The Humanities Index

Notes on “Babylon Revisited” I have finished re-reading, again, what is arguably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best short story, “Babylon Revisited.” It merges the past with the present as Charlie Wales returns to Paris to try and recapture his life literally by taking custody of his daughter Honoria, and figuratively by exploring the Paris of his [...]

Kafka uses rhetorical and literal frames to suggest the central focus of The Metamorphosis.

The first step in a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing.

T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” borders on a sort of mysticism. Ostensibly concerned with the foundation and history of poetry, Eliot only addresses the contemporaneous effects of poetry — both on the poet and the poet’s milieu. The poet, to Eliot, rewords, or (re)creates, not new art, but new form [...]