A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
On the page, we have total control - we see what's happening inside the character's mind, the narrative is designed to have a safe outcome, and there are no real-world repercussions. This allows us to safely explore strong emotions such as danger, obsession, or dominance. Often, these scenarios present these actions with emotional intensity, vulnerability, or chemistry, which can make them feel incredibly exciting and romantically charged, even though intellectually, we understand that these scenarios would not be appropriate.
If you want to paint, put your clothes back on! That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?
Marsha eventually brought her salon to campus and founded the Comparative Literature Women's Caucus, an activist collective that established the first women's literature classes in Comparative Literature, conceived and taught by graduate student women. Caucus members helped produce the first major translation anthologies of women's world-wide poetry, encouraged women to write feminist dissertations on women authors, and researched discrimination against women in the department.
bell hooks saved me. I say that in all sincerity. At a critical time in my life, when I was at my lowest point, it was bell hooks, through her books, who pulled me out of a hole of profound depression and set me on a path of self-renewal on which I have remained ever since. Newly divorced with two very young sons, I was determined to give a better fatherhood experience than the one I had.
Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a host of positive educational and socioeconomic outcomes. But now 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a chunky report on the matter—reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. The culprit usually blamed for this falling-off is the smartphone and its many short-term distractions; the mere presence of a smartphone in the room, recent research suggests, has an impact on our ability to concentrate.
It was once commonly understood that fiction was in the wisdom business, that it offered not only aesthetic pleasure but also moral improvement. This function of literature was not tough to spot. One of the first English novels was Samuel Richardson's 1740 work, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded-a title not meant ironically. Through the 19th century, many authors turned directly to the reader with philosophical and social (if sometimes ironic) commentary: "It is a truth universally acknowledged"; "It was the best of times"; "All happy families are alike." For readers not up to the challenge of full George Eliot novels, her enterprising publisher compiled a volume of Eliot's many Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in order to more broadly distribute "a morality as pure as it is impassioned."
You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
