When researching about the symptoms for congenital neurosifilis it caught my attention that most of the information was relevant for children below 2 years of age. However, the symptoms associated with Oswald’s age were “unexplained deafness, progressive intellectual deterioration or keratitis” (a condition in which the cornea becomes inflamed and eyesight is affected); these fit with […]
Read More →Archive for September, 2014
Ghosts and Inheritance
“The Sins of the Father” In class we touched upon the way in which inheritance plays a significant role in the play. Oswald inherits both syphilis from his father (although technically not possible) and his sexual deviousness. Pastor Manders notes that Oswald resembles his father as he descends the stairs, smoking his father’s pipe. In […]
Read More →Ibsen round-up
Well, today may have been the first time I was ever tempted in class to link Ibsen to Suicidal Tendencies, but the passage we focused on from Ghosts — all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they […]
Read More →Feeling Alive?
What does it mean to be alive? Aside from the physiological component, to be alive can be understood to have the capacity to feel and experience a wide range of emotions. The way in which we respond to these emotions can be seen as a determinant of how we live our lives and what we […]
Read More →how effective is the Priest?
How much authority does the Priest have? This character enters the scene suddenly, with no particular prompting in the text. Besides his age and gender, the Priest is not physically described in detail. The reader can easily project him or herself onto this character, and that may be deliberate. The Priest is the only character […]
Read More →Stages of Grief
According to the Kübler-Ross model, there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. (It is to be noted that not all five may occur depending on the individual, and they do not always occur in this particular order.) These five stages can be used to analyze and better understand the characters […]
Read More →Feast during plague–why is it so wrong
In Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague, it is clear that rejoicing during the time of plague is considered rebellious and immoral, to the extent of “lawlessness” (103). But as I was reading the play, I couldn’t help but ask “why is it so wrong?” Loss of beloved ones is surely a mournful thing, but […]
Read More →Party, Party all Plague Long
A returning theme in our discussions is the power of disaster (of which disease may often be read as a subset). These instances cause the breaking of norms, the destruction of taboos in society, and ‘the creation’ of an increasingly liberal, and often unconventional space for people to live in. We began to explore these […]
Read More →Final Thoughts on Arthur Mervyn
DRAMATIC TEMPLATES IN ARTHUR MERVYN Arthur Mervyn is undoubtedly filled with numerous events, experiences and circumstances that the reader can see has profound effects on the development of Arthur’s character in the novel. However, when looking closely at the types of plots that Charles Brocken Brown weaves into Arthur’s story, we can see that some […]
Read More →Jane Austen, meet Arthur Mervyn
If anyone here is a Jane Austen fan, you may want to think about the fact that Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are separated by roughly a dozen years. I’ve written here before about ties between these two novels — and on the special consideration novels in general give to questions of […]
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