Posts & Reflections

Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.

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  • Girl Moved To Tears By ‘Of Mice And Men’ Cliffs Notes (The Onion, 2006)

    If you are after some light relief amid preparations for the modernism unit, read this.

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  • What is love? tedious, puerile, inhumane, beautiful and necessary

    In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at

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  • What is love? tedious, puerile, inhumane, beautiful and necessary

    In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at

    Read Article →

  • Rhythming To the Lighthouse

    What is ‘rhythm’? It is neither a ‘thing’ (a material object) nor necessarily related to a human action. We usually think about rhythms in time, but the term need not be temporal. The OED gives one of the definitions as ‘Regularity in the repetition in time or space of an action, process, feature, condition, event,

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  • Modernism: Objects and quasi-objects in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

    This is the second in a series of two posts about the ‘subject’ and ‘objects’ of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in relaiton to the literary studies unit on modernism I will be teaching this coming semester. Literary criticism, in step with Cartesian dualism, has tended to operate according to a dichotomy of active subjects and

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  • Modernism: Narrative point of view in To the Lighthouse

    This is the first substantive post related to the unit in literary modernism I am teaching next semester. These posts are not intended to be proto-essays, nor necessarily particularly deep. I just want to jot down quick thoughts about what struck me in reading through the set texts, with the hope and intention of stimulating

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  • To the Lighthouse

    In preparation for the modernism unit next semester I’ll be starting Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse this week. Grab yourself a copy (the OUP edition is the one we’ll be using in the unit) and read along with me.

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  • Modernism: some preliminary reading

    Preliminary secondary reading To give you a grounding in some of the main lineaments of modernism, you may also want to read Michael Levenson’s ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (to which you have access through the university library website). If you feel the wind in your readerly sails, have a look at the

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