Berfrois

November 2010

Nietzsche always remained Christian, at least emotionally…

Nietzsche always remained Christian, at least emotionally…

From New Humanist: Nietzsche himself turns out to have been a likable sort of guy. Despite his over-the-top persona as an “antichrist”, he always “remained a Christian”, according to Young, if not theologically then at least “emotionally.” And despite his hatred of slipshod scholarship, he had no truck with...

Read More

‘Confessional literature has become a metaphorical striptease’

‘Confessional literature has become a metaphorical striptease’

Image via This Isn’t Happiness From The New Inquiry: Literature’s undeniable resemblance to gossip illuminates what is most useful about it, what causes literary works to endure. In her 1982 essay “In Praise of Gossip” in The Hudson Review, Patricia Meyer Spacks claims that gossip can function as “healing...

Read More

With the Vietnam War, black power, feminism, the Nixon administration, marijuana and LSD, student rebellion, and the sexual revolution roiling the country, targets for the newly launched National Lampoon were plentiful…

With the Vietnam War, black power, feminism, the Nixon administration, marijuana and LSD, student rebellion, and the sexual revolution roiling the country, targets for the newly launched National Lampoon were plentiful…

Funniest Pages: A tasting menu from the most hilarious magazine ever | by Craig Lambert

Harvard Magazine

Contrary to the romanticized image of a solitary artist forging brilliant creations in inspired isolation—Franz Kafka, say—most great works of art emerge from a group...

Read More

Non

Present Perfect

Present Perfect

by Fabio Camilletti   This essay analyses the relationship between the uncanny and time by focusing on the notion of ‘time-slip’ as reflected in three American novels of the 1970s: Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return and Stephen King’s The Shining. Through a comparative analysis of these...

Read More

Uncloseting Drama and Fag Hags: Berfrois Interviews Nick Salvato

Uncloseting Drama and Fag Hags: Berfrois Interviews Nick Salvato

by Russell Bennetts Nick Salvato is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Cornell University. His first book, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance will be published by Yale University Press at the end of November.  Currently Nick is working on a second book, tentatively entitled Performing Waste Management: A...

Read More

Nature’s Zombie-Masters

Nature’s Zombie-Masters

From The Smithsonian: Some of the most successful zombie-masters are fungi from the genus Ophiocordyceps. The parasites infest many kinds of arthropods—from butterflies to cockroaches—but it is among ants that the fungi’s ability to control other beings’ behavior is most apparent. One prototypical scenario is found in Costa Rica,...

Read More

‘From the opening scene it’s clear that this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people’

‘From the opening scene it’s clear that this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people’

Brenda Song as Christy Lee in The Social Network From New York Review of Books: How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say...

Read More

Nussbaum’s Manifesto

Nussbaum’s Manifesto

From The Philosophers’ Magazine: If “liberal” is a dirty word then Martha Nussbaum is one of the most profane philosophers alive. An unashamed champion of the value of liberal democracy, Nussbaum is also an enthusiastic advocate of providing the kind of humanistic education that prepares students to be good...

Read More