Reading literature through the looking glass of theory.
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg
Beware: the Beats are coming, the Beats are coming. The Beat Generation will shatter all of the rules, leaving society's bits and pieces scattered on the ground of history. Things are about to get...
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Talk about failure. Biff Loman is a bum and this play is a big bummer. Biff just wants to live on a farm out west and look at the sky. But us Americans are taught to make more of ourselves than tha...
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Ah, those stuffy old Victorians. They're just such easy targets. We could spend all day talking about why a woman with such a remarkable intellect had to use a man's name to get any of her books pu...
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
We imagine that Oscar Wilde lived in the most fabulous of closets. He belonged to a school of art called Aestheticism. This school of art focused on the surface as the essence of things—what you...
Querelle by Jean Genet
If you're going to be bad, you might as well be really bad. Like, if you're going to have a conversation about something that is so taboo, no one would dare talk about it, you might as well come ou...