Understanding Society

Theodor Adorno wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." But there are good reasons not to agree with Adorno. There is ...

Did the Iliad have an author? Since this is probably the best known text from the ancient Greek world,  one might find the question a puzzl...

George Orwell wrote a great deal of literary criticism, book reviews, and intellectual commentary, almost always with a down-to-earth plain ...

As a way of finding some interesting distraction in the social isolation of Covid-19 I have been reading Paul Fussell's  The Great ...

Some novelists take as part of their task the description and evocation of certain social realities. James Baldwin captured one slice of Af...

We are all persons with thoughts, desires, emotions, memories, and awareness. In some sense we have first-hand knowledge of all this -- we ...

I recently read Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant biographical book on Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare ,...

Literary traditions are sometimes thought to have an underlying interconnectedness and coherence that makes them more than simply a group of...