There are so many roads to Oedipus and so many ways we could take out of it to what comes next. Here are a few older posts, or multiple versions of posts, that can take us in a few of those directions. On summarizing the play: what matters? Why? (With a hat tip to Freud […]
Read More →Category: government
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 →Roy-cohn-naissance
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 →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 →Denialism is No Foreigner (Conveners Post)
Donald Trump may be (outwardly) the most powerful COVID denier in the world, but he is not the only one. Denialism runs deep inside the minds of people, whether due to their distorted allegiance to rationality (or rationalization) or thanks to the conditioned privilege of not encountering catastrophes on a daily basis before the […]
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 →