For the most part, I stopped reading the Harry Potter series at the sixth book. I should’ve stopped at the fifth. The middle and the last part of the “Half-Blood Prince” was utter garbage (except the chapter where he takes the good luck potion) and the ending was just an excuse to kill off aContinue reading “Two Things About Harry Potter”
Tag Archives: Marxism
Freud & the Tyrants of Therapy
For more than a century and a half since the founding of the psychoanalytic criticism by Sigmund Freud, the school has found a tremendous audience in the field of literature and politics in general. Psychoanalytic or “Freudian” critical practice is essentially the criticism of something, in two ready-made examples, a person or a literary text,Continue reading “Freud & the Tyrants of Therapy”
A Way to Compare World Outlooks, Ideologies
The way in which various ideologies can influence one’s world outlook and evaluation of objective evidence is best shown through the following question. This shows how Marxism is far more than just a socio-political theory, as are other ideologies such as liberalism. Q: Why do nations go to war? A: Human nature – classical realismContinue reading “A Way to Compare World Outlooks, Ideologies”
The Quest for “Authenticity” in Art
“Authenticity” as preached by today’s critics is an idealist concept. The concept of “art” is an era of mechanical, industrial production frequently comes under fire by critics, who insist that the “passion” and “talent” of the art of old is all but lost on today’s youth culture, that Shakespeare is somehow more worthy of praiseContinue reading “The Quest for “Authenticity” in Art”
Modernism
The word “modernism” is intentionally ambiguous, and perhaps without realizing it is a fitting term for such a literary movement. In the most common usage it refers to the twentieth-century movement that began with the concept of the “modern” (obviously, since without this word how could one have modern-ism?) and ended up being a collectionContinue reading “Modernism”
Crisis & Capital In Wuthering Heights
The majority of Victorian literature is the product of the petty-bourgeois class, and Wuthering Heights is no different. The tumultuous ideological storms contained within demonstrate a crisis in the ideology of the 19th century Victorian petty-bourgeois class to which Emily Bronte was born. Frequently, novelists and intellectuals have a reflective role to play at aContinue reading “Crisis & Capital In Wuthering Heights”
Content is Chief, Form is Chaff?
The form of a poem or story (as opposed to its content) is not merely ornamental or window-dressing, nor is it merely “fleshing out” the content. It has its own life within the text, and forms as simple as the note arrangements of classical music or the rhyming pattern (or lack thereof) of a pieceContinue reading “Content is Chief, Form is Chaff?”
Scott’s Denied Bourgeois Mentality
Sir Walter Scott may have denied traditionalism and the ruling class culture of his time personally, but his novels provide no alternative to those bourgeois doctrines and rather in the values of that system find their own comfortable justifications for existence. To illuminate the question of class ideology and how it is reflected in SirContinue reading “Scott’s Denied Bourgeois Mentality”
William Blake’s “Nurse’s Songs”
In order to grasp their meanings, the two versions of the “Nurse’s Song” in both William Blake’s the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience are to be read not through what they show literally, nor even what they appear to mean (the obvious “red herring” interpretation), but rather what they hide. At theirContinue reading “William Blake’s “Nurse’s Songs””
John Webster’s “A Dirge”
John Webster’s’ “A Dirge” is a delightfully gloomy poem contrasting the power and the all-encompassing inevitability of death with the beauty and balance of life. It seems to ponder on this deep subject, using images of nature to communicate its message. Webster makes his purpose immediately clear by the title-a “dirge” itself is a dismal funeral song. The verses clearly speak of death and the eternal nothingness that may reside afterwards-never in the poem does Webster mention anything about the eternal soul or afterlife. Clearly he is not concerned with life or metaphysics, but with death and the natural world.
Indeed, animals and nature are a reoccurring theme throughout the concise poem. “Call for the robin-redbreast,” it begins, “since o’er shady groves they hover, and with leaves and flowers do cover, the friendless bodies of unburied men.” His description of trees, birds and animals is undeniably beautiful even as his account of the bodies of forgotten men being covered in leaves is emotionally draining to the reader. Webster addresses wrens and robins, two kinds of small birds which fed on insects-perhaps those same insects currently feeding on the corpse’s flesh? At once, he speaks to loneliness and beauty, death and life in one package.
The Espresso Stalinist 