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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
And so what are monsters and historical fiction for?
What are monsters in literature for? And what why should we try to relive history through historical fiction?
In “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” an article he wrote for the October 30, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Review, Columbia College-Chicago philosophy professor Stephen Asma surveys some of the answers to that first question as propounded by philosophers, literary artists, and scientific minds over the centuries. “For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity,” he explains. “The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. After Freud, monster stories were considered cathartic journeys into our unconscious…” But he says the reasons for the current exponential rise of the monster culture are harder to pin down.
Read Stephen Asma’s “Monsters and the Moral Imagination Writing” now!
In “On Dealing with History in Fiction,” written by Hilary Mantel for the October 17, 2009 issue of The Guardian UK, the 2009 Booker Prize winner for fiction vigorously argues that we need better history rather than history “because a good deal of what we think we know about the past is unverified tradition and unexamined prejudice.” She says that “To try to engage with the present without engaging with the past is to live like a dog or cat rather than a human being; it is to bob along on the waters of egotism, solipsism and ignorance.” Mantel, a British novelist, short story writer, and critic, won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall.
Read Hilary Mantel’s “On Dealing with History in Fiction” now!
