A paper presented to the Queen Elizabeth I Society atthe 66th South-Central Renaissance Conference in Atlanta All art has a metaphorical quality.—Keith Oatley Prologue STRETCHING BACK to their royal entries, which intertwined genealogy with mythology,we have over 500 years of Tudor fiction to ponder.1 As this audience knows, we’re nowenjoying a particular resurgence, spanning media […]
Category: Writings
Things are always bad for you if they’re unprofessional. You always say, oh, that’s sounprofessional as though there’s some definition of professional that’s also a moralimperative for how to behave. I don’t even know what professional is anymore.—Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (2014), p. 34 Previews NOWADAYS MOST ADULT AMERICANS are either functional cogs […]
And flowers and grass and I and allWill in one common ruin fall …—Andrew Marvell, “The Mower’s Song,” lines 21-22 I. Too Much! The calamitous crises facing the denizens of our planet at present seem well-nighoverwhelming. Wherever one looks, there’s cause for alarm. Thousands of people liveand die in war zones; millions more lack food […]
L’hypocrisie est un vice à la mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour vertus.—Molière, Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre (1665) Might we be approaching a defining moment, a tipping point when liberal artseducation in America relinquishes any serious claims for beneficial utility or vatic cloutin the wider society and ceases […]
A talk delivered at the 2018 Cognitive Futures Conference, hosted by the University of Kent, England I must apologize. … I so deeply love good literature and hate so bitterly bad literaturethat my expressions may be stronger than they ought to be.—Professor Vladimir Nabokov (1941) Roasted! EVER SINCE SPURIOUS LINES attributed to Homer were being […]