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• Lost Illusions: American Neo-Realism and Hitchcock’s Vertigo
  Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I love you!” Sam Spade: “I don’t care who loves who.  No one’s gonna play me for a sap.” —The Maltese Falcon Joe Gillis: “You’re Norma Desmond.  You were in the silent movies.  You were big.” Norma Desmond: “I am big.  It’s the movies that got small.”  —Sunset Boulevard             The movies didContinue reading “Lost Illusions: American Neo-Realism and Hitchcock’s Vertigo”
• The Sense of the Sublime in the Middle Ages
• Eros and Charisma
  A lecture given at Bonn University, Conference on Charisma: Imagining Womens’ Power in Medieval Europe
• Inspiration and the Experience of Order
  Introduction The subject of this book is a moment in the process of wrestling with impressions,experiences, gathered data, emotions, when suddenly a long sought solution, a desired form, a poem with its words, rhymes and rhythms, or the form and content of a composition, present themselves, all at once coherent and as though given fromContinue reading “Inspiration and the Experience of Order”
• Brothers Karamazov
  I’m rereading Brothers Karamazov after many years. What a great book! And what resonance with US political dynamics of the moment. In the core of the complicated plot is a murder mystery driven by the mechanism of the inciter and the incited. The murderer eventually admits his crime (privately, to the inciter; the forces ofContinue reading “Brothers Karamazov”