Literary Essays by Don Foran
A collection of literary essays that explore various matters of the heart.
Image by Takeshi Obata
The Onion at the Wedding Feast in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Excerpt: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s final novel, published a century ago, remains for many one of the greatest artistic achievements in all of literature. It is as though the Russian novelist presented this synthetic work in order to provide subsequent generations with “a good memory,” one which, as Alyosha tells the Russian youths, “is perhaps the best education,” capable of making us “better perhaps than we are.”
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Dirty Cleans: The Philosophy of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Excerpt: Leopold Bloom is a water lover. What he most admires about water is its universality. Bloom is the universal man: furbish, courageous, inconsistent, compassionate, lonely, loving, ingenious, ingenuous, an outsider, a wandering Jew, Christ secundem carnem. At the heart of Bloom is fruitful paradox. Truth is, as he understands, “stranger than fiction.”
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Flannery O'Connor's Anagogical Way of Seeing
Excerpt: The characters in Flannery O'Connor's imaginative creations are, arguably, more like lunatics than lovers, and the more rational or coolly “reasonable”—a Hulga, a Mr. Head, an Uncle Rayber, a Mrs. McIntyre, a Shepherd, or a Julian—the more likely he or she is to be skewered upon the certain certainties and conventional wisdom such characters often extol.
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Gerard Manley Hopkins: Environmental Prophet
Excerpt: I have long marveled at the modern, even prophetic, images in the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889), and I have been anxious to celebrate the accomplishment of this British Jesuit priest who led a life as sequestered as Emily Dickinson’s (1830 – 1886), but who has, like the Amherst recluse, brought to the surface themes which over a century later are strikingly current.
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The Questor Seduced: Francis Tarwater in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away
Excerpt: Francis Marion Tarwater is one of the most dynamic and interesting characters in American Literature. The boy is virtually an embodiment of the subject in literature whom Faulkner has described as one with “the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and sweat.”
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“What I do is Me”: Winning Credibility with Your Writing
Excerpt: The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first to say it: “What I do is me,” though millions must realize there is a radical connection between identity and act. Perhaps the principal injunction of the New Testament, for instance, highlights the same idea, “By their fruits you shall know them,” and many earlier religious traditions suggest a similar ethos.
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THE VALUE OF NOTHING IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR
Excerpt: Robert Pirsig writes, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.” For many years I have imagined that the truth was an old man seeking a drink of water—the New Testament may have fed my imagery matrix—and, often enough, the old man has looked like Lear.
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Flourishing as a Spiritual Quest
Excerpt: A friend recently gave me an audio tape of Thomas Merton, the celebrated monk, writer and ecumenist, lecturing. In 1964, near the end of his ten years as Novice Master, Merton had the young monks read Faulkner’s story, “The Bear.” During that session, Merton probably floored his audience when he said, “To strive to become spiritual is a waste of time.”
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A Mirror Held Up to Nature: Mark Twain and America After 9/11
Excerpt: It has long been clear that the ironci liteary products of Mark Twain have spoeknt to the heart of many American.s The recent television documentary on Mark Twain directed by Ken Burns (PBS, 2002) features many literary critics and Twain scholars who believe that TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885) represents the defining moment in American culture, focusing as it does on the need for individual conscience to transcend racism.
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INDULGING IN EQUITATION: A SECOND LOOK AT PETER SHAFFER’S CONTEMPORARY TRAGEDY, EQUUS
Excerpt: Peter Shaffer’s best known play, Equus, winner of the 1975 Tony Award, was hailed as “theatrical dynamite” by Newsweek. It surely is that. Yet it is more. Even when read rather than viewed, Equus is a subtle exploration of text and sub text. On the surface it is a classic psychiatric detective story; on another level it is a powerful study of contemporary culture, the kind of work that DeLillo does in Underworld or Wolfe accomplished in The Bonfire of the Vanities.
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Touch: Cutting Across the Devious Intricate Channels of Ordering in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
Excerpt: The basic tragedy of Absalom Absalom! is Thomas Sutpen’s choosing to emulate the very classist and racist system which had forced him to “a harsh recapitulation of his own worth” when he, a poor white from the mountains of West Virginia, was turned away from the door of a Virginia plantation mansion by a black butler.
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Levels of Definition: Protagonist/Antagonist
Excerpt: The word agon in Greek means struggle or contest. A protagonist, then, struggles for something; an antagonist struggles against something. In classical literature, beginning with Aristotle, the terms protagonist and antagonist have special meanings.
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Excerpt: When I look at the photograph, me sitting on a rock near a creek, two Dominican forest rangers in the background, I realize it doesn't do justice to the experience I'd had. This was the last day of a nine-day series of surveying stints in the Dominica Rain Forest in a Volunteers for Peace program. For the past seven or eight hours we had charged up hill and down dale following a map created in the early seventies.
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