Sophocles and Homer present compelling cases for granting full funeral rights to the Boston Marathon bomber.
A copy of Shakespeare’s works that circulated through apartheid-era prisons shows the Bard providing solace for the prisoners.
Literature as therapy, Greek tragedy as soap opera: assorted articles about lit and life.
The lessons of the Sophocles play “Oedipus” can be applied to disgraced Penn State coach Joe Paterno.
Roger Clemens tried to bully his Congressional interrogators the way that Oedipus bullies witnesses. To say that he should have handled himself differently is to say that he should have been a different man.
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Sophocles, Yeats (William Butler) | Also tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland |
Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a [...]
Having compared Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight yesterday with Frances Burney’s Evelina, I feel I owe my readers an apology and an explanation. The apology is that I violated one of my principles for the website and judged the book by the movie. All I’ve read of Twilight is the excerpt on amazon.com. If I sell the [...]
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to [...]
