A Meditation on Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!Shortly after the death of Nebraska pioneer John Bergson, his children––Alexandra, Lou, Oscar, and Emil––go on a “pleasure excursion” to buy a hammock from Crazy Ivar, who obtained the name from his hermetic lifestyle, . . . . Continue Reading »
Here I am again at the writer’s desk with a tall glass of lemonade, ready to analyze two passages that invoke “the Genius” of the land in Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! In the first passage, we witness the retrospective despair of John Bergson, a first generation pioneer in . . . . Continue Reading »
Dostoevsky is not usually thought of as a comic writer, but he was a great comedian and satirist. When Grandma shows up unexpectedly at the casino in The Gambler , the novel takes a sudden Woodhousean turn. Feodor Karamzov is disgusting, but hilariously so. His greatest comic . . . . Continue Reading »
Today I’m going to reflect on a passage from Willa Cather’s achingly beautiful novel, O Pioneers! (1913), a title inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem. The Library of America offers a short description of the book in case you’re not familiar with it:O Pioneers! is the story of a . . . . Continue Reading »
Elizabeth Watson reads Hamlet through the lens of Eamon Duffy’s classic “stripping of the altars” thesis. In the play, altars are replaced by tables, the arras, the bed, and the stage spectacle takes the place of Catholic liturgical spectacle: “it is not the . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1881, Edward Payson Vining wrote an innovative book that promised to unravel The Mystery of Hamlet . When Vining had weighed all the evidence, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Hamlet was a woman. Not, mind you, that Shakespeare conceived of a female prince: “It is not even . . . . Continue Reading »
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play questions with Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s inversion of Hamlet , Rosencrantz says that the score was “Twenty-seven-three.” “He murdered us,” he adds, and then says it again for good measure. As Marjorie Garber notes in her . . . . Continue Reading »
De Grazia still, summarizing Lacan’s claim that Hamlet is about mourning: “‘I know of no commentator who has ever taken the trouble to make this remark . . . from one end of Hamle t to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.’ It is no coincidence that . . . . Continue Reading »
In her ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet , Margreta de Grazia shows that Hamlet was not always considered a harbinger of modern subjectivity. On the contrary, Restoration critics and playwrights considered Shakespeare and Hamlet to be retrograde and rude: “In the ‘refined . . . . Continue Reading »
Two members of Shylock’s household escape his house during Merchant of Venice . Lancelot Gobbo leaves in order to become a servant to Bassanio, and Jessica leaves to be with her lover Lorenzo. The parallels between the two are brought out by the juxtaposition of the plots in Act . . . . Continue Reading »
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