"Yet the human person, standing at the crux of reality, calls the artist to the limit of his creative powers."

Daniel Fitzpatrick on "seeing" as a theological enterprise

Concerns that video game players confuse the game world and the real world, manifesting virtual into real violence, contain echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Jacob Martin on video games as time travel

“Our times have fallen out of tune with simplicity.”

Michael Golec on typographical modernity

Murder is a real conundrum for modern humans. Officially, we are against it.

Elizabeth Stice on the violence at the heart of modern life

“I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.”

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on the modern subject’s self-theft

On his journey home, Merrill adapts to the conventions of the upper-class in hopes of carving his own place within it.

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on an eight-mile journey through backyard swimming pools

On Virginia Woolf’s thirty-third birthday, she and Leonard Woolf made three significant decisions over tea: they would purchase a house in Richmond, acquire a bulldog named John, and buy a printing press.

Reanna Brooks on The Hogarth Press

For all its parallels to Christ’s passion, The Old Man and the Sea is no allegory but something deeper, a tale which reveals how suffering may be spun into wisdom.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on Paschal elements in Hemingway

Though Beef does not end with a “born again” moment, it points us to the hunger for one.

Elizabeth Stice on two artistic windows into ourselves and our times

Beef draws attention to the hamster wheel of our America today.

Elizabeth Stice on two artistic windows into ourselves and our times

Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work.

Xiamara Hohman on Mei Lanfang’s effect on Marianne Moore

[T]rue liberal education aims at a holistic understanding of truth, a universal knowledge in which, as Saint John Henry Newman puts it, all branches of learning connect.

Kate Whitaker on her liberal arts education

[Frost’s] theories of “sentence sounds” and “sound-posture” insisted that tone and spoken vocal inflection­–how words sound when we say them–should be the material of poetry, a poetic paradigm which was perfectly suited to performance.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last hundred and fifty years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

The absence of poetry from our daily discourse and our public life leaves a total vacuum because there is no substitute for it.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

It is in the world of the incarnate word that we find our true selves, and it is the imagination that takes us there.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

Most of what we do or make, for good or ill, originates in the imagination.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

What I suggest is we have attributed intellectual deficiencies to Pollyanna as a character that she does not possess in Porter’s books because they align with our changing cultural paradigms about optimism.

LuElla D’Amico revisits an icon of childhood literature

Much ink has been spilled on whether Amrita Sher-Gil’s work was “modernist” or “realist,” Eastern or Western, modern or traditional.

Vaishnavi Patil offers a fresh reading of Amrita Sher-Gil

Ten years ago, when I was in college, it was fashionable to perform an ironic attitude toward the world. Millennials were dubbed the ironic generation.

Luke Foster responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast