Dante’s Hell is a diorama of sin, enacted as both moral exhortation and poetic prophecy. Change is no longer possible here, and damnation is the irrevocable, total removal from God—a separation that is more terrible for being freely willed by… Read More ›
“Why not,” I said to myself, “present this highly strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his characters live though they have been born in his fantasy, and the fact that these characters, having by now… Read More ›
Next to such esteemed Nobel laureates as Samuel Beckett and Luigi Pirandello, Mr. Fo seems like an alien, even an accidental choice. His response was characteristic: He said that to be in their company gave him “a certain sensation.” One… Read More ›
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) argued that Italians are less suited temperamentally to writing novels than to writing poetry, essays, and biographies. Certainly, the art of storytelling has long been esteemed in Italy; Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528; The Book of… Read More ›
The Trickster impulse, which is a symbol of transgression in world literature, is variously defined by anthropologists, sociologists, psychotherapists, cultural theorists, writers and film critics. Enemy of boundaries, trickster figure resists the narrow framing of definition. Creativity- the ability to… Read More ›