Monthly Archives: January 2014

Tom Perkins & America’s Dragon-Like 1%

Tom Perkins complaining about Nazi-like progressives resembles the dragon in “Beowulf.”

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How Is Lit Useful? Let Me Count the Ways

A recent issue of “New Literary History” explores a number of ways that literature is useful.

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Pete Seeger Has Got Up and Went

Pete Seeger’s song defying old age is of a piece with all the other ills he defied.

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Arguing against Lit for Lit’s Sake

Nabokov’s aestheticism in the 1960s tried to separate literature from history.

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England’s Most Humane Novel

A new bibliomemoir on “Middlemarch” shows a book shaping a life.

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This House Is Filling with Light

Tim Winton’s novel “That Eye, the Sky” finds spiritual resonance in difficult circumstances.

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Competing Heroic Narratives in Super Bowl

One Super Bowl narrative: Manning as the return of the king. Another narrative: Manning as Laius blocking the way of the next generation. Plus: Belichick-Welker in Oedipal drama.

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Using Fantasy to Take Back Time

Fantasy appeals to us as we chafe against machine-imposed reality, including machine-imposed time.

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Fantasy’s Special Insight into Reality

Fantasy literature becomes something different after the world ceased believing in magic.

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