April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
August 19, 2013
The Projection of Personality
The tightness or rightness of sentences, images, metaphors, the snapping-together of word and word, phrase and phrase—in other words, the stylistic elements writers spend years perfecting—are useless without the supreme […]
September 9, 2012
Riddle me This
The riddle is wrongly considered a “lesser” or “lighter” kind of verse (“light” verse is implicitly considered “lesser” poetry, in contemporary literary convention). The riddle, in fact, is at […]
August 21, 2012
Parricide/Regicide/Deicide: A Few Notes on The Brothers Karamazov
First, a passage from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, regarding Comedy. “The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them […]
April 6, 2012
Letting a Rock Roll Down a Hill: An Interview with Daniel Torday
In just more than two days Daniel Torday’s The Sensualist will be released by Nouvella and first things first: the book’s a phenomenal read, sucking the reader in with what […]