The Line Dividing Good and Evil
What we can learn from the moral and literary failings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and James Baldwin.
Megan Gafford
· 8 min read
literature
A collection of 59 posts
Where Have All the Cultures Gone?
The homogenisation of culture begins with the loss of language.
Tristan S. Rapp
· 10 min read
Making Fiction Boring
The ideological capture of college writing programs has ushered in an age of didactic, anodyne, and tedious books.
Adam Szetela
· 14 min read
The Geopolitical Thriller: A Right-Wing Genre
Other plots may attract both right and left-wing authors, but successful geopolitical thrillers are always informed by a conservative view of the world.
Stewart Slater
· 10 min read
The Sensitivity Era
Amid literary subcultures, competition has always been fierce and unrelenting and has become even more so in our age of elite overproduction. On social media, these embittered rivalries play out in public amid a chorus of backbiting worthy of Chekhov.
Robert Huddleston
· 8 min read
Because the Night Belongs to Lovers
Love is transformative—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is clear-sighted about the fact that that transformation can be for the worse.
Iona Italia
· 8 min read
Another Tiresome Trans-Activist Power Play
The campaign to strip novelist John Boyne of his Polari Prize longlist honour shows that gender extremists still seek to control progressive arts subcultures—even as mainstream society rejects their illiberal movement.
Allan Stratton
· 9 min read
Fan Service vs Geek Service
From the Iliad to Mission: Impossible, creators have wrestled with the question of how much universe-building is too much.
Stewart Slater
· 9 min read
Gonzo Bros
Twenty years after his death, what Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy—or lack of it—tells us about literature and manhood in our current moment.
Frank Celia
· 29 min read
Playing with Helpless Dead Puppets
‘Ragtime,’ E.L. Doctorow’s forgotten novel of Progressive Era New York, is a reminder of how much American politics have changed over the past century.
Josh Allan
· 9 min read
AI and the Death of Literary Criticism
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Thomas P. Balazs
· 8 min read
Evolutionary Psychology in the Humanities: Shakespeare’s Othello
Othello and Iago represent two enduring behaviours whose conflicts have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.
Helen Pluckrose
· 17 min read
From Skies to Screens
Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by digital technology. This is stripping us of our sense that the physical landscape is infused with meaning.
Robert Huddleston
· 9 min read
Monstrous Things
Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess?
Allan Stratton
· 11 min read
The Problem with Utopias
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Ewan Morrison
· 15 min read