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The Power of Words, or, Jamal Kashoggi’s Legacy
The disturbing news about the presumed torturing and murdering of writer and journalist Jamal Kashoggi caught up with me as I was in the middle of rereading one of my favorite novels, Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt [The Last World]. ‘Reality,’ so to speak, violently burrowed itself into the literary universe. At the same… Read more »
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What I Learned from Umberto Eco’s Little Red Book
Umberto Eco, the Italian author, philosopher, and professor of literature has been one of the towering figures of my intellectual coming-of-age. His scholarly books on semiotics and on the role of the reader as producer of meaning in literary texts (Lector in Fabula) opened up a world of new and sometimes radical connections. But Eco… Read more »
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Goethe and Digital Literacy
Goethe’s Italian Journey is a voluminous text. More than 500 pages long, it provides a sometimes very detailed account of Goethe’s two-year journey to Italy (1786-88). The travelogue is written in the style of a diary, whose entries cover everything from seemingly mundane weather reports to quasi-ethnographic descriptions of contemporary Italian people and culture. Although there are… Read more »
