A Newberry Library Adult Education Seminar This seminar offers a lively survey of some of the artistic techniques, styles, innovations, and traditions that we encounter everyday. Through literary excerpts, film clips, lectures, and discussion, our sessions will explore the importance, in fiction and film, of a good beginning, the depiction of characters’ thoughts and feelings, […]
A Newberry Adult Education Seminar Anthony Trollope’s 1855 novel The Warden revolves around an English cleric whose comfortable living is called into question not only by progressive voices in society but by his own conscience. While inaugurating the expansive Barsetshire series, The Warden on its own is a relatively short, intense examination of emotion, moral choice, and the social […]
This weekend Chicago will host the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). This year’s gathering will attract more than nine thousand literary scholars and students from around the world, each more eager than the other to make sense of such papers as “Chupacabras and Border Crossings,” “Creative Ontogenesis in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology,” […]
Romantic poets “admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to realize that the process of putting such a taste into a reader’s head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, […]
“Secondly, and more seriously, it has been deduced from this belief that you are liable to destroy the poem if its meaning is discovered, that it is important to preserve one’s innocence about the meaning of verses, that one must use sensibility, and as little intelligence as possible.” This is from William Empson’s Seven Types […]