January 23, 2019
On Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”
For many writers, nothing is more exciting than seeing in some work of fiction, be it a short story or a novel or a play or even a movie, a […]
August 27, 2018
In Defense of Flat Characters
Every fiction writer who’s taken even an intro to creative writing class is likely aware of E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters, from his book of lectures […]
May 18, 2018
On Character Motivation
In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that […]
April 29, 2015
Drunken Savages with Quill Pens
At one point in his Philosophical Letters on the English, in which he observed the culture and society of France’s rival across the Channel, Voltaire, that paragon of French neoclassical […]
September 22, 2012
Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self
I’ll begin with a claim: that every text produces in its writer a sense of the self becoming unglued—that one creates, or expunges, meaning in the form of a literary […]
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 […]