New Year’s Resolutions: Some Lessons from Literature

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Now that the ball has dropped, the confetti has been swept away, and 2017 has arrived, it is time to put those New Year’s resolutions into effect. Easier said than done. For readers who seek help along the road to self-improvement, we offer some unconventional advice and context, gleaned from the digital pages of文学批评在线,对一些常见的决议。

Drink Less:If that New Year’s Day hangover is not enough to prove the importance of moderation in alcohol consumption, perhaps the short fiction of Raymond Carver—treated in SSC 213—will do the trick. Carver himself struggled with the bottle for much of his adult life, and his stories often deal with characters whose alcohol abuse leads to broken relationships, alienation, and family strife. All is not bleak and hopeless, however. As critic Frank Kovarik notes, Carver’s short story “If It Please You” concerns James Packer, a recovering alcoholic who takes up needlework to “overcome his desire for booze” and “fill up the time formerly devoted to drinking.” Packer “knits things that connect him to others’ lives—‘caps and scarves and mittens for the grandchildren,’ ‘two woolen ponchos which he and Edith wore when they walked on the beach,’ and an afghan that he and his wife sleep under.”

教训:失去一个副可能获得一个爱好的最好方法。

减肥:在努力摆脱了几磅,许多人会转而在新年节食。保持健康的体重是一个值得称赞的目标,但桑德拉TOMC在她的安妮·赖斯夜访吸血鬼覆盖在TCLC的分析解释238可以有黑暗的一面节食。她的散文“节食和诅咒”认为,赖斯的小说等同的与“住饥饿的行为”,“意识的膨胀成比例的身体diminishment。”这样的想法,她指出,随着女权主义学者的论点冲突:“对他们来说,节食是有害于女权主义的议程,因为,通过强迫妇女如此完全专注于自己的身体,它转移他们从他们的头脑更具政治建设性的培养。”

课:吃的健康,不要饿死自己,并不断撞击的书籍。

Quit Smoking: It is always a good time to turn away from tobacco use, but the deadly habit can prove difficult to kick. At the beginning of John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run, the unsatisfied eponymous protagonist is trying to quit smoking, and after a pickup basketball game he tosses a cigarette into a trash can before lighting it. As Richard G. Androne notes in CLC 278, “Updike associates Rabbit’s impulse to quit smoking with larger dissatisfaction and the vague desire to change his life, which had reached its zenith eight years ago when he was a high school basketball star.” Rabbit succeeds, for a time, in quitting, but not under the best circumstances: asked by his wife to pick up some cigarettes, he leaves the house and does not return for months. During his absence he refrains from smoking but engages in an affair; when he is finally reunited with his wife after she gives birth to their second child, he slips back into the habit. According to Androne, his renewed smoking “signals both restoration and decline: ‘The effect is somehow of a wafer of repentance and Rabbit accepts. His first drag, after so many clean months, unhinges his muscles and he has to sit down.’”

教训:采取一切手段放下香烟,但尝试了补丁而不是跟随兔子的路径。

尽管尽了最大的努力,许多人将无法履行决议。对于那些谁无法通过结出硕果,也许马克·吐温的话说,在领土企业印在1863年1月1日看到他们改善计划,会抚慰失利的刺痛:

昨天,大家抽着雪茄最后,把他的最后一杯,并发誓他最后的誓言。今天,我们是一个虔诚的模范社区。从现在起三十日内,我们将已铸就我们的改革,以风和去切割我们古老的缺点比以往大大缩短。

If nothing else, let us all resolve to approach the New Year with good humor.

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