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Antigone

It is not always entirely clear who (if anyone) or what is the tragic hero(ine) in Sophocles’s Antigone, or what exactly is the nature of their tragedy. One might have thought that the tragic figure was the eponymous Antigone herself, … Continue reading →Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, lb5-2-2013 | Tagged with drama, Jon Beasley-Murray, literature, posthegemony, Sophocles, teaching

Foe

As part of the Arts One Digital initiative (which I’ve mentioned before, we’re recording various lectures delivered as part of UBC’s “Arts One” program. You can see for instance my lecture on J M Coetzee’s Foe here, in various formats. … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with Arts One Digital, ArtsOne, literature, teaching, technology

Watchmen

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen offers something of a counter-factual history of the Cold War. In particular, it imagines the central role of two generations of masked do-gooders: a 1940s cohort of “Minutemen,” most of whom are somewhat ephemeral … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, graphic novel, literature, narrative, teaching

Felisberto Hernández

The Wednesday quotation, part XIX: I’ve been reading Felisberto Hernández, a very striking Uruguayan writer from the first half of the twentieth century who is practically unknown, especially in English. Some of his short stories have been translated, in a … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, felisberto hernandez, Latin America, literature, memory, quotation, teaching, writing

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is preoccupied above all with the secret and mysterious life of things. It’s concerned with the human and the non-human, and the surprisingly porous line between them. The narrator takes for granted that things … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with affect, ArtsOne, gender, literature, teaching

“The Metamorphosis”

Perhaps the oddest thing about Franz Kafka’s celebrated short story, “The Metamorphosis,” is how stubbornly it resists the notion that it is an allegory or extended metaphor. Though dreams are invoked in the very first line–“Gregor Samsa woke one morning … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, biopolitics, habit, Kafka, literature, teaching

The Waste Land

The final stanza of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land encapsulates much of what has gone before. It comprises four languages, multiple allusions, abrupt transitions and changes in register and tone: London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, literature, modernism, ruins, teaching

The Prince

For a political writer renowned for his commitment to realism–to real politik, indeed–it’s remarkable, and surely significant, that Niccolò Machiavelli should open and close The Prince with a couple of extended metaphors. The resort to literary tropes frames what is … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, constituent power, Machiavelli, political theory, teaching

Civilization and Its Discontents

Like Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents is interested in the puzzling fact that ultimately we are our own worst enemies. However hostile life may be–and in Freud’s vision of things, life … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with affect, ArtsOne, Freud, psychoanalysis, teaching

Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde have become a byword for the notion of mankind’s dual nature, the good and the bad, the virtuous and the immoral. At times the text seems to support this reading: Henry Jekyll’s “Full Statement of the Case,” … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, public | Tagged with ArtsOne, body, literature, multitude, teaching

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