Student Independent Projects English 2017: "A Slur on the Divine of Our Nature:" Alcohol in the Lives and Literature of Marguerite Duras and Elizabeth Bishop

Keeping, Julia (2017) Student Independent Projects English 2017: "A Slur on the Divine of Our Nature:" Alcohol in the Lives and Literature of Marguerite Duras and Elizabeth Bishop. Research Report. Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Willing to sacrifice himself to an intoxicated oblivion in order to better serve his art, the brooding literary artist has been an all-too familiar archetype of popular culture. The idealized aesthetic of the "literary drunkard" has been fueled by the canonization and celebrity of figures such as Hemingway, Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, and Lowell. Most of the twentieth-century's great writers, of course, were not alcoholics; nevertheless, drinking and writing still occupy a close proximity in public consciousness. As Brett Millier notes, the relationship between alcohol and literature has received a good deal of attention in the last thirty years. Critical works such as Tom Dardis' The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (1989), Daniel W.Goodwin's Alcohol and the Writer (1988), and Thomas B. Gilmore's Equivocal Spirits (1987) have all sought to reveal a link between drinking and creativity.

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