January 22, 2017 at 11:48 pm
(It is a felicity that the elision in the title allows one to pronounce it as ‘Whatever persuasion’, so that it suggests at once something peculiar about Austen but also about ourselves, making it then something not peculiar but universal, acknowledged or not).Dr. Looser (LOE-sir) at the TLS has very likely bemused some readers in […]
January 17, 2017 at 11:34 pm
Rightly, Mary Beard in a recent article for the TLS takes for granted the question about whether the humanities should make it in the news at all. In a sense, it would be derogating from one of the signal purposes of the humanities if they were to be made the subject of more headlines. For […]
December 22, 2016 at 9:55 pm
It is easy in the Core Curriculum to feel content with having acquainted oneself with the tradition that is of primary concern, namely, thewestern. It is also understandable, but we should at least be aware of other kinds of classics that usually earn only a cursory treatment in this corner within the western corner. And […]
December 18, 2016 at 8:30 pm
It seems that any article seeking to explain the recent capsizing of our politics will obligingly run through the explanations we have come to know by broken heart: it was rigged. Actually that is one explanation we unfortunately haven’t heard, since the one who would have made it most vociferously did not lose the election. […]
December 11, 2016 at 9:48 pm
As our understanding of Artificial Intelligence and its relation to our own intelligence is slowly becoming illuminated, one cannot help but to speculate whether machines of the future will be able to replace our role in certain activities. And some feel immediately slighted when such functions are also one’s dearly cherished. Many of these involve […]
December 10, 2016 at 5:59 pm
Nicholas Dames at The Nation reviews three books that attempt to vindicate the practice of literary criticism. One of the most salient ways in which all three have done so is by laboring howcriticism opens the sensibilities of its readers to more valuably appreciate works of art that wouldotherwise have been abstruse or mysterious. What, […]
December 6, 2016 at 5:06 pm
And in posing this question Professor Molly Worthen argues dyspeptically in her latest article for why more liberals should be attending ‘Great Books Camp.’ A careful study into the history of one’s own ideas, Dr. Worthen suggests, would allow us to put not only Donald Trump in perspective, but more generally to engage with conservatives […]
December 3, 2016 at 11:07 pm
If Yeats said that ‘Words alone are certain good’ then we may suppose that anything that strives to go beyond them must be doing something better. At a time when money is more and more coming to serve as the universal currency, the one of our language seems to be depreciating in value. Beyond Words […]
November 27, 2016 at 4:02 pm
Dr. Daveena Tauber at McSweeney’s has found it necessary in light of the new darkness inaugurated by our jurassic president to revise her paper grading rubric. She wants to make America grade again, Trump’s way. Now, the class clown will now find himself valedictorian.If it could make Trump president and give success to all of […]
November 25, 2016 at 2:45 pm
(“Read it and Weep” might not have been the best entry into one’s column). As all of you probably know, our world has experienced a tragedy recently, and some of us are still finding it difficult to recover from the sounding of the death-knell: Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: Literature? […]
