Departments

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literature

  • 1/20/20

    George Orwell, 70 Years Later

    by John Rodden

    Would the visionary author of Nineteen Eighty-Four have ever imagined that George Orwell might become the most important writer since Shakespeare and the most influential writer who ever lived? 

  • 1/19/20

    Ross Douthat's Prescription for Academia Won't Solve the Real Problem

    by Ed Simon

    Humanities departments have shrunk, tenure track jobs have disappeared, and the academy has increasingly come to rely upon an exploited underclass of contingent, part-time faculty. The argument of who exactly is responsible for this state of affairs rages on, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat insists he knows the answer.

  • 1/12/20

    Can America Recapture Its Signature Exuberance?

    by Tracy Dahlby

    Walt Whitman understood transcendence of national mood is an uphill climb. Periods of division and strife sort new realities into a renovated sense of purpose. Yet periods of upheaval must necessarily lead to a refitting, not obliteration, of our common story or democracy is toast.

  • 12/1/19

    A Review of Amazon Prime’s Series Dostoevsky

    by Walter G. Moss

    Americans unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's life, and perhaps even with some of his greatest works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, can now get to know him via Amazon Prime’s 8-part subtitled series Dostoevsky, directed by the Russian Vladimir Khotinenko.

  • 3/10/19

    Robinson Crusoe’s Wall

    by Geoffrey Sill

    We can look to history, especially literary and cultural history, to explain the passionate desire of many Americans to build a wall.

  • SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
    7-12-13

    Who edited Shakespeare?

    Sometime in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – what we now know as the First Folio. It was the literary event of the century, recording for all time the sound of Shakespeare's English and the sweep of his imagination: Elsinore, Egypt and the Forest of Arden; a balcony, a spotted handkerchief and a skull.

  • SOURCE: LiveScience
    5-28-13

    Medieval readers had eclectic tastes

    Nowadays, people bounce effortlessly from reading news to blogs to email. And it turns out the reading habits of people in medieval times weren't so different, a new book suggests.People in 14th-century London consumed a variety of texts, often linked together in bound volumes. Arthur Bahr, a literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores these habits in his new book "Fragments and Assemblages" (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

  • SOURCE: NYT
    3-7-13

    Lawsuit on whether Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain

    Devotees of Sherlock Holmes are a famously obsessive bunch, and in the 126 years since Arthur Conan Doyle introduced his coolheaded detective they have certainly had plenty of real-world intrigues to ponder alongside fictional ones like “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”...But when the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only literary club, gathered for their annual weekend in New York in January, few had any inkling they would soon be embroiled in a distinctly 21st-century case that might be called “The Adventure of the Social Media-Driven Copyright Debate, With Annotations on Sherlockian Sexism and the True Nature of Literary Devotion.”A few weeks later, after a leading Holmes scholar and longtime Irregular filed a legal complaint against the Conan Doyle estate arguing that Sherlock Holmes and the basic elements of his world were in the public domain, various online Sherlockian conclaves exploded....

  • SOURCE: WaPo
    3-3-13

    Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky scholar, dies

    Joseph Frank, a longtime professor of literature whose five-volume biography of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered a landmark of historical and literary scholarship, died Feb. 27 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 94.He had pulmonary failure, according to the New York Times, which first reported his death.Dr. Frank wrote on a wide range of literary subjects before he began to focus on Dostoevsky — the author of “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov” — in the 1950s.Dr. Frank learned Russian and immersed himself in the turbulent milieu of Dostoevsky’s life — he lived from 1821 to 1881 — to write what some scholars have called an incomparable portrait of the author’s life and times. From 1976 to 2002, Dr. Frank chronicled Dostoevsky’s dramatic life in five volumes that totaled more than 2,400 pages....