Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...
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Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...
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On The Hatred of Literature