Exploring existentialism in Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, before Albert Camus & Jean-Paul Sartre

Exploring existentialism in Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, before Albert Camus & Jean-Paul Sartre

Alberto Moravia writes about existentialism through his characters. In fact, he was, in many ways, even celebrated as the founder of the literary existentialist movement, before Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In Moravia’s Contempt, existentialism embodies many forms. The characters of Moravia are not religious, they believe in no afterlife, and no universal order or...

Cinema Paradiso: A film dedicated to films

Cinema Paradiso: A film dedicated to films

Cinema Paradiso is a comforting film. It’s a cure for loneliness because it lifts you out of your reality and places you into a poignant and wistful one. However, once you get too close to the bliss that it emanates, it covers you in a blanket of melancholia and longing. The story is one...

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

When you read a book like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, your conscience’s worst nightmare is your waking reality. The words wound you. Your skin crawls, your heart jumps, but your mind survives. It survives because that is where literature possesses its own soul, heaven, and hell. And when you,...

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

There are people whose past events exist on a linear trail. Each moment is a stamp upon a smooth and unruffled surface. This makes reminiscing a past self easier, more coherent, perhaps even rectifiable. Then there are people like Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations whose past is an assortment of terrifying and pleasant moments....