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Holmes Changes his Mind
The Birth of Free Speech in America
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Brad Skow
1
Naive Sprung Rhythm
Metric poetry is rhythmic language laid above, and to some degree matching, an underlying pulse. If you do not know where in that pulse you are, you may…
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Brad Skow
4
On Hamlet
One does not just walk into Mordor. The same might be said of Hamlet criticism. But in my naive, Hobbit-like way, I read Nicholas Brooke’s essay on…
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Brad Skow
6
Romanticism, II: Art and Politics.
Part I treated Romantic ideas about Reality and Knowledge and Virtue (in Isaiah Berlin’s telling), but wasn’t it primarily a movement in the arts? Yes…
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Brad Skow
Romanticism, I: Revaluation of Values
The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin
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Brad Skow
5
Side Note: The Documentary Fallacy Fallacy
In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley? Henry Oliver comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” He…
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Brad Skow
5
Nietzsche, Neuroscience, and Ancient Greek Heroes
1. Songs of Surrender, by U2. Nietzsche explains Dionysiac art in The Birth of Tragedy. It’s art expressive of, and causing in its appreciators, a sort…
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Brad Skow
Moral and artistic value, narrative and history, Bob Dylan, and more.
1: The autobiography of Charles Darwin. Darwin on his education: I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine…
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Brad Skow
Why is this happening?
Unanswered questions as artistic flaws
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Brad Skow
1
The paradox of fiction: a defense
1. It is Act III of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt is hunting Romeo. Tybald finds him and demands that Romeo “turn and draw,” but Romeo refuses—always a…
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Brad Skow
4
Free Indirect Style Gymnastics
When writing in free indirect style, an author conveys a character’s thoughts, feelings, or mental state, without explicitly marking that this is…
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Brad Skow
“An atmosphere of artistic theory”
1. The institutional definition of art Plato said that works of art are imitations of reality, and something like this defintion went mostly…
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Brad Skow
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