Literary Nomads

In the mood for a story? Most of these are in the Winter Solstice ghost-story tradition; others come from the various opportunities and intermissions along our various literary journeys. Enjoy!

We begin our wandering with the famous Chopin short story, exploring topics of reading aesthetically, freedom, tragic hamartia, female silencing, and some missteps in reading Victory.

A little marginalia of a poem, author unknown, yet open to our examination of song and philosophy, the history of authorship, the intentional fallacy, our changing concept of ego, and an outright challenge to the Sacred canon.

What differences in another culture’s conception of story? We examine epistemic shifts, overlapping narrators, bad binaries, and what happens when we attach the wrong frame to art.

Think what you want of recreations, but it’s all we’ve ever done. We consider ekphrasis in literature, the role of art under capitalism, meaning in the non-verbal, and the Sesame Street Effect. We also take a field trip into a digital Van Gogh experience.

A long examination of the metaphysical poem, its problematic and philosophical tensions, the ironically enduring history of carpe diem, and our readerly discomfiture and uncertainty. Along the way, we meet Catullus, Dorian Gray, Trekkie-verse Sulu, Saul Bellow, Rilke, and Dorian Gray; and we get to write a poem and essay!

Le Guin’s short story is hardly the first to ask difficult questions of our politics and ethics, but it is one of the more provocative. What do we turn away from? And what does privilege look like, exactly? Maybe we’re only reading it in a way that makes us comfortable answering.