Hello everyone! Since we will not have the chance to discuss “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” again in class, this post will be a bit longer than usual. For those of you who missed the waffles and class discussion, we are first going to briefly talk about narration, which is a topic that we touched upon […]
Read More →Archive for March, 2019
Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: An Autobiography About Everyone Else?
Kathrine Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider opens with a lucid stream of consciousness. Throughout the dream sequence, the reader experiences intimate contact with Porter’s immediate thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Interestingly enough, upon waking up, Porter is not free from her morbid dreams of fear and death. As Porter enters a daunting reality, the readers are […]
Read More →A ghost but more alive than she was
As we transition from Ibsen to Porter, let’s take a moment to remember poor Oswald, slipping into unconsciousness just as the cold, cold Norwegian daylight finally comes streaming through that window. The ending of Ibsen’s play resonates with the final lines of Porter’s story: No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that […]
Read More →A Woman’s Right
In this article from The Guardian, the author goes on to explain the similar characteristics each of Ibsen’s female leads have within the world of their plays. The article states that Ibsen had “empathized” with his female characters and paints them out as social victims. This is shown in Ghosts with Helen Alving being a slave to the dos and don’ts of society […]
Read More →Fighting ghosts
In Ibsen’s Ghosts, the characters most of the time refrain themselves from confronting the ghosts in their life and going against it. Even Mrs. Alving, the most “free-thinking” character of the play, only acknowledges the impact of those ghosts on her life decisions, without taking much action to remove herself from their grip. If we […]
Read More →19th Century Immorality & Co.
Ghosts is a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1881 and was first staged in 1882. The play is shown to have critical views on 19th century immorality, which then breaks off to further factors that follow underneath this main idea. The overarching theme of immorality forms a throughline across the various topics the play […]
Read More →Who’s to blame?
While reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, I was reminded by a piece of literature that addresses a very similar issue, Typhoid Mary. This book written by Susan Bartoletti shines a light on an Irish immigrant named Mary Mallon. Mary became a reliable cook as she made her way through several establishments upon her […]
Read More →Topographies of disease
Snow’s 1854 map of cholera deaths in proximity to the Broad Street Pump is one of several examples of attempts to visualize data about an epidemic’s spread. The other examples featured on this Princeton University Library site are fascinating too. See the online exhibit at large for other early thematic mapping projects as well as […]
Read More →Armed with science/knowledge, are we completely safe from disease?
Armed with science/knowledge, are we completely safe from disease? “Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades…” Stephen Johnson (pg 255) Irrespective of man’s knowledge of the spread of various diseases, man is still locked in a battle with diseases. Not just […]
Read More →Thinking About Anthropomorphism in The Ghost Map
Last class, we discussed various topics relating to The Ghost Map, one of which was the anthropomorphizing — or what we called personification in class — of the bacterium in the book. Indeed, the book’s preface states the following: “This is a story with four protagonists: a deadly bacterium, a vast city, and two gifted but very different men. …” (emphasis mine). This demonstrates Steven Johnson’s conscious decision in […]
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