Essays
Something Terrific: Emily Brontë’s 200 Years
Transpose creeping desert sands with peaty Yorkshire moors. Overlay Shelley’s antiquity with Brontë’s more recent times. Juggle Ozymandias and Heathcliff, two male mononymities, purveyors of colossal wreckage who sneer, life-like even in death. And ask: what is Ozymandian Heathcliff mocking with such disdain? WHAT IS his problem?
Breaking Up with James Joyce
The truth is that there would be no Joyce without the three women who supported him: Nora, his life-long partner, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, his benefactor. Lover, publisher and salary provider. Chance furnished him with exactly what he needed. So he certainly doesn’t need another handmaiden in the form of a small-time Australian essayist. But for some reason, I need him.
Weaponising Learning
The quality and the democratic nature of a humanities education are both important: students must all be taught well, and they all must be taught equally well. But of the two, democracy matters more. The humanities are, by definition, interpretative ventures intrinsically concerned with the analysis and description of the human world, in which disciplinary mastery is largely a matter of expert judgement, not objective measurement. In this kind of undertaking, students’ collective intellectual growth is the ultimate rationale of teaching.