William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
There are three sets of characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the Athenians contending over love, the Athenian tradesmen putting on a production of Pyr...
Tag: 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 anythin...
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; b...
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...
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...