The defining works of the Modernist novel, Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, all worked to dethrone the presuppositions of bourgeois consciousness, with its assumption of fixed [ Read Article ]
Robinson Jeffers came of age at the end of a century that had wrestled with the question of divinity as few others before it in the Western world. Christianity had twice divided, in the eleventh [ Read Article ]
The major part of Nancy Herman’s small but select show at her gallery in Narberth covers a single long wall, but it says a great deal about looking, and the how and why of what [ Read Article ]
Thanksgiving this year included a sigh of relief that America had managed to hold a more or less normal midterm election in which the anticipated red tsunami did not materialize and voters apparently decided, Solomonically, [ Read Article ]
America’s retreat from its century and a half commitment to public education has now become a rout. There has not been a greater betrayal of our country in my lifetime. There is no more disastrous [ Read Article ]
Andrei Tarkovsky, the exact contemporary of the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut (1932-1986), made only seven feature films in his thirty-year career, but their prestige has elevated him to almost mythical status. Ingmar Bergman called him [ Read Article ]
The story of American Abstract Expressionism in its mid-twentieth century heyday seems a settled one, at least as far as its major figures are concerned: Rothko, Gorky, de Kooning, Newman, Still, Pollock, Guston, Kline, and [ Read Article ]
Weldon Kees belongs to the circle of American authors who left us early, in some cases by their own hand: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, David Foster [ Read Article ]
Sometimes it takes a deeply conservative intelligence to get to the heart of the matter. Such an intelligence was that of William Butler Yeats, who wrote nearly a century ago that things, not men, were [ Read Article ]
The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech. That’s only the beginning of the story. People and institutions try to shut us up all the time, or make us pay a price with our pocketbooks, [ Read Article ]
Musicians from Marlboro paid their third visit to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Society’s penultimate concert of its 2018-19 season at the Perelman Theater. The Chamber Music Society itself was born, thirty-three years [ Read Article ]
Donald Trump says he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any votes. I believe it, too. First of all, it’s a hypothetical—the Donald doesn’t really mean it. Secondly, if he [ Read Article ]
Cheating is as old as the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25). It’s also as old as the university. There’s certainly nothing new about ChatGPT, the new recipe for the oldest scam, except for [ Read Article ]