First posted February 28, 2014 In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers. Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagletonreviewed by Jonathan Rée Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it… Read More Culture and the Death of God: Terry Eagleton
First posted September 14, 2017 Enzo Traverso is an Italian historian of the Holocaust and totalitarianism The Aporias of Marxism: In a letter to Walter Benjamin, dated 13 April 1933, Gershom Scholem described the rise of Nazi Germany as ‘a catastrophe of world‑historical proportions’ which permitted him for the first time ‘to comprehend deeply’ the expulsion… Read More The Aporias of Marxism / Archaism and Modernity. By Enzo Traverso
Minae Mizumura THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH Reviewed by JAY RUBIN The wonder of this book is that it exists at all. The author tells us of her native language: “What a bizarre and amusing language Japanese is . . . Fast and loose in its logic . . . ”… Read More The Fall of Language in the Age of English
First posted October 19, 2020 Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world: Wilhelm Reich… .. the concept of ideology makes sense only in relation to the truth or untruth of what it refers to. There can be no talk of socially necessary delusions… Read More Ralph Dumain: Paranoia Papers Bibliography. The (Un)Natural History of Social Paranoia
NB: Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a novella about the life of a school teacher, Mr. Chipping, written by English writer James Hilton, and published in 1934. I think it must be among the most beautiful love stories ever told. It also reminds us of the tremendous power of the human soul. My father took me… Read More Goodbye Mr Chips
The theologian and journalist suggests that slaves in the Roman empire contributed to the core texts of Christianity in this refreshingly readable book God’s Ghostwriters by Candida Moss Peter Stanford Graham Greene, who wrote so much about Catholicism in his novels, was regularly asked whether he was still a believer. It was listening to the… Read More God’s Ghostwriters: did enslaved scribes write the New Testament?
In Aeschylus’ ‘Persians’, Xerxes though defeated, was not dethroned. He went on to rule for another decade or more. But the spirit of freedom and democracy set alight by that struggle lived on for more than a century Vijay Tankha What could the earliest extant Greek tragedy have to say about the recent elections? Nothing… Read More Why an ancient Greek tragedy has resonance in politics today — in India and beyond
Both winners referenced the conflict-clouded international situation, at a time when the arts world is grappling with divisions over the Israel-Hamas war and corporate sponsorship of the arts. LONDON : Author-activist Naomi Klein won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction on Thursday with “Doppelganger,” a personal account of her plunge into the world of online… Read More Naomi Klein and V V Ganeshananthan win Women’s Prize literary awards
The move away from true hands-on scholarship feels truly tragic Lisa Lieberman t was getting toward the end of this recent semester, and I was at a loss. Either one of two things was happening: My freshman-composition students’ writing had gotten mysteriously, miraculously, markedly better over the semester compared with previous ones, or a large minority… Read More AI and the death of student writing
I am appalled by today’s sensitivities—how easily people take offense. It impels me to be offensive, or at least to ignore the shrinking violets. George Salis: Your latest book is Burma Sahib, a novel about a young Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) in India. What attracted you to this part of Blair’s life? Paul Theroux: A line in… Read More The Grit That Makes the Pearl: An Interview With Paul Theroux
After the truth-shower 