Tagged: literature
The Heroic Knight in the Wife of Bath’s Tale
The Wife of Bath’s Tale shows how desperate readers are for a hero and what we are willing to forgive or ignore to get one
Sunday Morning! “Constellation of Genius”
About an extremely readable day book for 1922, a year in which culture changed absolutely.
Fagin, Bigotry, and “Cancel Culture”
Put simply, Fagin is one of the most loathsome and unredeemable creatures I have ever come across in fiction.
Ashes in the Wind
Can two people set aside their differences and under the influences of hormones and hearts, live happily ever after?
Dystopia Week
Welcome to Dystopia Week. Let’s begin by taking a moment to understand why we write this way in the first place.
In Defense of Poetry
Old poetry is laden with the baggage of centuries of hidden metaphor and archaic references. New poetry is prone to abstraction and whimsical laziness. But poetry deserves our consideration as an art form nonetheless. After all, all the music we love is poetry, and all the fun little things we can do with language are best done in poetic form.
Shakespeare in American Politics
Guest Author T. Greer eulogizes the neglect of our literary heritage in contemporary rhetoric.
Atticus Finch Is Still a Decent Man
J.L. Wall explores the duality of Atticus Finch as portrayed in both the newly-released Go Set A Watchman and the classic To Kill A Mockingbird.
Driving Blind: Austerity, Street Art, and Books
Let’s get right down to business. Paul Krugman comes out swinging in the New York Review of Books with a piece of extended economic criticism that will surely draw much ire, but push an...
Driving Blind: The Humanities Die and Superman Returns
Digby argues that MSNBC’s ratings aren’t down because of quality issues, but rather that a large part of its liberal base is currently alienated and indifferent. Some are defending the humanities against digital aggression,...
Driving Blind: Liberal Imperialism Was so Much Cooler in the 80s
I’ve linked to some of Leopold Lambert’s architecture posts in the past. Cameron Kunzelman’s been reading his book, Weaponized Architecture, and gives a great, brief over view of it. Carrie Brownstein, courtesy of the Awl, tells...
More Readers Means More Buzzfeed and How Work-for-Free is Inegalitarian
Writer says writing is dying–or maybe it’s just really hard to make a living doing it–or something like that.
The wheel of fantasy
Riffing off of my Atlantic piece, fantasy author R. Scott Bakker writes: According to common wisdom, genre fiction is culturally cyclical: It ebbs and flows in popularity as time alternately burns out various tropes...
Eddard Stark’s Ethics of Honor
~by Kyle Cupp “Have you no shred of honor?” Ned Stark asks this question to the ever-plotting Lord Petyr Baelish toward the end of A Game of Thrones. The question exposes the Lord of...
Harry Potter and the Art of the Epilogue
I still haven’t seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Deux yet, but I hear the epilogue is poorly handled. I was sort of agnostic about it in the book. Epilogues are hard....
A Book Club in Winter
League alumnus Freddie deBoer is hosting a book club on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: First published in English translation in 1983, it is an incredibly well-realized piece of historical fiction, a...
Bread & Circuses: A mini-review of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
I finished the third installment of The Hunger Games last night, Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins, and my goodness what a read. All three books are absurdly intense page-turners bound to keep one up far...
