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If you have never read or only studied in graduate school, please try it through ole yule log

If you have a graduate degree in English, I bet you are my neglected Jacques Derrida's "Communication", you have read Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw". It has been a critic's favorite for a long time, because we really don't know what will happen in the end—everyone likes puzzles—but postmodern critics love it. You can stack up any half-baked theories at will, because no one will call you. In 1995, Wayne Booth wrote that before he got tired of adding them up, he found more than 500 books or articles about novellas. It's easy to double now.

This is not to say that this is a bad story. Quite the opposite. I think this is one of James' best. This is also a good example of how James was misunderstood.

James' intricate syntax and psychological realism make him a favorite of British professors. Ruth Bernard Yeazell admitted in a recent issue of Dædalus, “It wasn’t until one day that I realized that I connected him to the classroom so closely... It is not that James himself wrote for the classroom. At least, he was right. The experience of the institution is unstable." However, he likes to talk about stories and creates works that create space for discussion. As Jezer said: "Although there is no reason to think that James is writing for the classroom, there are good reasons to think that heated discussions are the lifeblood of the novel for him."

Indeed, we see James' discussion in his letter. However, as far as "Rotation of the Screw" is concerned, James's main interest is not the political or philosophical ideas he tried to capture in the text, but the aesthetic effect of the story-how to make it "heartbreaking" the story.

In 1898, shortly after this novella was serialized in Collier’s Weekly, he wrote to Louis Waldstein saying, “I can only blush when I see the real content read in. ". He admitted that "where there is life, there is truth", but his main concern is how to turn something "so ugly" into a success story. His method is to "belong to the artist and painter forever." James wrote a lot of the same things to HG Wells and FWH Myers. He told Miles, "Honestly speaking, S.'s T. is a very mechanical problem-an inferior, mere subject of a picture, but a shameless pot. In retrospect, the last thing I want to do... It is to give children the most terrifying impression of evil and dangerous communication imaginable...This is the artistic knot I want to untie."

This is not to say that "Twisting the Screws" is just a "shameless pot", but a Christmas ghost story that must be pleased. Critics’ touchstone of making so many cakes, James’ ambiguity, mainly serves the aesthetic effect of "The Turn of the Screw". He had to come up with some unexplained but "imaginable" evil to make the story work-because it is a "creepy" story, not just "horrible".

For the first time James heard the essence of this story from Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury. He forgot most of the details and killed it one night shortly after Christmas. James wrote that the reason the Archbishop told the story was because "the conversation turned to... phantoms and night fears" and "a significant and sad decline in general supplies and... the overall quality of such stories": "Okay." , A truly effective and heartbreaking ghost story... It seems that everything has been told that no new crops and new varieties of any season are waiting for us." Modern ghost stories are too clinical-"It's like being exposed to mobile Like under the laboratory tap, all weird things are washed away.” Therefore, the origin of the screw's rotation.

The story tells of a tutor taking care of two children Miles and Flora in a country house. It is told from the perspective of a tutor. She started to meet people for reasons she didn't know. She learned from the help that the former tutor, Ms. Jessel, is related to a Peter Quint, and that Ms. Jessel and Ms. Quint have spent a lot of time with Miles and Flora. The tutor was increasingly worried that the ghosts of Jessel and Quint were trying to reconnect with the children outside the grave, corrupting them in some way, and we ran away.

If you have never read or only studied in graduate school (which may be the same thing), please try it in this season's ole yule journal.

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