintains that friendship constitutes a fundamental theme in the tragedy of Hamlet, one that is first articulated in the dramas opening scene and is sustained throughout. Evans also studies the relationships between Hamlet and Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Claudius, and Ophelia, as well as his friendships with other minor characters in the play. According to him, Horatio shows himself to be a true friend, while Claudiuss actions demonstrate that he is an isolated and self-serving figure, as are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He concludes by remarking on the tragic near-friendship of Hamlet and Laertes, observing that they wrongly battle one another not because they are enemies, but to prove whose love for Ophelia is greater.
Charlene Spretnak champions the cause of early Greek goddesses. Spretnak argues that prior to the establishment of the patriarchal Olympic mythological tradition, which developed after early Greece was invaded by the lonians, the Achaeans, and later by the Dorians, who took up residence from about 2500 to 1000 B.C., there existed an oral tradition firmly rooted in Goddess worship.
Spretnak notes that the goddesses were incorporated into the Olympian myths, they were transformed into jealous, disagreeable, sexual objects. Spretnaks Lost Goddesses of Early Greece retells of several very famous stories from Greco-Roman mythology the myths of Gaia, Pandora, Themis, Aphrodite, the triad of the Moon (Artemis, Selene, and Hecate), Hera, Athena, and Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Spretnak also presents the research that allowed her to draw these conclusions and create her reinterpretations of the ancient stories.zSpretnaks analysis of the Greek myths is based partly on the idea that many of the first deities worshipped by humans were female Goddesses (more on this hypothesis later). She claims that the Greek pantheon we know today is the merging of the mythology of several cultures that of the original matrifocal inhabitants of Greece, and that of the invading Ionians, Achaeans, and Dorians, who brought with them male gods, patriarchal religion and culture. Spretnak is the first writer to recreate the actual stories of the pre-Hellenic goddesses from history and classical writing. She takes full responsibility for her interpretations of the myths, and acknowledges that there is no way to truly reconstruct an ancient, unrecorded oral tradition. The telling of myth is a ritual creation of sacred space. Reading a myth to oneself or hearing it spoken in a ritual setting draws ones consciousness into a field of relationship that places all participants --- the engaged witness, the narrator, the principals of the sacred story --- in deep accord with the life processes of the unfolding universe. Myth is sacred narrative evoked by a totemic presence, a manifestation or empowered bearer of cosmic energies. The more a narrative evolves in elaborations distant from the totemic presence, the more it loses vitality and may fade in time to formulaic allegory. The sacred stories of the Goddess are replete with such totemic animals --- bears, owls, serpents, deer, and spiders --- but clearly the remarkable allure of Goddess myths in disparate eras and cultures results from the fact that the body of the Goddess is itself a totemic presence.
This passage leads nicely into an idea alluded to earlier the idea that all religion was originally Goddess-centered, which is often tied to theories that human culture was originally matriarchal. While the abundance of female figurines found in paleolithic and neolithic archaeology suggests that Goddess-worship may have played an important role in many cultures, The ancient matriarchies hypothesis is even more controversial, although it was very popular in historical, paleontological, and anthropological academic work for a time.
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