In reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis for class last week, I noticed that the novella is framed in a way that highlights one of its central — if not the central — thematic concerns of the text. Figuratively, frames are a way to organize and structure reality. If you consider a photograph, it is framed or composed in such a way as to present the real world in an organized and predictable fashion. It’s frame includes certain elements while it excludes others. All of the components of the text (novel, photograph, poem, film, etc.), then, tell a unified story which is often an expression of the values of the framer (artist, writer, photographer, etc.).

Kafka presents Gregor’s metamorphosis in such a way, and he gives textual clues to this rhetorical function based around how women are framed in the narrative.

Continue Reading

Upon hearing the word “evil,” many simply turn off, not wanting to hear anymore. Aren’t we, as good people, supposed to shun evil; do our best to destroy it; rebuke it; cast it down? For that’s what God did to his chief angel, Lucifer, and in turn, what Satan did to humanity. Indeed, humanity does not want to negate creation and the endeavors of humanity, but the much of what brings about the grandeur and greatness of humanity lies in its ability to challenge what is, even if it means the occasional revolution and destruction of systems and orders which no longer fit. Lucifer means “light bringer,” and I find that in many literary manifestations of the fallen archangel, he still fulfills that function.

Continue Reading

Ezra Pound, in his essay “The Renaissance,” writes: “The first step in a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing” (214). Pound suggests that a renaissance artist needs to develop his own “table of values” from his great predecessors — values that he likens to a painter’s palette of pure colors which an artist can “make out [his] own spectrum or table” (215). While Pound was hoping to foster a twentieth-century renaissance, his words seem equally as applicable to the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Renaissance artists renewed the work of the classical, pagan tradition of Greece and Rome and combined it with what they learned from the Christian Middle Ages, and with a syncretism unique to the Renaissance, made something new that was supported and validated by tradition. What came out of this tradition during the Renaissance may be illuminated by the great “renaissance men” of the time like Leonardo, who, in his Notebooks, suggests a new art based on the pragmatic and verifiable, i.e., “true science” away from the religion and superstition of the Christian middle ages to observable, empirical truth and a trust in the capacities of humanity.

Continue Reading

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 in an individual expression. The poet lives and expresses “the present moment of the past” concentrating on poetry’s living substance (34).

Continue Reading