March 5, 2019
On Novels that Span a Lifetime
There’s a famous theory (attributed to Aristotle, though in reality the result of misinterpretations of his work made by Renaissance humanists) that a good tragedy should follow the three unities, […]
July 6, 2013
“Deeply and Irreverently”: How and What to Read
One of the usual defenses of reading widely in the Western tradition (or, say, in 20th century poetry) is that it improves your writing—that it’s the legwork necessary for the […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
October 19, 2012
Now or Never: The Writer and the Age
One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have […]
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 […]
July 16, 2012
Make it New While Keeping it Old
When it comes to translating a work that is, at once, radically different from what we are used to reading, as Greek tragedy is—both in its (multiple) tones/registers and its […]