Aldous Huxley Revisited
Semmler, Clement. 1970. The Australian Quarterly 42, no. 4: 74-82. This journal article examines the life of writer Aldous Huxley, from his youth to his political opinions as a young man to his fascination with…
Category: Storytelling
The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald: Liberal Illusion and Disillusion in ‘This Side of Paradise’ and ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’
Monk, Craig. 1995. American Studies International 33, no. 2: 60-70. Monk discusses war and peace in two of the interwar novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who fought in World War I and lived and travelled throughout Europe…
Psychic decolonization in 1960s science fiction
Higgins, David M. 2013. Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 2: 228-245. In this introduction to a literary journal, David Higgins analyzes the political undertones in novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune and Arthur C.…
Writing the dismembered nation: The aesthetics of horror in Iraqi narratives of war
Bahoora, Haytham. 2015. The Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1: 184-208. Bahoora presents a discussion of three Iraqi novels (Luay Hamza Abbas’s Closing His Eyes, Hassan Blasim’s The Reality and the Record, and Ahmed…
Waltz with Bashir (2008): trauma and representation in the animated documentary
Kraemer, Joseph A. 2015. Journal of Film and Video 67, no. 3-4: 57-68. Kraemer argues the animation in Waltz With Bashir (2008) softens the real violence and atrocities committed by the characters in the film, allowing…
What to do when you have the power; in the meantime, remember to skylark!
Vonnegut, Kurt. 2016. In If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? Edited by Dan Wakefield. New York: Seven Stories Press. A 1970 commencement speech from Kurt Vonnegut, in which he argues that art restores innocence and optimism…
More, Huxley, Eggers, and the utopian/dystopian tradition
Herman, Peter C. 2018. Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 41, no. 3: 165-193. Peter C. Herman argues that Thomas More’s novel Utopia, Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, and Dave Eggers’s novel The…
COMING OUT AS JEWISH: To Be or Not to Be, 1942
McCormick, Rick. 2020. In Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, 282–307. Indiana University Press. In this book chapter, Rick McCormick discusses Ernst Lubitch’s 1942 comedy To Be Or…
“All this happened, more or less”: Making Sense of the War Experience Through Humor in “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “The Sirens of Titan.”
Gallagher, Rosemary. 2012. Studies in American Humor 26: 73-84. Gallagher synthesizes the use of humor in narratives of war as well as those of peace, through the lens of famous anti-war novelist Kurt Vonnegut. She…
The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003
Mohammed, Sadek R. 2018. World Literature Today 92, no. 2: 32-36. Mohammed discusses the history of the Iraqi novel from the 1920s onward, including the large output in the 1960s, the character of highly censored…