Catullus and Ginsberg Walk into a Bar...

Readers often speak of poetry and novels as separate, defined genres of literature, but the truth is that they feed off of each other....

Since the dawn of written language, poets and revolutionaries have scrawled sarcastic sayings onto walls, parchments, and tablets. These...

English has often drawn intense critical attention for its lack of standardized conjugation, endless declensions, and its general...

Novelists and playwrights since the beginning of modern literature have sought to prove that life is purposeful, that we are not simply...

In one particularly poignant episode of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye Pierce, the hero surgeon whose vaudevillian antics and humanitarian commitment...

For millennia, historians and strategists have tried to make sense of the politics of war, but war is emotional just as much as it is...

This week I am revisiting my previous blog post on the hubris of humanity and the struggle to control our own inventions. For centuries,...

This week, I am revisiting my first post about tragic heroes and the importance of tragedy in world literature. The prevalence of tragedy...

“Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the...

Saul Bellow, the great bombastic cynic, once wrote that “a fool can throw a stone in a pond that a hundred wisemen can not get out.” For...

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is” Saul Bellow writes in Herzog, his masterful novel of middle-aged angst. For...

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Paul M. Blowers criticized the apparent “selfishness” of Greek tragedy, expounding...