ESSAY CEMETERY

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello , J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.” In The Sublime and the Beautiful , Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure.

Can morals embedded in a work of literature influence our real-life behavior? The question becomes more complex when the work in question is fictional, with imaginary characters navigating imaginary dilemmas. When a work is set in a hypothetical future in a world governed by laws vastly different than our own, its links to our own reality become even further obscured. Philip K. Dick's 1967 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a future in which Earth has been ravaged by nuclear warfare. Earth is populated by humans and androids, artificially constructed biological humanoid beings. Some androids kill their owners for a chance at a life of freedom. These are sought and killed by bounty hunters like protagonist Rick Deckard.  The parallels to our own reality are quite transparent. The maltreatment in the novels of androids mirrors sexist and racist attitudes in recent Western history. Throughout the novel Rick grows to feel empathy toward these beings wi

Summary Eliot begins the essay by saying that women produce a lot of silly stupid novels which she terms “mind and millinery” novels. These feature a particular type of heroin that is either rich, witty, accomplished, religious, and moral, or all of these except rich. In all these, men play the minor role of worshiping the heroine. The plots too are predictable and the heroine always ultimately comes out on top. Crappy writing is excusable if the authors are underprivileged but they are not – they are upper-class women. They are not good at representing any class of life, including their own. They misrepresent the speech of children and endow their heroines with unrealistic linguistic skills. She gives examples of novels with such failings. Also, novelists tend to have their characters exemplify unrealistic conversational skills. Other times they use complex language to express simple ideas. Often they create frivolous plots and character behavior with high morality. The other kind of

Problems with fiction about horror: it can be pleasurable; it doesn’t do justice to the horror (but at least there’s exposure) Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How do you compare two evils? Can you? Is there an ethical problem with such a comparison? Having to choose between telling a story and doing good. Elizabeth would choose good; he would choose to tell a story. Basically he is an aestheticist and she is an ethical writer. The answer, as far as she can see, is that she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. West, she thinks, would rather tell a story, though perhaps she ought to suspend judgement until she hears it from his own li

Costello has been invited to talk about the problem of evil in the world. This is because she gave a talk in which she compared animal slaughterhouses to the holocaust and people thought she was belittling the holocaust. She thinks it’s futile to talk about evil and she’s also wary of defending herself but she agreed because of a novel she was reading at the time she received the invitation. The book contained a description of the execution of holocaust victims by hanging and it made her sick and inspired/motivated her to speak of evil.  The paper she agreed to give was on the topic “witness, silence and censorship”. She has lately come to believe that we live in a capitalist (“illimitable endeavor”) world. She has also come to believe that reading and writing do not always improve one. In her lecture, she wonders if Paul West, the author of the holocaust book, was not permanently scarred by his exploration of the topic. In the lecture, she proposes that paul’s soul may have been scarr

Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room is set in post-industrialization, post-urbanization England. Throughout the novel, Jacob lives in cities, relocating from Scarborough to Cambridge University to London. Although the premise of Jacob’s Room is realistic, descriptions of these cities are often accompanied by mystical and supernatural imagery. Through metaphors of light and darkness, Woolf explores the role of the city and of education in man’s increasing estrangement from nature. In spite of the city’s bright appeal, Woolf exposes intellectual urban life as an ineffective barrier against the unavoidable chaos of existence and the inescapable mortality of man. Chapter Three sees Jacob leaving his mother and his home in Scarborough to attend university at Cambridge. His first impressions of Cambridge are of the brightness of its cityscape. “They say the sky is the same everywhere... But above Cambridge--anyhow above the roof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out a

Chapter Six of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair opens with a direct address to the serial novel's readers. "I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one", the narrator apologizes, "and must beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a stockbroker's family in Russell Square" (60). In an era in which the extent of the readership determined a serial novel's continued existence, the reader-writer relationship was of paramount importance. Thackeray appeases his readers, defends his artistic choices, and refutes their implied concerns about his craft. By examining the dialogue into which Thackeray enters with his readers in the context of the novel, we can gain insight into the role of the reader in the Victorian serial, and the manner in which Thackeray harnesses the reader-writer relationship to engage the readers and enhance the effectiveness of his social critique.  The dependence of the serial

Mary Hays's novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney features correspondence between its protagonist, Emma, and other characters in the novel's fictional world. Tension ensues between the form of the novel and its content: even though the epistolary genre is inherently concerned with communication between several parties, Memoirs of Emma Courtney does not seem to provide insight into the minds of multiple characters. Hays's self-proclaimed intent in writing the narrative, as detailed in the preface to the book, is "attention to the phenomena of the human mind". However, instead of exploring several characters, the novel repeatedly focuses on a solitary individual – Emma Courtney. Attention to sentence structure, keywords, and thematic focus provides insight into the manner in which Hays harnesses the epistolary genre to explore the psychology of one single character. The novel does not adhere to the epistolary genre throughout. Aside from letters from Emma to various charac

In her 1923 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf places characterization at the center of the novelist’s concerns. For Woolf, the novelist is defined primarily by his or her obsession with capturing character, a task she deems nearly impossible. “Few catch the phantom [of character]; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (21). Despite this ostensible focus on characterization, Woolf has been criticized for creating shallow, incomplete characters in her works. Indeed, in her novel, Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, remarkably little attention is given to the title character. Only a vague outline is provided of the progression of Jacob Flanders from early childhood to his death, and key transitional moments in Jacob’s life are elided from the narrative. Whereas the title character is often absent from the action and narration of Jacob’s Room, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children protagonist Saleem Sinai is omnipresent throughout that narrat

Anglo-Saxon England saw over two hundred years of Viking attacks at the turn of the first millennium. By the end of the tenth century, Anglo-Saxon England had become Anglo-Scandinavian England (Frank 23). The Scandinavian presence in England is the subject of much Early Medieval poetry, prose and historical literature. The Danes, a geographically foreign and pagan people, emerge as an Other against which the Anglo-Saxons struggle to maintain their ideological integrity. In the poem “The Battle of Maldon” the warfare waged against the Vikings exposes weakness within the ranks of the English. In the “Life of St. Edmund”, an Anglo-Saxon defeat in a battle against the Vikings gives rise to a saint who works miracles from beyond the grave. Even though both texts were written within decades of one another, the recentness of the events depicted and the thematic focus of their authors result in two very different treatments of a similar historical setting. Ælfric’s “Life of St. Edmund” is an e