Synecdoche

“Does society need a mandatory time-out?” asks an article in The Atlantic. I am drawn to the notion of the Sabbath, albeit secular, for a number of reasons, not just thanks to my recent conversion to Judaism. ⇰ Continue Reading

NPR shifts from language focusing on the contentious, dubious opposition between “choice” and “life” to terms that emphasize that the debate is about the right to choose. ⇰ Continue Reading

If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes? ⇰ Continue Reading

This quotation from Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World seems timely and topical. I've copied it here, without commentary, for your reflection. ⇰ Continue Reading

The gestation of this post revolves around the realization that in a few weeks I am going to have to turn in a respectably well thought out, cogent paper applying Jacques Derrida’s not-method of deconstruction to a literary text of my choosing. Until recently I have been consumed by something approaching intellectual panic regarding both the choice of text, and something more fundamental: the purpose of deconstructing a literary text, given Derrida’s own thinking surrounding différance and deconstruction, namely the concurrent lack of origin and endpoint. If deconstruction can never arrive at a conclusion, why begin? ⇰ Continue Reading