The Humanities Index

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a confusing play, but one lesson that it seems to impart is that sometimes idealistic value systems do not work when put into practice. Titus Andronicus goes to great — almost hyperbolic — lengths to make this clear, though it is often overlooked trying to make ethical sense out of a [...]

The epic hero has a double role. He (there are no epical woman heroes as far as I know) is an individual person with an habitual virtue from which his exploits flow, and he is representative of the group to whom the exploit is important. Since the performance of the exploit is important because of [...]

Like Euripides was for Athens, Ovid was for Rome: the iconoclast poet devoted to the education of Rome’s elite in the ways of love. He wrote satirical verse aimed at subverting what he saw as an authoritarian imposition of moral reform embodied by his contemporary, Virgil. Ovid’s major work, the Metamorphoses, makes pains to be anti-Aeneid [...]

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 [...]

Much of what is uncomfortable about Silko’s “Yellow Woman” and Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” stems from a clash between our traditional societal values and those presented within the stories. I have heard many students condemn the unnamed narrator of “Yellow Woman” as an irresponsible and immoral whore that should be punished accordingly. The [...]