Tag Archives: Literature

Mark Twain, “A Fable”

Reprinted from about.com. One of the few things I read in my undergraduate years that I enjoyed greatly. Wilson Carey McWilliams had us read this before anything else in the Classical Political Thought course at Rutgers – this was prior to Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine. Your thoughts about the nature of criticism are appreciated: …

December 10, 2012 – 7:52 pm | By ashok | Posted in media | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Learning the Hard Way: On John Updike’s “The Alligators”

The plot of John Updike’s short story “The Alligators” seems simple enough. Adolescent boy thinks he hates adolescent girl and torments her; boy realizes he’s a social outcast like girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy gets rejected, for he is neither needed nor wanted. To illustrate, starting with the girl: Everybody hated her. …

April 7, 2009 – 9:34 pm | By ashok | Posted in love, writing | Tagged | Comments (8)

Just finished a Straussian ritual, Aristophanes’ “Clouds:” Preliminary Notes on the Limits of Comedy

1. Consideration of comedians: they use laughter to make everything ridiculous. The good things, while made ridiculous, still are essentially good and cannot be dismissed. They are necessary no matter how much we laugh. The bad things, made ridiculous, fall away quickly. All comedians – including those who believe all is spin, such as Jon …

November 11, 2008 – 8:30 am | By ashok | Posted in philosophy, plato, xenophon | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Temptation.

I want to post on the election, and I have no idea why. Yesterday I spent a good bit of time thinking about how all the entries written about the election are now a waste, consigned to the dustheap. No one – not even me – cares what I thought about Joe Biden some weeks …

November 4, 2008 – 9:26 pm | By ashok | Posted in media, personal, politics | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Comment on Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age:” Hackworth, Authorship and Philosophy

Subject to change when I reread the book. IT IS POSSIBLE to conceive of knowledge as reflecting an eternal order, a way things should best be done. Knowledge in this case would be linked to Being, whose permanence would be seen in moral laws, aesthetic standards, and intellectual discipline. Confucian and Victorian mores are of …

October 17, 2008 – 1:50 am | By ashok | Posted in writing | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Running into a Professor on the Internet feels Weird: On Sophocles’ Antigone, 334-375, the “Ode to Man”

Karl Maurer is a professor of mine, so it is with an especial pride I present to you these lines. I ran into him accidentally on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog, and the passage he cited by Nietzsche there is well worth your time. The comment below was left on the blog by …

September 30, 2008 – 3:35 am | By ashok | Posted in poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Bookstore

There’s a new Barnes and Noble open near me. I’ve been walking there nearly every day to read, although I carry my own books. Always the dissertation text and one other book – the recent one has been Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics,” for obvious reasons. It’s comfortable there: well-lighted, nice furniture, fitting temperature. But the …

September 13, 2008 – 11:02 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

On Reading Slowly

Just a thought, nothing more: I wonder if all the intellectual virtues can be had merely through reading carefully. Usually we encourage students to get books done so we can start discussing the whole. But that quite obviously serves the end of rereading, of getting more out of the book the second time. Rereading is …

June 23, 2008 – 4:15 pm | By ashok | Posted in education | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Brief Incomplete Comment on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus Rex)

Adapted from an e-mail I sent recently; I am aware this doesn’t address Benardete’s “trapdoors,” it’s not meant to. What is below is mostly from the essay “On Oedipus Tyrannus,” by Seth Benardete, in the book Ancients and Moderns: Essays in Honor of Leo Strauss. You can deduce how this reading came about by thinking …

May 23, 2008 – 10:09 pm | By ashok | Posted in poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Rant: Should Literature Ape the Sciences? An Angry Response to Jonathan Gottschall

Writing in the Boston Globe, Gottschall argues that “literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with …

May 13, 2008 – 9:08 pm | By ashok | Posted in politics | Tagged , | Comments (9)