When it comes to idealistic prose, none other can top Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther in my humble opinion. I first read the work years ago, letter by letter, slowly digesting Werther’s agony and self-punishment for loving someone he shouldn’t. Perhaps in result of spending so much time with the text, ever [...]
Entries from January 2008
January 13, 2008
Women as Lovers–A Cautionary Tale?
It feels as though I’ve consumed gallons of coffee and turned thousands of pages today, but alas, my Sunday has not been so fantastic. I finished reading Charlotte Temple–a cautionary tale about a young English girl who is carried off by a dashing soldier to America only to be abandoned and forsaken. The [...]
January 12, 2008
America, or a Vision in a Dream
Nearly three years have passed since I have examined Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem that I understood to be an opium user’s musings. Reading this in tandem with de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater in a British Lit course, Xanadu was fairly obvious: a hedonistic paradise both awe-inspiring and terrible.
However, Mazzeo’s ‘The [...]
January 2, 2008
First blog of 2008!
Welcome to the New Year, friends! This was the possibly the last Hogmanay celebration for Edinburgh and the gang and I were sure not to miss it. Well, we had free tickets. For those in the U.S., Hogmanay is Scots for the “last day of the year”–maybe you learned something new.
One particularly amusing [...]
