Zoë comes to us from Chicago and is greatly looking forward to coming to Toronto for the first time to lead the discussion of Sophocles’ Theban plays in her seminar The Fall of the House of Oedipus. The three plays trace the fall of a great king and the subsequent […]
A guest blog post by Jonathan Rowan She waited for him in the garden . . . drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which, as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the […]
A guest blog post by Mark Cwik I’ve been reading quite a bit in the last few months about the frontier and the American West, and I’m struck by how deep, pervasive and suggestive the idea of the West is for us in North America. It is almost impossible to […]
A guest post by Nella Cotrupi The themes of human displacement and migration dominate our media today. The dramatic photos and headlines, like the ravaged lives they depict, are inescapable. In Canada, many community groups have sprouted up to focus on providing support and, in many cases, legal sponsorship to […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
“Who are you?” – the Caterpillar, Alice in Wonderland “And you may ask yourself, Am I right? Or am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, My God! What have I done?!” – Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” When most people think of the story of Oedipus, they […]
Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, is one of his most complex and ambitious works. It includes everything you’d expect from Dickens—a huge cast of characters, a convoluted plot, extremes of emotion, and a vivid depiction of life in Victorian London. (Did you know, for instance, that private “dustmen” […]
We’ve just passed into autumn. Depending on where you are, you’ll be seeing familiar changes sooner or later—shorter days, chillier nights, life going indoors, nature just shutting down all over—and we’ll think about how Persephone has left us again for the underworld. That’s likely not how you think of the […]