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• 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”
• Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial: The Limits of Charismatic Art
  These thoughts on the aesthetics of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial began as the last chapter of my book, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (2012). Because the book was already too long, this essay became an orphan. I hope it’s still worth reading without the rest of itsContinue reading “Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial: The Limits of Charismatic Art”