Tag: Other Modernist Figures

Six Characters in Search of an Author

by Pericles Lewis When the lights come up on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), the first thing the audience sees is a bare stage, with no scenery and only a few folding tables and chairs scattered about. A stage-hand is starting to build a set, but the stage manager interrupts… Continue Reading Six Characters in Search of an Author

The Renaissance

1 Reading Pater for his ideas is like reading Wordsworth for his philosophy; what ideas he does have he took from others who expressed them better.1 His principal merit is style. His prose effectively impersonates the emotional center of his thought: the ecstasy to be felt before certain works of art, which then presents a… Continue Reading The Renaissance

Walter Pater

by Elyse Graham 1. Born in a slum in the East End of London in 1839, Walter Pater was the son of a professional family barely hanging on to the middle class.^1 When Pater was two, his father, a general practitioner, died suddenly of a brain hemmorhage. His uncle, who shared the family’s medical practice… Continue Reading Walter Pater

Wilfred Owen and Christianity

by Andrew Gates The fateful morning of November 4, 1918 condemned to the ranks of a hiccough what might have been a revolution in English poetry. Yet, although the poetic career of Wilfred Owen was cut abruptly short, his legacy echoes not only through the English canon, but above all through the humanitarian—and Christian—ideas that… Continue Reading Wilfred Owen and Christianity

Poems (Wilfred Owen)

by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Born in 1893 in Oswestry, England, near the Welsh border, Wilfred Owen was killed in battle on Nov. 4, 1918, a week before the First World War ended. He was twenty-five years old. An aspiring poet since his teens, in the last two years of his life Owen produced some of the… Continue Reading Poems (Wilfred Owen)

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

by Alexandria Miller Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (in the original German, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), written in 1874 as part of his second “Untimely Meditation,” has been read not only as an essay on the crisis of historical culture, but also as a… Continue Reading On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense

by Stephen Gilb The 1873 “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn”) was one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early works, and he was originally unable to have it published. Though it precedes many of his more well-known writings, it is considered by some scholars to be a cornerstone… Continue Reading On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense