Close readings

Essays

Short arguments, not summaries. Each essay keeps to a handful of works and a single pressure in the text.

1. Job’s Friends

   Piety as a closed system, and the whirlwind as a refusal to close it.

   The Book of Job · The Brothers Karamazov

2. The Rear Guard

   Roland at Roncevaux, and the ethics of a death that waits for the horn.

   The Song of Roland · The Iliad · Beowulf

3. Nothing Will Come of Nothing

   Lear’s arithmetic, and the storm that teaches him to count differently.

   King Lear

4. The Wound That Thinks

   Ahab’s ivory leg, and the metaphysics a body will not stop writing.

   Moby-Dick · Heart of Darkness

5. Unspeakable Rites

   Marlow’s fog, Kurtz’s voice, and the sentence Europe still has not finished.

   Heart of Darkness

6. Faustus at the Edge of Knowing

   Two pacts, two clocks, and the beloved who does not survive the striving.

   Doctor Faustus · Faust

7. The Ordinary Epic

   Bloom’s day, Homer’s night, and the heroism of getting home for breakfast.

   Ulysses · The Odyssey · Mrs Dalloway

8. Ice and Insomnia

   Macondo’s first wonder, and the manuscript that already contains the last.

   One Hundred Years of Solitude

9. Rememory

   Sethe’s claim, 124’s spite, and the child the law would not let her keep.

   Beloved · Antigone

10. The Judge’s Coin

    War as theology in the desert, and the dance that will not let the kid refuse.

    Blood Meridian · Beowulf