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Today's featured article

Front cover of the first edition

The Structure of Literature is a 1954 book of literary criticism by Paul Goodman, the published version of his doctoral dissertation. It proposes a mode of formal literary analysis in which Goodman defines a formal structure within an isolated literary work, finds how parts of the work interact with each other to form a whole, and uses those definitions to study other works. He analyzes multiple literary works as examples with close reading and genre discussion. Goodman finished his dissertation in 1940, but took 14 years to publish it. In mixed reviews, critics described the book as falling short of its aims; engaging psychological insight and incisive asides were mired in glaring style issues and jargon that made passages impenetrable or obscured his argument. Though Goodman contributed to the development of the Chicago School of Aristotelian formal literary criticism, he neither received wide academic recognition for his dissertation nor was his method accepted by his field. (Full article...)

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On this day...

May 7

Maximilien Robespierre

1487 – Granada War: Forces of Aragon and Castile began a siege of Málaga, a Muslim city in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
1794 – French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre (pictured) established the Cult of the Supreme Being as the new state religion of the French First Republic.
1798 – War of the First Coalition: A British garrison repelled a French attack on the Îles Saint-Marcouf off the Normandy coast, inflicting heavy losses.
1937 – Employees at Fleischer Studios in New York City went on strike in the animation industry's first major labor strike.
1946 – Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded the telecommunications corporation Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later renamed Sony.

Mary of Modena (d. 1718)
Tore Wretman (b. 1916)
Willard Boyle (d. 2011)

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In the News

Kyren Wilson

Kyren Wilson (pictured) wins the World Snooker Championship.
In horse racing, Mystik Dan wins the Kentucky Derby.
Following the Solomon Islands general election, Jeremiah Manele becomes the prime minister.
Acting prime minister of Haiti Ariel Henry resigns, and the Transitional Presidential Council is sworn in.
NASA announces that the Voyager 1 space probe is sending readable data for the first time in five months.

Did you know?

Joseph Redding

... that opera composer and librettist Joseph Redding (pictured) was also a chess expert and lawyer who argued a landmark decision before the United States Supreme Court?
... that the 1920–1922 Tashkent wall newspaper Rost was the first Bukharian-Jewish Soviet newspaper?
... that Kooraban National Park has provided a habitat for more than twenty vulnerable animal species, including koalas?
... that a bust of the notorious slave trader Isaac Franklin was placed on the prow of his slave ship, the Isaac Franklin?
... that the video game Manor Lords was wishlisted more than three million times on Steam after its developer had estimated it would receive around 14,000?
... that Walid Daqqa wrote several works of prison literature, including a children's novel about a boy who uses magical olive oil to visit his imprisoned father?
... that the production team of the TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier created a digital highway more than five miles (8 km) long to capture visual effects for a truck action sequence for the episode "The Star-Spangled Man"?
... that prior to becoming a royal reporter for Fox News, English journalist Neil Sean released a cover of Cliff Richard's "We Don't Talk Anymore" with his mother?

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Picture of the day

Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven)

Manuscript credit: Ludwig van Beethoven

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