In the era of the Internet and social media, an awareness of semiotics, also known as the “study of signs,” is useful to have. This article considers some elementary but illuminating ideas in the field. What are signs and how do they convey meaning? What is the message […]
Picaresque novel cum Bildungsroman, Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954; trans. Denver Lindley) resonates with the late modernist psyche. Mann’s novel prefigures a psychiatric epidemic of our day, psychopathic narcissism. In this widespread postmodern condition, the fragile identity implodes in its own process of self-aggrandizement, […]
The processes of myth-creation rely on a crossover between reality and imagination. A collective psychological space exists in which history and myth merge and become indistinguishable from one another. In the heyday of the television western, for instance, how many young children were aware there was any difference […]
Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins) was screened on TV the day after I happened to be reading the first part of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, her finely honed analysis of the cultural perception of womanhood. I knew there existed ample literature on the cultural and feminist […]
Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Once hooked, always will be, on these writings of Samuel Beckett. On. Sometimes referred to as “novels,” Beckett’s three later works, Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) and Worstward […]
