For more seasoned readers, these chapters also uncover the feline motifs that, like medieval marginalia, are everywhere on the edges of this history but have mostly escaped notice until now.

Caroline Hovanec reviews Marx for Cats

[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

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

War, revenge, and obsession are driven by the perception of control and hopes for victory and utopia, but ultimately result in being drawn into one’s own destruction.

Sarah MacMillen delves into applications of the Golem myth

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

If David Foster Wallace stands athwart postmodernity yelling slow down, so too does Samuel Johnson stand athwart modernity, yelling at least define your terms.

Katy Carl responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

I surmise that Wallace knew that life could only be an infinite jest if it were either a divine comedy or a nihilist nightmare.

Daniel Zimmerman responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

The final episode of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast is live!

Nevertheless, not all Christmas traditions are comfortable or joyful—sometimes they are painful.

Jacob Martin offers a holiday reading of Ibsen

Those in the past are not only metaphors for how we view the family as a structure today: they were people whose lives can provide some vision for our own.

LuElla D’Amico responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

Carlos Bulosan’s humanist vision of freedom was articulated through his deep attention to the material conditions of Filipino life.

Colton Bernasol’s retrieval of a giant of American letters

[Bulosan] locates the “who” of America on its margins, expanding the nation’s definition of itself to include those who have been excised from its democratic institutions and practices.

Colton Bernasol’s retrieval of a giant of American letters

His experience was that poetry—Romantic poetry in particular—had the potential to expand perception by rousing the imagination in a way that forged a new unity of self and world.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]the distinction we make today between inner realities (consciousness) and outer realities (the physical universe) is not final, nor is it an accurate basis for reconstructing… the pre-human past.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

Through the guise of hypotheticals and future realities, authors of the genre can critique current conditions and disseminate their ideas to a broad, sometimes international, audience.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

Official efforts to promote science fiction in support of national rejuvenation have the perverse effect of encouraging a genre that is shot through with powerful anti-totalitarian tropes.

Andrew Latham and Erica Paley on Chinese science fiction

If we read Virgil’s works closely, we can see how he anticipates a Christian view of creation in his approach to the pastoral…. His vision of pastoral poetry is more Christian than classical.

Mary Grace Mangano on Virgil’s Christian approach to creation

This interplay of death and eros produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on love and death in Joyce’s writing

Past writers have updated Arthur for new audiences without sacrificing his essential kingship. If that's possible for Arthur, it should be possible for Charles and the British monarchy.

—Gabriel Schenk on what King Charles can learn from King Arthur.