The two things that I find most compelling in William Shakespeare’s work are his use of language, his rhetoric that is at once beautiful, captivating and often heartbreaking, and the violence that permeates so many of his texts. Today I’d like to discuss exactly that: word and action in two of my favourite works by […]
Tag: English students
Bloom as Joyce’s Odysseus
A quick Google search of ‘Ulysses by James Joyce’ will bring back over seven million results and the headlines of the two top articles give a better summary of Joyce’s novel than I ever could. The first reads, ‘Why you should read this book – James Joyce’s Ulysses’; the second, ‘Is James Joyce’s Ulysses the […]
Eliot, Dante and Undoing
Literary critic, I. A. Richards wrote that T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘The Waste Land’ described the state of modern, post-war life as one that was suffering from a ‘sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for life-giving water which seems suddenly to […]