Wednesday Writing last week for the New York Times’ “What Is Power?” series, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari argued that fiction is a more powerful force than truth in politics. I extend the discussion to literature (which Harari does not discuss) because of its reliance upon fabrication in the service of a higher understanding. Camus, […]
Tag Archives: William Shakespeare
Old Friends Recall the Midnight Chimes
Monday When Julia and I reunited with my senior Carleton roommates recently, I found myself thinking of the reunion that concludes Henry IV, Part II. To be sure, our memories didn’t involve loose women we had encountered in our youth. Nevertheless, there was an elegiac feel to our gathering as there is in the play. […]
Cataract Surgery: See Better, Lear
Thursday I am undergoing a second cataract surgery today and so am reposting the essay I wrote following my first (successful) surgery. I don’t expect to re-experience the same mixed feelings that I described two years ago, but dramas that feature sharp objects poked into people’s eyes still seem relevant. This essay is not for […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Black Leopard Red Wolf, cataract surgery, King Lear, Marlon James, Oedipus, Sophocles Comments closed
Same-Sex Desire in the Sonnets
Wednesday If you want a one-stop article about the same-sex desire expressed in Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, Sandra Newman’s recent Aeon article is the place to go. Newman neatly summarizes the historical debates over the sonnets and pretty much puts the matter to rest: they really are expressions of homosexual love from Shakespeare to a […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Sonnet 20", As You Like It, LBGTQ community, Same-Sex Intimacy, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Twelfth Night Comments closed
Are We Watching Shakespeare or Beckett?
Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Arthur Conan Doyle, Donald Trump, Endgame, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Mueller investigation, narrative, Richard III, Samuel Beckett, Unnamable, Waiting for Godot, Westword Ho! Comments closed
Caution against Purity Policing
Monday One of my conservative readers wrote me recently asking me how I felt about leftist insistence that Virginia governor Ralph Northam resign for having posted a racist picture in his medical school yearbook years ago. After all, hasn’t Northam lived a fairly exemplary life since then? The reader also sent me a Quillette article […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, Merchant of Venice, Oroonoko, purity policing, Tom Jones Comments closed
Do Endings Reveal Meaning of Life?
Monday My wife Julia alerted me to an intriguing although somewhat frustrating article in Atlantic about the end of time. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s 1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Megan Garber wrestles with an issue recently raised by The Washington Post: how do we live with constant reminders […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", "Second Coming", Alexander Pope, endings, Frank Kermode, King Lear, Matthew Arnold, modernism, post-apocalyptic fiction, Samuel Beckett, Sense of an Ending, William Butler Yeats, world weary ennui Comments closed
How I Make Literary Connections
Wednesday A friend the other day asked where my ideas come from, especially when I apply a passage from one century to incidents in another. Yesterday, for instance, I said that Trump confidant Roger Stone reminded me of a passage in Herman Melville’s Confidence Man. So how did that enter my head? To answer, let […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged blogging, Confidence Man, Geoffrey Chaucer, Herman Melville, Restoration comedies, Twelfth Night, Wife of Bath Comments closed
