Stephen Bertman

University of Windsor · Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

This discovery article explores the previously unrecognized semantic resonance between the concluding verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" and Walt Whitman's poem "The Untold Want." The English and American poets were not only contemporaries but also friends who admired each other's work and corresponded over the course of two decades. I...

Modern-day archaeological discoveries in the Near East continue to illuminate our understanding of the ancient world, including the many contributions made by the people of Mesopotamia to literature, art, government, and urban life The Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia describes the culture, history, and people of this land, as well as their...

Objective To explore the theme of retirement in the epic tale of Odysseus and the implications it can have for contemporary retirees in the light of recent empirical research. Methods Homer's Odyssey (ca. 8th cent. B.C.E.) and Tennyson's poem “Ulysses” (1833) were closely read and compared to disclose the impact retirement had on a literary charac...

Examining-room computers require doctors to record detailed data about their patients, yet reduce the time clinicians can spend listening attentively to the very people they are trying to help. This book presents original essays by distinguished experts in their fields, addressing this critical problem and making an urgent case for reform, because...

Examining-room computers require doctors to record detailed data about their patients, yet reduce the amount of time clinicians can spend listening attentively to the very people they are trying to help. This book presents original essays by distinguished experts in their fields, addressing such critical problems and making an urgent case for refor...

Dr. Lucian L. Leape’s groundbreaking 1994 article, “Error in Medicine,” brought to the fore the widespread and largely ignored problem of harmful hospital errors, which Leape attributed not to bad people but to bad systems. As Leape strove to cure a dysfunctional healthcare culture and thereby reduce its mistakes, a transformation had already begun...

The humanistic practice of medicine requires that the practitioner have sufficient time and appropriate focus. Both elements, however, are under assault by the high-speed, distraction-filled environment within which primary care is delivered today. Despite or perhaps because of modern medicine’s technological advances, the potentially healing bond...

The humanistic practice of medicine requires that the practitioner have sufficient time and appropriate focus. Both elements, however, are under assault by the high-speed, distraction-filled environment within which primary care is delivered today. Despite or perhaps because of modern medicine’s technological advances, the potentially healing bond...

The monstrous likeness between the Creature in Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, and the Golem of Jewish folklore is no mere coincidence. The Golem's introduction into early nineteenth-century German literature - ironically at the hands of two avowed anti-Semites, Jacob Grimm and Ludwig Achim von Arnim - may have permitted its rediscovery by Mary...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bestowed high praise on the literary achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, describing him in particular as the father of the modern detective story. Doyle's debt to Poe is most evident in the way he modeled Sherlock Holmes on C. Auguste Dupin, the intellectual detective–hero of three of Poe's tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,...

Rather than reflecting, as many have claimed, a benign "mis-translation" of Exodus 34 by St. Jerome, the horns on Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses are emblematic of a millennium-long tradition of antisemitism that stretched from antiquity to the days of the Italian Renaissance. Both through literary invective and iconography, Jews were portray...

Andy Jackson's choice of trappings for The Hermitage, his home near Nashville, Tennessee, reveals a literary, scientific, compassionate side of 'Old Hickory', the warrior, Indian hater and ruthless politician.

What if you could marry anyone-or anything? A cultural historian examines the human impulse to make commitments and how it could alter our journey to the altar.

The ancient Greek god who symbolized time was Chronos, spelled with the letter chi, or "ch." Greek mythology also tells of another god named Kronos, spelled with a kappa, or "k." The similarity in the sound of gods' names paralleled a similarity in their natures: both were primordial deities, and both were all-devouring. Kronos, in particular, was...

Like Alzheimer's disease, cultural amnesia is a progressive and debilitating disease. It may threaten America's capacity to extend its democratic traditions into the future.

How many kisses will be enough for Catullus? That is the question that opens Poem 7. The answer: as many as are the grains of sand in the Libyan desert, asmany as are the stars in the nightime sky. Yet in this poem sand and stars do notfunction simply as quantitative symbols. Each is in fact described in a mannerthat subtly alludes to the mouth – t...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. Includes bibliography.