In the several years Cyrus Patell and I taught our Writing New York course on the Square, we amassed a pretty substantial number of blog posts about Kushner and Angels. They may prove useful as you continue to wrap your heads around the play in a short amount of time this week. Here are a […]
Read More →Archive for October, 2012
“We are failing, failing. The Earth and the Angels.”
Who are these angels? And what the hell are they doing in America? Prior Walter first encounters an angel when he hears a commanding voice in his dream (which overlaps with Harper Pitt’s Valium trip), and again hears the same voice while being treated at the hospital for infections. He at first attributes it […]
Read More →Not a Guide Dog, a Blind Dog
Here are links to a couple of things… firstly to a blog review of Blindness – it provides a good overview of the book and crosses over with issues we previously discussed, e.g. the lack of punctuation. Then, to provide some light relief for Eid, and to plug my own poorly made video (!), here […]
Read More →Drawing Comparisons
This essay draws connections from Blindness to a number of contemporary thinkers, trends and of course, works of literature. Including a small section that looks at both the Plague and Lord of the Flies comparisons that we made also in class. “The novel can also be interpreted and taught from a philosophical and existential standpoint. Some may want […]
Read More →Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Imagine people losing their eyesight in massive numbers for no apparent reason, without any additional symptoms, while their eyes remain perfectly healthy. Imagine someone just turned off a feature of the brain responsible for vision and left you in an abysmal void. Why not a perfect subject-matter for fiction novel? The epidemic of mass blindness […]
Read More →“The Possessed” — remind you of something?
Camus on Nihilism: He talks about The Possessed by Dostoyevsky and there is several similarities to our discussion of The Plague!
Read More →Camus wrap-up
Greetings from death’s door. Apologies for the loss of a day’s discussion, but my hope is that putting some of your thoughts down here will allow us to still get some closure on this novel. Last time we finished by reading several paragraphs surrounding the death of M. Othon’s son. Our first task today was […]
Read More →For the Practicing Absurdist…
I’ve stumbled upon the Absurdist Monthly Review. They have a nice selection of absurdist quotes, including this particularly relevant one by Eugene Ionesco: “No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human […]
Read More →Persistence of Yersinia Pestis
According to this semi-scientific article, Yersinia Pestis, the agent of the plague in the 1940s in Oran, still existed in the same place in Algeria when the article was written in 2006: “Rieux, the hero of Albert Camus in “La Peste,” aimed to relate the events of the plague outbreak in Oran in the 1940s […]
Read More →Why recommend it
I found a nice video of recommenadtion and I could not agree with him more. He also puts the emphasis on the philosophy behind the novel and the idea of “how one should live”. It is worth listening to his point of view. I believe this book may make some readers gain a new perspective […]
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