Nick Jans '77
Alaska Northwest Books
Nick Jans '77's second book of essays, A Place Beyond: Finding Home in
Arctic Alaska, [book excerpt] solidifies his place as an insightful commentator on the
Alaskan north. Twenty-eight short narratives and some stunning black and white
photos depict Jans's adventures in the Brooks Range mountains, the changing
lives of the native Inupiat people among whom he lives, the hardships of Arctic
winter and the wonder of encounters with caribou, bountiful fish, Arctic wolves
and grizzly bears.
A Place Beyond, even more than his first book, The Last Light
Breaking (1993), is unsentimental about the last American frontier. Jans
describes frankly his own preference for jet-boats over canoes and his first
reaction on seeing Atlantic Richfield's facilities on the North Slope. The
sudden appearance of man-made clutter strewn wide across the wilderness
startled him. "But Prudhoe is the largest oil field in North America, and it
looks like what it is," he writes.
In his preface, Jans tell about his friend Clarence Wood, an Inupiat elder,
encountering thousands of caribou and repeating a single word, "lots." "The
longer I live here and write, the more I find myself following Clarence's
cue--turning to simpler words and fewer of them," Jans says. A Place
Beyond succeeds with spare prose and vivid images from one of the few
residents who writes well about living in the Arctic.
The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions
Laurie Osborne (English)
University of Iowa Press
Straddling textual criticism and theater history, Osborne's book discusses how
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night can be understood through various
interpretations, from early stage productions to contemporary videos.
Osborne contends that Twelfth Night and, by extension, any play, exists
not as an original but as a synthesis of its editions. She points out how
inconsistencies in early performance editions suggest that there is no
"original" Twelfth Night, but that a series of competing variations,
considered collectively, form the basis for scholarly criticism.
Debate about the origins of Twelfth Night and its historical place in
Shakespeare's work, Osborne says, is further evidence of the "multiplicity of
the text."
Uncertainty about differences in the early performance editions has
contributed to the acceptance of multiple versions and an unwillingness by
critics to disregard one over the other, she says.