An affluent womanizer, Tony Bream. The nicest, sweetest girl, Jean Martle. A desperate lover abroad too long in China, Dennis Vidal. The odd Rose Arminger. They all seem like characters from the famed game Clue. Who was the murderer of the little girl Effie Bream; who held this child’s delicate body under the water until […]
The theatrical nature and content of Sologub’s The Little Demon had me envisioning a play on the stage for the first third of the novel. Hilarious dialogue, telling imagery, and one of the most paranoid and depraved characters in fiction made visualizing this text taking place physically before me easy. For much of this novel, […]
Finally, I have read my first Doris Lessing novel. I admit, it may not have been the best one to wet my feet. The Four-Gated City (British, 1969) is the final book of a five-book series called the “Children of Violence.” I didn’t read the first four but only the last. I felt as if I […]
William Blake, in many ways, polarizes innocence and experience in his book of poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience. His exploration of these are literally separated by a frontispiece and title page. Moreover, he marks the primary differences between innocence and experience by showing the evolution of poems — “Infant Joy” in the first […]
When I was called out for teaching some provocative contexts in my “Strange Children” course this quarter, my supervisor came to my defense by saying, “Well, it’s not like you’re teaching Death in Venice, or anything.” I had heard of Thomas Mann’s novella — and really enjoyed reading the obscure The Transposed Heads, which I […]
Today one of my soon-to-be students for my Spring quarter course called “Strange Children” mentioned that the course description reminded her of Mark Ryden‘s art. I, of course, looked into his work directly. Indeed, Ryden’s oeuvre is almost entirely dedicated to depictions of children — mostly prepubescent girls — and nature. The children are grotesque […]
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