Articles
Hard Times for Great Books
Read on the Square.
No Plain Jane
Read in Touchstone.
Fragmentation? Nonsensical!
In March 1918, serialized parts of James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared in the American journal The Little Review. Serialization was halted in 1918 when the graphic Nausicäa episode prompted prosecution for obscenity. This highly controversial Modernist tome was published as a complete work in Paris early in 1922. It was banned in the United States and the United Kingdom until 1930. Let us juxtapose this early part of the Ulysses publication saga against a momentous period in the career of one of the most prolific popular writers of the twentieth century. In September 1916, a short story by P. G. Wodehouse entitled “Extricating Young Gussie” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. The following year, the story was published in the volume The Man with Two Left Feet. Read more... (StAR pdf)
Pending Sparagmos: Encountering the Divine in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare
“I am transformed,” cries the Petrarchan lover, “and still I flee the belling of my hounds.” This piteous lament, appearing at the conclusion of Canzone 23 of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, appropriates the mythological tale of the hunter Actaeon as an analogy for the lover’s experience in encountering the beloved. Transformed into a stag by the goddess Diana, Actaeon is killed according to the ritual of sparagmos: he is torn to shreds, and by his own hounds. On a meta-textual level, Canzone 23 reflects the overwhelming influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (from which source the story of Actaeon was drawn by the Italian poet) upon Petrarch’s work. Further consideration of the heritage of the Actaeon myth reveals a psychologically real embodiment of the tale in the character of the Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. A study of these three manifestations of the Actaeon myth produces an informative reflection upon the trajectory of literary influence (Ovid upon Petrarch and Petrarch upon the English Renaissance). Beyond this, the disparate Actaeons of these works unite to present a fascinating discourse on the nature of love and man’s encounter with the Divine. Read more...
The Mark of Cain: Murder, Community and Brotherhood in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (April 10, 2007)
The reader of Our Mutual Friend experiences the interiority of the murderer in all of its complexity, prompting the critic Edmund Wilson to observe that here Dickens’s “probing of the psychology of the murderer…becomes ever more convincing and intimate” (Collins qtd. 282). The murderer Bradley Headstone is both the Everyman who is capable of murder, and the vile, inhuman murderer who is beyond the pity of his narrator. Dickensian heroes strive for community. Throughout his life, Headstone fails to establish social ties, and is overwhelmed by alienation and exile. Community breeds brotherhood, yet Headstone turns against his social “brother” and seeks to kill him. Headstone is an impotent, inept member of society, and, as a murderer, becomes the Cain of Genesis. His “brother’s blood” cries to God from the ground, and Headstone, like Cain, becomes “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 10). The mark placed upon him spares him from society’s punishment. Even so, death and damnation are upon his head. By his action, Headstone’s personal and social identity is destroyed utterly, and in the end execution is accomplished by the only hand that is capable of doing so: his own. Read more...
The Dirty Linen of Literary Studies (December 2007)
“I don’t know about you,” said a Doctoral candidate in one of my graduate classes (a fellow who openly broadcasts his embrace of an homosexual lifestyle), “But this really makes me feel excited.” The “this” in question was a large photograph of a classical statue of a naked boy. The “excitement” of the student was neither platonic nor pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Such is the state of main-stream literary studies today – perversely obsessed with sex, highly politicized, pompous, self-indulgent, and solipsistic. Read more...
On Spirituality and Scholarship (March 17, 2007)
The erotic poetry of the Song of Songs speaks movingly about the lover and the beloved, the interplay of love, desire, consummation, and delight. God’s relationship with man is thus dramatically embodied. Setting this romantic imagery aside for a moment, however, we can pluck an analogy to scholarly endeavor. This analogy can be discovered by interpreting the verse two different ways: first, taking the wind as Divine breath blowing over the garden of the mind, we shall ask the question, “Where does God fit into my personal scholarship?;” second, considering God Himself as the garden full of “choicest fruits,” welcoming us in to enjoy such delights, we shall ask another question: “How should scholarly inquiry turn to God Himself?” Read more...
Popery in Prose: Ruskin's Stylistic Dalliance with the Scarlet Lady (November/December 2007)
“Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval!” exclaims John Ruskin, standing in the hush of the Venetian cathedral of St. Mark’s. In an essay published in The Stones of Venice, Ruskin describes the cathedral in an almost mystical ecstasy. Francis O’Gorman insists The Stones of Venice “offered a form of Gothic uncontaminated by […] Catholicism,” yet it is not the absence of Catholicism but rather its persistent problematic presence that fills this work. The passage on St. Mark’s poignantly registers the conflict of this Protestant Englishman who stands before an architectural embodiment of Roman Catholicism. Implacable in his rejection of Rome, a figure such as Ruskin at the same time seeks to abstract characteristics of the Roman Church, alter them ever so slightly and assimilate them in their altered – and now acceptable – state. This is not to imply that Ruskin fostered a secret yearning towards the Church of Rome, and was held back from conversion by fear of the shame of defection; rather it is to identify in Ruskin the lurking qualities of Catholicism, qualities I identify as a “Catholic aesthetic,” and which can be mapped along the Catholic Nicene Creed refrain of “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.” Read more... |
