Category: Rhetoric
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“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly…
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Here are my CRAP reflections on Chapter 15 of Longinus’ “On the Sublime.” Criticism Longinus begins this chapter by emphasizing the importance of phantasia, or visualization: “…dignity, grandeur, and urgency are to a very large degree derived from visualization (phantasia).” He distinguishes this from the mere production of images. Instead, phantasia is a vital mental…
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In Chapter 14 of “On the Sublime” Longinus lays out one of the most radical creative challenges in literary history: “We too… should carefully consider how perhaps Homer might have said this very thing, or how Plato, or Demosthenes, or (in history) Thucydides, might have given it sublimity.” Criticism Longinus doesn’t just ask writers to…
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Longinus, in Chapter 13 of On the Sublime, offers a compelling meditation on imitation and inspiration: “[T]here is another way that leads to sublimity… It is the imitation and emulation of the greater writers and poets of the past… For many authors are inspired by the spirit of others…” Criticism Longinus views sublimity not as…
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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the entertainment industry. It’s not really a novel realization, and it’s been hit on by quite a few critics and commentators, but it’s really beginning to bother me. Human creativity seems to be waning in such a dramatic way in recent years. There are so many formulaic attempts at…
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“Writing: It starts at the keyboard, and it ends at the far corners of the universe.” — Paako, From Vincent Lowry, Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries Long ago I came across this quote on Twitter and it got me thinking. Whenever I sit down to write something, I usually don’t have much of…
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“Ask for money, you get advice, ask for advice, get money twice.” – Pitbull Yes, this quote is from the very Pitbull you believe I’m referring to, the rapper from Miami, Florida. The quote is literally from the opening lines of “Feel This Moment,” the fourth single from his Global Warming album. This is excellent…
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“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” – Pablo Picasso Many people might think of Picasso as the man who looked at the world as if it were a kaleidoscope and thought, “Why not make it even more twisted?” But, he’s also the guy…
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Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed,…
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No institution has done more to arrest intellectual progress under the guise of divine authority than the Church. For over two thousand years, Christianity has braided guilt and power into a crown it insists you wear humbly. Apologetics, especially the polished, genteel flavor popularized by C.S. Lewis and his successors, don’t exist to explore truth;…