At the close of Can you Forgive Her? readers are asked to follow suit and forgive Vavasor -- easily -- for what she has done. As a reader in the 21st century I could really care less about her jilting Grey; I once jilted a lover. What I struggle to forgive in Vavasor is her insistence that she can never want to forgive herself.
Gogol's protagonist comes face to face with the temptation of what he wants most. For Tchartkoff, this is money and fame. He buys the wayward painting because he falls in love with it, its undeniable expression of talent and of something else: its evocation of the feminine diabolical. What makes this devil -- like so many devils before and after it in literature -- "feminine" is its Asiatic garb
This month I read four novels that seemed to be connected to each other through the trope of fantastical misogyny: Nabokov's Lolita, Thompson's The Nothing Man, Ellis's American Psycho, and Hamsun's Hunger(ok, this novel isn't quite 20th century --1890 -- but is considered an important landmark novel that inspired 20th century fiction). In each of the these texts the hero's actions are propelled forward through his obsessively imagining the physical abuse of the women around him.
The "domestic tale" is steeped in matters that extend beyond the usual domestic realm as Hall is forced, after the death of her doting husband, to provide a liveable environment for her two daughters in the aftermath of rejection from her rich relatives.
The shroud of suffocating fog that permeates “the dirtiest streets” of London at the opening of Bleak House finds its way into every crevice of modern life, from Tom-all-Alone’s to the Dedlock estate.
If Woolf creates art through the mystic’s intuition then she, like Yeats, should illustrate a sacrifice of ego in her texts which amounts to an absorption of consciousness into something more obscure and perhaps more significant. In The Waves Woolf juxtaposes consciousness with the natural flux of the ocean tide.
In the "The UnKnown Masterpiece" Balzac takes up the age-old debate about where nature ends and art begins. He does so, not surprisingly, through the most classic medium: the nude female form.
Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure could be the anthem novel for the early twentieth-century movement inspired by Filippo Marinetti except Cleland’s work predates Futurism by nearly two centuries. Taken out of historical context, Cleland and Marinetti seem contemporaries in their metaphysical treatment of pleasure and pain
The “portrait” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is upheld by Joyce as textual, communicating meaning through words and associations. His denotative question, “Why own a thing when you can say it?” reveals his bias; instead of upholding the visual quality of the art, shown through ocular imagery and aesthetic, Joyce uses the intangible word to create mental pictures and manifest beauty.
Part of winning the Games depends on how Katniss can manifest a love that she doesn't quite feel for her district partner, Peeta, and the Capital's censorship of the love that she does feel for Rue. Katniss's "real" love -- for Rue -- is the saving love.
Literary Electricity 