Category: Guest Post

“Whatever happened to the epic?” by Jo Ann Cavallo

Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed to have composed Don Quixote de la Mancha to combat the imaginative hold that books of chivalry had over his contemporaries. Reading the novel for the first time as an undergraduate, however, I had been…

Contemporary Figure Skating: Dancing towards an Unhealthy Aesthetics

Dr Maryam Farahani – July 2022 Health and beauty classifications are controversial topics in humanities and sciences, but they are also inevitable concepts upon which people ponder in the path of self-discovery. In their edited volume, Narrative Art and the…

‘A Sensitive, Avid and Silent Political Subject’: Roland Barthes, Politics-Polemics-Pandemics

by Andy Stafford, Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Leeds; author of the forthcoming book Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self. As we emerge now (hopefully!) from two years of the pandemic and regular lock-down, isolation and…

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795

Drawn to Blake In Ross Glass’s 2020 psychological horror film, Saint Maud, the title character, a hospice nurse who has recently converted to an extremely ascetic form of Catholicism after a hedonistic earlier phase, is given a book of William…

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine

Travel writing, as its name suggests, would seem to require travel in order to be effectively produced. After all, how can one write about your experience of visiting foreign lands if you’re unable to travel to them in the first…

Techniques & Aesthetics in 3D Films of 1950s and their Impact on Later Productions by David A. Cook

Although I have written about 3D films before in A History of Narrative Film (HNF, W. W. Norton, 1981; 1990; 1996; 2004; 2016) – both polarized and digital – in Chapters 12 and 21 respectively, I wanted to understand stereoscopy…

Classroom 15 by Julia Mueller and Zack Demars

Some of the most memorable educators are the ones willing to throw out the syllabus in pursuit of a higher lesson. When a fourth-grade teacher in Roseburg, Oregon, did just that during the height of the Cold War, he sent…