We use the word tragedy commonly and rather loosely to mean a disaster of some sort, an accident that has befallen someone inexplicably, a calamity, a misfortune. The word, though, has a more precise meaning in the study of literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the renowned British scholar A. C. Bradley gave …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Why, Wherefore Ask You This?
A gentleman named Brabantio was once a senator in the Republic of Venice. His daughter, Desdemona, was, as fate would have it, quite beautiful, and he, of course, was quite protecting of her. One young suitor by the name of Roderigo the father had already parried away, but the desperate man called yet again on …
Sailing into Unknown Waters
An instructor of mine in college once admonished his class of graduate students that they all read too much. It was spring, the term almost over, and he threw down the challenge that we all should enroll in a drawing class over the summer. His judgment surprised everyone, because both the scholarship and writing of …
Now It’s There, Now It’s Not
It is one of the fundamentals of writing that every word must count. Consider these two sentences: the bank president hired three new people whose job was to guard the guards, and the bank president hired three new people whose job it was to guard the guards. The only difference between the two is the …
Freedom Struggling
Jacob Needleman was an American philosopher and teacher who articulated in clear, straightforward prose the basic questions of philosophy which have preoccupied civilizations from the ancient world to the present. Among his many titles are Real Philosophy: An Anthology of Universal Search for Meaning; Money and the Meaning of Life; and The American Soul: Rediscovering …