In which I explain how The Iliad saved my freshman year in high school.
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Tag Archives: Sigmund Freud
The Iliad Saved My Freshman Year
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Creative Writing and Daydreaming", "Strange Meeting", force, Homer, Iliad, Richard Lattimore, Simone Weil, war, Wilfred Owen Leave a comment
Understanding Murikami’s 1Q84
In which I explore the theme of toxic masculinity in Murakami’s “1Q84.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", 1Q84, Carl Jung, Haruki Murakami, Matthew Arnold, return of the repressed, toxic masculinity, Trumpism Comments closed
Mirror on the Wall, Who Is Evilest?
Lit Hub had a reader poll to determine the evilest literary character. Maybe not surprisingly in the Trump era, Orwell’s dictator won.
Posted in Ayn Rand, Uncategorized Also tagged 1984, Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Evil, George Orwell, Stand, Stephen King, Walt Kelly Comments closed
How Toxic Masculinity Imprisons Men
Those men who are embracing toxic masculinity make themselves vulnerable since it’s so easy to deflate them. Lady Montagu pointed this out in an 18th century poem.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Hustand", Chaucer, Country Wife, cuckold jokes, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, male anxiety, toxic masculinity, Wife of Bath, William Wycherley Comments closed
The Meaning of Trump’s Shark Fears
Trump’s anxiety about sharks can be understood through an examination of “Jaws.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Carl Jung, Donald Trump, Jaws, Jungian psychology, Peter Benchley, sharks Comments closed
A Poem for When You’re Feeling Weary
Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine,” a good poem for when you’re feeling fed up with life.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Garden of Proserpine", "Lotus Eaters", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Depression, T. S. Eliot, Waste Land Comments closed
Got a Problem? Call a Poet
Tragedy, it turns out, is a powerful literary form for dealing with posttraumatic fear.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Angus Fletcher, Aristotle, bibliotherapy, catharsis, literary technique, Oedipus, philosophy, posttraumatic fear, PTSD, Rhetoric, sophists, Sophocles, Wonderworks Comments closed
Freud: Lit Leads to Self Mastery
A Freudian analysis of why we are drawn to literature and what it does for us.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Bruno Bettelheim, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Interpretation of Dreams, Joseph Conrad, Oedipus, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sophocles Comments closed
Why I Think the Way I Think
I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Antonio Gramsci, Beowulf, Carl Jung, Carleton College, Hans Robert Jauss, Harper Lee, Huckleberry Finn, intellectual history, J. Paul Hunter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jerome Beaty, Karl Marx, Literary Theory, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, New Criticism, Norman Holland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, racism, Reader Response Theory, reception theory, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed