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...

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....

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino’s stories do not imitate, familiarize, or instruct a reader toward the infinite possibilities of imagination. They transcend, magnify, and remodel the fabric of literature itself. Invisible Cities is an unconventional and intuitive book of descriptions. Descriptions of the inner workings of many cities that are masterfully-crafted to tickle the mind’s eye. You...

Harold Bloom’s How To Read And Why

Harold Bloom’s How To Read And Why

In Literature, the only constant is the solitary act of reading. But even that, Harold Bloom writes, has been deeply mistranslated. The function of solitary reading – be it short stories, plays, poetry, novels – is grossly misunderstood as an appetite for escapism or to provoke the fancies of idealism. What it is, what...