November 12, 2013
On Literature’s ‘Secondariness’: Citation, Creation, and Critical Primacy
Here’s a promise, or an imperative: if I bring any references to books, poems, poets, novelists, dramatists, theorists, or philosophers into this post, you can stop reading immediately. You should […]
October 7, 2013
Literature and the Loss of Confidence
Mathematicians have been asserting, since Pythagoras, how number underpins all of nature. The discipline of physics has spawned an entire speculative cosmogony that strives to discredit and replace Genesis. Religious […]
May 23, 2013
The Regression to the Primitive
Northrop Frye, discussing the arc of Shakespeare’s plays, says something very profound about Shakespeare’s late “Romances,” like A Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. …as a dramatist, […]
July 22, 2012
The neo-canonicity of F. R. Leavis
My first ingestion of F. R. Leavis’s 1953 essay “The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education” resulted in the British critic’s own volume being thrown across the room. What was […]
June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]