January 30, 2019 at 8:25 am
Hell is everywhere we look. It is integral to religious belief systems, literature, and even popular TV shows. As editor of the new compilation “The Penguin Book of Hell,” Scott Bruce explores 3,000 years of this damnation, from Odysseus traveling to Hades to Climate Change as Hell on Earth. While doing so, he reckons with […]
December 18, 2018 at 5:03 pm
We’ve known our share of allegedly misunderstood literary figures (lookin’ at you, Nietzsche). But is Machiavelli one of them? In The Prince, Machiavelli argues that leaders shouldn’t be objectively virtuous or truthful, but rather effective at preserving their reign. Hence a just end can excuse a leader’s horrendous acts, or “the ends justify the means.” […]
February 8, 2018 at 11:34 am
The Enlightenment was… many things. To seek to define it in one word would, perhaps, be a display of great arrogance. And of course, none of us here with the Core have anywhere near enough self-esteem to be considered arrogant. One of the definitions of Enlightenment, and perhaps the most common, is thus: the Enlightenment […]
February 8, 2018 at 10:55 am
Now that we’re in the thick of the semester, we’re all lacking for a full night’s sleep. Here is what three of the English Romantics had to say about the subject of night. The Sun Has Long Been Set William Wordsworth The sun has long been set, The stars are out by twos and threes, […]
March 20, 2017 at 12:56 pm
Many thanks to Prof. Rabinovitch for bringing this to our attention! We know from our readings of Augustine’s City of God that the saint believed in a world of souls stained by original sin. Over in Britain, however, fifth-century ascetic Pelagius denied that nagging evil lurking within souls, pointing instead to a world born to […]
March 15, 2017 at 9:04 am
What killed Jane Austen? Over at Pictorial (via Jezebel), Kelly Faircloth investigates the untimely death of Jane Austen at the age of 41. There are a number of theories to choose from–among them Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Addison’s disease, and death by cow (er, that is, tuberculosis caught from cows)–but a new assertion from the New York […]
March 14, 2017 at 10:31 am
Special thanks to Prof. Kyna Hamill for bringing this to our attention! Turns out Leaves of Grass has more editions than your textbook, and the only thing that stopped Walt Whitman from releasing more than nine was his death (probably). Unlike your textbook, however, each edition of Leaves of Grass introduced a variety of new […]
February 23, 2017 at 10:56 am
Gary Taylor, lead general editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare, departs from the usual collections of Shakespeare’s plays. For the first time, the three Henry VI plays add the name of Elizabethan tragedian and “bad boy of the English Renaissance,” Christopher Marlowe, as co-author alongside the Bard. But that’s not all–fourteen other plays from the […]
