Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature A hot trend in literary criticism is the use of computers to analyze text, a field known as digital humanities. Recently Ryan Boyd, a graduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and James Pennebaker, the Liberal Arts Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the university, conducted one […]
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Here are my statistics for March: Number of posts written: 31 Shortest post: 220 Longest post: 2,150 Total words written: 23,345 Average post length: 753 Distribution of posts across my three blogs: Change of Perspective: 11 Notes in the Margin: 10 Retreading for Retirement: 12 The total of posts here may not equal the number
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I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened A constant topic of literary criticism (in both senses of criticism) is that the Western canon is populated by an over-abundance of dead White guys and that we don’t read or even hear about enough authors from the margins of society (e.g., women,
Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature – and Ian Rankin proves it On the occasion of Ian Rankin’s becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Allan Massie discusses the author of the John Rebus novels and crime fiction in general. Massie bets that having been “received into Scotland’s intellectual elite
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Being a Better Online Reader Maria Konnikova collects evidence and hypotheses about how the shift from print to online texts has changed the experience of reading. She begins with reference to Maryanne Wolf, whose book Proust and the Squid examines the history of the science and development of the reading brain from antiquity to the
January was all about convincing myself that I could indeed find something to write about and produce a blog post every day. In February I turned my gaze outward and looked at other blogs and bloggers instead of just my blog/myself as blogger. I found a number of blogs that I learned a lot from.
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It’s the final day of this course, Day 10, which offers the following challenges: Prompt: future Form: sonnet Device: chiasmus Sonnet A sonnet is normally composed of 14 lines of verse. There are several ways you can split your sonnet into stanzas (if you wish to), though the most common ones are 8–6 and 4–4–3–3.
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Right up front, let me admit that today, Day 9, is the one day I allowed myself to bail on, as I’ll explain in the section labeled Writing Process below. Today’s parameters are: Prompt: landscape Form: found poetry Device: enumeratio Found Poetry Like a blackmail letter in a sordid crime novel, a found poem is
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Today’s Day 8 assignment involves: Prompt: drawer Form: ode Device: apostrophe Ode An ode is a laudatory poem celebrating a person, an object, a place, etc. It can come in any form these days, having shed its ancient (and much stricter) formal requirements. At their best, odes are both a compelling portrait of something and
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Here’s the assignment for Day 7: Prompt: fingers Form: prose poetry Device: assonance Prose Poetry A prose poem is any piece of verse written using the normal typography of prose, while still maintaining elements of poetry, like rhythm, imagery, etc. The words may be arranged typographically like any piece of prose, but the sounds, the
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