Angels in America is a period piece. Kushner bridges fact and fiction in a story set in 1980s America. One of the key pillars of that bridge is big gun prosecutor Roy Cohn. He is the only major character in the play explicitly based on a real life person. “Have you no sense of decency?” […]
Read More →Category: History
The name’s Bond. Liberty Bond
Pale Horse Pale Rider is a story set in World War 1, and we see a lot of elements from the era become everyday realities for Miranda, our protagonist. One of those are the Liberty Bonds, which salesmen keep hounding her for, and she wonders what use her 50 dollars could be for the country. […]
Read More →Camus and the Postcolonial (augmenter’s post)
Albert Camus’ The Plague has widely been studied as an allegory for the invasion of Nazism in France during World War II. In the novel, set sometime during the 1940s, the bubonic plague invades the town of Oran in French Algeria, starting from a deluge of unexplained dead rats to the rapid upsurge of “inguinal-fever […]
Read More →What’s in a name?
In Katherine Ann Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the protagonist Miranda Gay has a near-death experience with the 1918 influenza pandemic . However, “influenza” was not the only name which was used for this globally spread disease and the pattern of naming it across the world is actually quite interesting. The British science journalist […]
Read More →Alving’s Haunt- The Form and Place of Ghosts. (Bhrigu’s Augmenter Post)
Ghosts work from home. Apart from the Flying Dutchman’s crew and the Wild Hunt, ghosts, ghouls, and other phantoms are homebodies, content to stick to one place to carry out their spooky business. Captain Alving is such a ghost, tormenting his long-suffering wife throughout the action of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Ibsen keeps Alving’s ghost in one […]
Read More →Defoe: Spilling the Tea Since 1723? (Convener’s Post)
Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is an elusive text. First published in 1722, it describes life in London during the Bubonic Plague through one man’s experiences and documentation. Though Defoe refers to it as a “Journal”, which is evident in the title of the book, it is debatable whether this book can be […]
Read More →A complex complex
I’d like to throw out two general areas for our consideration as we begin our discussion of Oedipus: First, the question of plague as material fact and as metaphor. To what degree can we think about the representation of plague in these separate ways — i.e., literal and figurative? To what degree are they conflated […]
Read More →The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster: Who’s To Blame?
In the early hours of December 3rd 1984, between 30-40 tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic gas, leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant just three miles outside of Bhopal, India. The poisonous gas burned people eyes, throats, and resulted in the immediate death of at least 3,800 people. In a 2006 affidavit Indian […]
Read More →Fantasia V.S Real-Life Events
As we look at the title of Kushner’s masterpiece: Angels in America: A Gay “Fantasia” on National Themes, the idea of “this is just another fiction” probably flashes through all of our minds. As a matter of fact, the fantasia is based on several real-life events that makes this play look more related to our […]
Read More →Iron Lungs
Significance: In Roth’s Nemesis (2010), we have come across the term “iron lungs” which some of the characters in the novel had to use when they contracted polio. It has been stated that there is no other device more associated with polio than an iron lung, or a tank respirator. Physicians that treated people who […]
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