Monthly Archives: February 2014

The reading for Tuesday, Sigmund Freud’s essay “On Mourning and Melancholia,” is now up under the Readings tab. Please read pages 243-250. I’m also posting below a sketch of an outline of the essay to help you read. I’ll stress … Continue reading →

Here is a link to the shot-by-shot reading of the beginning of Melancholia by Manola Dargis at The New York Times: This is How the End Begins It’s a strange form: not a review, and also not entirely analytical (some entries … Continue reading →

The readings for Thursday (2/27) are now available under the “readings” tab at the top of the blog. (The password is “defoe”—all lower case.) Remember to print them out and read them before class, marking any passages that puzzle you … Continue reading →

As I write this blog post, the Norse gods are fighting to the death—their deaths, according to Norse mythology. They will all die and this world will be submerged in water, only to emerge anew some time in the future. A … Continue reading →

For Tuesday, read (print, annotate, bring with you) the following short story by the Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz: Monstro (This is a scan of the story straight from The New Yorker, where it was first published. You can, of course, ignore the … Continue reading →

For Tuesday, please read the texts at the links below. Be sure to bring a printed copy with you to class. The first is a poem by the British poet Lord Byron. The second is an essay about that poem … Continue reading →