May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
September 24, 2013
Against Histrionics: On Deaths and Afterlives
Compare the deaths of Socrates and Christ: They mirror each other in the setup (thinker put to death for subversion of the established order), but Christ’s death is physically painful […]
September 14, 2013
Genius and Unpredictability
We all know that which book or author “takes off” and which one doesn’t is, at least in part, a matter of chance. The process by which large numbers of […]
February 25, 2012
Poetry, Prose, and Prosetry: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Vigor
Prose took over storytelling (both in narrative and dramatic form) beginning in the 17th century. The prose shift in full-scale narrative commences with Quijote, which is why critics have […]