January 31, 2008 – 08:00 am
In his story collection, Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino writes, “When space doesn’t exist having somebody unpleasant…underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing” (43). He writes this in all seriousness, with hardly a wink or a chuckle. Oh, there is a sense of play about it, of course; the whole experiment of Cosmicomics is born [...]
October 25, 2007 – 11:33 am
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is not a subtle book. The author’s vision is clear and his themes move slowly and obviously across the page like his two major characters walking the eponymous road. The characters are an unnamed man and his son, “the boy.” The world they inhabit has been destroyed by some [...]
October 22, 2007 – 12:27 pm
“Sing, Heavenly Muse,” (1.6) Milton begs, “I…invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (1.12-13). Does the Muse answer? From Milton’s output—twelve books of verse, one book per apostle, one per tribe of Israel—one may believe so, but where in all of Paradise Lost does the Muse answer the poet’s call?
Perhaps in the line break [...]
October 2, 2007 – 12:01 am
gestalt |gə sh tält; -ˑ sh tôlt| : A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
Theodore Sturgeon’s novel, More Than Human, tracks the formation of “a gestalt life-form” (105), a “new kind of human [...]
September 11, 2007 – 12:16 pm
A man sits down to begin writing a book in which the main character is God. This man is not one of those people who wants to write a book and then does not, nor is he one of those people who writes a book and then sticks it in a drawer, and nor is [...]
September 5, 2007 – 10:57 am
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Herland as the recollected narration of a male sociologist. The narrator’s profession allows Gilman to present her vision of a feminist utopia from a generalist’s perspective, devoid of any of the difficulties of the details of life. Instead of showing us the life and habits of a single Herlander, the narrator [...]
In Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett summarizes his process of evolutionary investigation with the “stock Latin phrase, ‘cui bono?,’ which means ‘Who benefits from this?’” (62). The basic idea is that one can best approach an evolutionary mystery by first determining who or what is the beneficiary of the equipment or [...]
For his collection, The Norse Myths, Kevin Crossley-Holland worked from “six primary literary sources fundamental to a study of Norse mythology” (xxxvii), though he cautions the reader that our knowledge of the myths suffers from “the filter of literary artifice, fragmented manuscripts, prejudice and contempt occasioned by conflicting religious belief, and hindsight” (xxxvi). His collection [...]
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s [...]
Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach, begins in Australia on December 27, 196—, which is already sometime after nuclear war has eradicated humanity from the Northern Hemisphere. The novel ends the following year, sometime in late August or early September, when the fallout finally arrives on the southernmost-inhabited continent and kills off the only human [...]
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