Why does Shylock insist on getting his pound of flesh? He stands for law, for justice, and as a Jew his justice is the lex talionis , eye for eye. He wants flesh because flesh has been taken from him. When? ”My daughter is my flesh and blood” he laments when she . . . . Continue Reading »
In his book on Dostoevsky, Nicholas Berdyaev sets up a series of comparisons and contrasts between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Both recognize that man as he has been conceived in earlier ages is dead. Both know that man is “terrible free.” Both know that Humanism has . . . . Continue Reading »
Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is To Be Done? - described by Joseph Frank was “one of the most successful works of propaganda ever written in fictional form,” inspiring Lenin among others - describes a romantic triangle between two medical students and their love, Vera Pavlovna. . . . . Continue Reading »
The always insightful Anthony Esolen has a superb piece on the First Things page today defending the controversial theses that Shakespeare was “a profoundly Christian playwright” and that he was a rigorous advocate of male chastity, for Shakespeare “as near to an absolute value as . . . . Continue Reading »
Marjorie Garber argues that our view of Romeo and Juliet has been altered by contemporary trends and events. Romeo has become the standard American high school Shakespeare play, and some of its themes and sensibility were taken up by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. As a . . . . Continue Reading »
Joseph Frank ( Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time ) makes the intriguing argument that Dostoevsky’s use of Gogol (especially “The Overcoat”) in Poor Folk is parody, but parody that strengthens rather than undermines the central thematic thrust of Gogol’s work. He writes: . . . . Continue Reading »
David Bentley Hart writes somewhere about the revolutionary character of the gospel’s depiction of the tears of Peter after his denial of Jesus. Ancient pagan writers, Hart argues, could only have seen the tears of a fisherman as material for parody, not pathos. This was explicitly the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Gothic romance of Ann Radcliffe are still in print, but who reads them besides students taking courses in the early English novel or specialists in English literature? Yet, Radcliffe has some claim to being the proto-inventor of the modern novel. Austen read Radcliffe and laughed; her . . . . Continue Reading »
“Let Romamti-ezer bless with the Ferret- The Lord is a rewarder of them, that diligently seek him” (A 43). Sherbo notes that this connection is not necessarily arbitrary: “the association is with activities of the ferret as exemplified in the verb ‘to ferret . . . . Continue Reading »
Ahh, but Mark Womack argues that the whole point of Milton’s image of the “two-handed engine” is to leave us uncertain about its specific referent: “The need to define ‘two-handed engine’ has put scholarly minds in a panic, producing a vast body of commentary . . . . Continue Reading »
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