Writing on Literature

Writing about literature that’s not sf or world lit.

Date	Title	Note
2019-11-05	“Courage through Opposition: The Political Resonance of Norman Mailer”	The first draft of a chapter I wrote for Mailer in Context.
2018-10-03	“The Existential Situation: The Making of Mailer’s Early Protagonists”	A look at some of Mailer’s protagonists in his short fiction.
2014-10-15	“Breaking Bad: Walter White’s Hipster Transformation”	Looking at Walter White as a post-9/11 Mailerian hipster.
2014-02-28	“Integral Social Media”	How I augmented my #MailerClass with social media.
2013-06-17	“Teaching Norman Mailer”	The first post in a series that discusses the “legacy power” of Mailer.
2013-04-05	“Into Darkness”	In The Executioner’s Song, Gary Gilmore is more than just a cold-hearted executioner.
2013-02-23	“Norman’s ‘Mailer’”	Mailer’s multiple personae attempt to get at some sort of truth.
2013-02-01	“The Harbors of the Moon”	The moon is a major symbol that haunts Rojack throughout Norman Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream.
2013-01-25	“The Minuet of Macho”	Norman Mailer’s 1959 short story “The Time of Her Time” shows his Hipster at work, but has fun with him at the same time.
2013-01-22	“Mailer’s Adverts & Hipster”	Reading key excerpts from Advertisements for Myself.
2012-10-12	“Mailer’s Novel(ist)”	In and Beyond the Late Age of Print.
2012-02-09	“Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse: Signs and Maps Along The Road”	Anytime we try to talk about the apocalypse, we slip into nostalgia to guide our way forward.
2011-06-13	“The Novel and the Order”	Will a new genre eventually replace the novel?
2011-06-06	“Mailer as Novelist”	Norman Mailer places the novelist in an ethical and existential position of great responsibility.
2009-10-24	“Faust, Mailer, and the Comfort of Evil”	Norman Mailer famously stated that technology was the work of the devil. Sometimes it’s best to keep the devil close.
2008-11-17	“Frames in Kafka’s Metamorphosis”	A note on literal and figurative frames in Kafka’s novella.
2004-07-14	“On Kafka's Metamorphosis”	A few thoughts on Kafka's nightmare vision of contemporary life.
2004-04-12	“Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’”	Suffering, the Blues, and our (in)ability to listen.
2004-03-30	“Virginia Woolf and The Hours”	Do we live in or just tolerate the hours?
2004-02-10	“What Place Evolution?”	An observation on Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”
2004-01-13	“You Can’t Go Home Again”	Some notes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1931 short story “Babylon Revisited.”
1997-10-06	“Healthy Blasphemy: Dissenting Discourses in Rushdie and Bulgakov”	My Master’s Thesis, published in this revised form in 1997.
1995-07-02	“The Fall of a Sparrow: A Note on A Hero of Our Time and Hamlet”	A comparative note on acting and heroism.
1995-04-14	“Apropos Sonnets 33, 34, and 35”	A reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet trio.
1994-04-09	“Bulgakov and Pasternack”	Considering the role of the artist in these twentieth-century Russian classics.
1993-12-19	“Revisionary Mythmaking”	On Adrienne Rich and “Diving in the Wreck.”