Eliot defines what he exemplifies in The Waste Land — i.e. the “mythic method” — in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The mythic method looked to the past to glean meaning and understanding for what has been lost or destroyed in the present.
Archive | July, 2004
On Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Not quite a tale of the supernatural, nor a unified allegory, nor a tale of the quotidian, nor a journey through the psychology of the characters, The Metamorphosis, like most of Kafka’s other writings, cannot be interpreted in a new critical manner. We must be comfortable with our discomfort, with our inability to neatly tie this piece up in one pretty bow.
Notes on Naturalism
A basic tension between head and heart was characteristic of our naturalistic novelists. Their intellectual commitment to scientific determinism and its attendant implications regarding humanity’s place in nature is to be seen in the forms of their works — in explicit and implicit commentary, in character conception, in the use of background, in the dynamics [...]
Euripides’ Medea: Patriarchial Terrorism
Medea does leave the audience with a sense of pity and terror, even perhaps more than Oedipus Rex in its unnaturalness, if that’s possible. Euripides’ play seems to suggest that in order for the patriarchy to understand its inherent double standards, one must strike it at its very center: those who would continue its tradition.
