The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

A brief analysis of depictions of dirt and the body in Djuna Barnes’s 1937 novel “Nightwood”, assessing the interrelation with emotion and identity.

Rilke’s engagement with the abject (Kristeva) through the writer of the “Notebooks” is examined in the context of modernity’s attempt to purify and order reality.

Despite its B-movie release in 1973, “The Wicker Man” now ranks in the top one hundred twentieth-century British films. Depicting a clash between Christianity and pagan belief systems, the film raises perplexing questions concerning morality and cultural domination. The remote Scottish island community that has regressed to pagan barbarity…[Read more]

Nineteenth century British writers and artists looked back to, and in some cases attempted to claim a cultural heritage not their own. Rather than appealing to the indigenous Germanic and Celtic mythos, the literature, art, and culture of Ancient Greece provided a palliative to contemporary anxieties regarding social order, cultural achievement,…[Read more]

Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is in essence an exploration of the poet’s internal transformation in relation to the natural landscape and the memory of landscape. This process of maturation enables Wordsworth to experience and reflect upon nature’s beauty rather than simply enjoy its immediate sensation. The poem’s emphasis on pleasure derived fro…[Read more]

The paper argues that the obvious class conflict characterizing John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” is inseparable from and complicated by considerations of education/intellect and masculinity/virility, and relatedly that Osborne’s designation as an “Angry Young Man” intertwines with the work’s manifestations as text and performance. Two dramati…[Read more]

This paper briefly examines the (New) English identities of the primary characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlett Letter”, suggesting that their individual negotiations of landscape and homeland are are, like the ties of love between them, complex and contradictory.

Undergraduate syllabus for a course on science fiction literature and film that includes a significant creative component as well as experiential exercises (e.g. attending and analyzing a film premier or a table-top gaming club).