A guest blog post by Zoë Eisenman [Editor’s note: Zoë will be leading The Fall of the House of Oedipus at our summer seminar program, Toronto Pursuits. Join Zoë in Toronto to take a fresh look at one of the most famous families in the history of literature. Why do […]
Month: January 2016
GUEST BLOG—Death in Venice: What Price Metamorphosis? by Tom Jones
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. – T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” What is the nature of art and the artist? Is art to be […]
GUEST BLOG—East Meets West; West Embraces East by Sean Forester
The Japanese prints, so the story goes, had first arrived in Paris in the 1850s as packaging protecting ceramics. The prints attracted the attention of Claude Monet, who hung works from his large collection on his dining room walls at his home in Giverny. Monet was not alone in seeking […]
GUEST BLOG—Beauty’s Vivifying Force by Betty Ann Jordan
“Beauty comes to us, with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labour.” — Elaine Scarry As a young art student in the early 1970s, I acquired as my first reproduction to adorn the wall of my apartment White Plumes by Henri Matisse. A […]
GUEST BLOG—The Deliciously Dark World of Film Noir by David Schmitt
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. from “The Second Coming” William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Look […]