The Politics of Henry James
Each great writer acquires an image that owes its energies to certain felt airs and essences associated with his creative imagination. The cut and quality of that imagination, its character and code, its reach and ambit, finally determine its dynamics. The image is uniquely answerable to such a dialectic; it sustains itself through a certain "chemistry" of effects, and, at times, through a certain aesthetic "mysticism." In short, it attains, en route, an unmistakable ambience. Considered thus, Henry James figures to the responding imagination as a writer of such rare refinements, subtleties and felicities as to become in the end a kind of vintage wine to be taken in slow, measured draughts. To be sure, his fastidiousness has in some later tales a distressing aspect, and his "transcendence" a false ring, but where the Jamesian imagination is true to its inner energies and does not let the human situation turn cold or abstract or static, the compact between reader and writer has the quality of a shared dream. Its ceremoniousness has a purposive aspect; it becomes a kind of aesthetic tender. The "great good place" holds and compels.
The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James
Book-length criticism of Henry James tends to be either adulatory or spiteful; there seems to be little room for compromise between the extreme views of James as an infallible genius or as a windy equivocator. It is hard to imagine, for example, that the recent studies by Dorothea Krook and Maxwell Geismar are really about the same novelist. Mrs. Krook is totally committed to "the depth, the breadth and the intensity ... of Henry James's mature vision of life," while Mr. Geismar sees him as a prurient neurotic and a snob. Where Mr. Geismar finds James's novels to be full of pathetic confusion, Mrs. Krook compares them favorably to Shakespeare's plays. Which critic is right? The truth is that neither is right; each exaggerates in a way that is typical of his critical school. Testing the fiction against a criterion of realism and "normality" (by which he seems to mean a composite picture of Freud and Marx), Mr. Geismar inevitably falls into an exercise in sarcasm. The inner life of James's art is not bound by the narrowness of his social attitudes, and the critic cannot be complaining about that narrowness and simultaneously showing what really goes on in the fiction. Yet the adulatory critic, who does have the patience and dedication to accept James's peculiar form of intensity, is no less handicapped than the iconoclast. Like Mrs. Krook, he characteristically overrates James's involvement with life, his objectivity as a social observer, and his magnanimity as a moralist. By seeing the novels through the lorgnette of the Prefaces, he tends to overlook fundamental ironies which may not have been fully appreciated by James himself. For James often introduced psychological complication into portraits that were intended to endorse his own taste for disengagement, and the grand renunciations with which his novels almost always conclude invite
Image Projection in Immersive 3D Visualization Laboratory
In recent years, many centers in the world attempted to build a virtual reality laboratory. The main idea of such laboratory is to allow the user to “immerse” into and move in a computer-generated virtual world. In the paper, the underlying principles of the system of virtual reality (VR) are described. The selected implementations constructed by the research centers of the world are also presented. The cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) installation is planned to be implemented at the Gdansk University of Technology. In this solution, the images will be projected on flat screens arranged in the form of a cube. The user will be located inside a transparent sphere freely rotating inside a cube, which allows simulation of free movement without changing the position of the screens. A walking motion of the user will trigger changes in the computer-generated images on screens surrounding the sphere thus creating an illusion of motion. The problems of visualization in the planned installation are outlined and discussed.