As Donald Trump has gained fame and power, his rage at opponents and appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened. A classics scholar looks to literature for help understanding him.
- Professor of English, Rutgers University - Newark
As the election nears, it seems everyone is afraid.
In the ugly spectacle of American politics, it’s hard to keep humanity in sight. But literature, says a poet and scholar of the classics, can remind us of what we know about growing old.
Kevin McCarthy, the only speaker of the House to be ousted, has quit Congress. The ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as Shakespeare, understood the price of ambition like McCarthy’s: humiliation.
The insights of an ancient historian show that the causes of civil unrest are often the same over time and across societies.
Shame and guilt seem equally foreign to many politicians and public figures these days. Rather than cover their bad behavior with a veneer of hypocrisy, they revel in it, a classics scholar says.
A classics scholar looks at Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony and says only a rare few are able to summon courage. For others, the drive to maintain power produces cowardice and willful blindness.
In the middle of a brutal war, poetry asserts its value, challenging the darkness and inhumanity.
Five articles on the meanings of hope and how to think about resilience, healing and even joy in the midst of this winter’s bleakness.
Rachel Hadas says that despite the cascade of scary news, humans will adapt, as they always have – and provides evidence of that resilience in the literature she loves and teaches.
Hope does not ride alone. It has a companion: anxiety. A classics scholar who is a poet notes that, at what may be the end of a long and dark pandemic year, both are in evidence.
A classics scholar and poet turns to Greek mythology, especially the story of Oedipus the King, to explain the drama – or perhaps tragedy – that is taking place in the highest office in the land.
From ‘islands of pain’ to the ‘peril of exposure,’ writers have captured the fear, emptiness and despair that characterize life during the current pandemic, writes a poet and English scholar.
From human suffering to political chicanery to environmental degradation, the tide of bad news, blared in headlines every day, seems overwhelming. One poet and classics scholar asks: What can be done?
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