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When someone says the name “Allen Ginsberg”, any number of things immediately come to mind. Ginsberg was a celebrated US poet, and his work “Howl” is world famous. But he was also a noted activist. Not only did Ginsberg vehemently decry the war in Vietnam, but he was at the forefront of the battle against drug criminalization […]
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In 1915, Robert Chenault Givler published the results of his PhD thesis, which he had undertaken at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. The work was entitled ‘The Psycho-physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry’ and consisted of Givler strapping a series of readers to an early blood-pressure device in the hopes of […]
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A trip to the theatre, these days, often involves additional purchase. Theatre merchandise (‘merch’) is sold in a related shop or kiosk, so that attending a performance might involve also buying a t-shirt, a mug, a toy, a CD. Some canny productions also ‘product place’ the merch in the production itself, meaning that material goods […]
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When we think about prejudice, we think about people. People who are prejudiced against us; people whom we may be prejudiced against (whether we admit it or not). Yet not all prejudice is directed against people. Sometimes it can be directed against an animal. Or a bird. The cormorant is one such bird. It has […]
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Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike have explored how we build the world with metaphors and other figurative language. The present era is undergoing a massive metaphorical transformation, as computer technology […]
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Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi once wondered if he might be a dream that a butterfly was having. A couple of millennia later, a biologist asks a similar question in Greg Bear’s novel Vitals (2002). “Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us,” Bear’s scientist declares. “Perhaps we are only a dream the […]
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Thirty years ago, I planned to write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. With a monograph in mind, I assembled Bowen’s essays and reviews scattered across various magazines and newspapers. What started as a few items retrieved from obscurity quickly snowballed into hundreds. I began visiting archives and fitting […]
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When is interruption an art form? Short answer: the eighteenth-century novel. Interrupting another speaker gets a bad rap: common charges lodged against listeners who jump the queue maintain that interrupters are pushy, rude, impatient, or, at the least, distracting. Certainly, the first generation of emerging novel theorists directed similar rhetoric against the cacophony of tale-tellers […]
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