Review of Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy
Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy. Steven Michels. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. In his 1922 travelogue What I Saw in America, G.K. Chesterton comments briefly on…
Glowing Embers: Enriching Comparisons
I write this piece in memory of my Ph.D. Supervisor and dear mentor, Professor Peter Emberley whose illness and sudden demise has saddened many of us. Peter…
Flannery O’Connor, Conscience, and the Shattering Spirit of Modernity
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it. —Flannery O’Connor 1. Introduction: Flannery O’Connor’s…
Language, Power, and the Reality of Truth in 1984
In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell presents us with a world where systemic thinking, a form of solipsism represented by the Party and embodied in O’Brien,…
The Politics of Perfection
It is a nearly universally acknowledged fact that technology carries the potential for both great benefits and great dangers to human beings. Few question the assumption that…
Review of The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film
The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film. Kimberly Hurd Hale. Lexington Books, 2016. In The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in…
Permanent Liminality and Modernity
Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels. Arpad Szakolczai. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017. As in the previous review, I’ll just…
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich. New York: Random House, 2016. One of Dostoevsky’s more profound and even prophetic philosophical…
Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches (Part II)
La Tentation from a Girardian Perspective Flaubert in La Tentation has confronted the epoch, summed up in Anthony’s spiritual tribulation, in which archaic sacredness, passing through the…
Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches (Part I)
Introduction: A Nameless Genre Gustave Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine ou la révélation de l’âme (first version 1848; final version 1874), its sui generis character notwithstanding, belongs in…
“Glory is My Work: Mary Oliver’s Search for Order”
Eric Voegelin developed a rich body of concepts for interpreting literary symbols. This essay will use those concepts to interpret some of the verse of the contemporary…
Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary
Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary. Arpad Szakolczai. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016. Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, and…
So-So City
Did you ever catch yourself dreaming, adrift in la-la land—only to wake up to your own, personal so-so city? A consoling (but sophistic) thought: The number of…
Love Story
In war, sitting out protects one’s bodily safety. Sitting out of the morally messy struggles typical of adult human life protects one’s sense of superiority and innocence.…
Manchester By the Sea: Dark, Beautiful, and Real
Every person undergoes traumatic experiences. Their quantity and quality vary, but once suffered, these experiences are incorporated into the person, usually invisibly to the rest of us.…