Word: beowulf
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...steps the logical problem, defining love in terms of art and then repeating the same thing backwards. More often he resorts to metaphor. His metaphors are quirky, personal, often drawn from the Northeastern countryside of his youth or the Greek and Anglo-Saxon myths of his beloved Homer and Beowulf. They're catchy, too; but usually in On Moral Fiction Gardner presents us with a serious question, flings a captivating metaphor at us, and hurries away to some other problem before we have time to ask for answers...
...tenth of the undergraduate population, it seems, was so convinced that it didn't want to brave the rigors of a heavy reading period this spring, that 671 people packed Sanders Theater to listen to tales of Beowulf and Batman from Albert B. Lord, the star of Humanities 9b, "Oral and Popular Literature...
Forbidden Fruits. Horror stories were told in prehistory-there are monsters in the cave paintings. In ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was chopped to pieces on the orders of his mother. Terror haunts Beowulf and the Book of Job. But horror as civilized commercial entertainment arose in the rationalist 18th century, and its compensatory function was recognized. In one of his Caprichos, Painter Francisco Goya said it all: "The sleep of reason breeds monsters...
...princes. Robert Fitzgerald, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and a poet (Spring Shade, 1971) in his own right, has cut back on the pomp without scaling down the epic. His battlefield seems bleaker-black and white rather than Pope technicolor. His protagonists are closer to Beowulf than to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The blank-verse lines may flex to a Homeric simile, but in combat they are as direct as a dagger thrust. What Fitzgerald has done is provide all that a late-20th century translator and his audience can share on the subject...
Myth in the modern novel is reworked into absurd comedy, and plot retreats upon itself. Characters are puppets whose strings lead you to different parts of the author's pysche. John Gardner reveled in all this chaos in his earlier novels. In Grendel, Beowulf is just another ridiculous hero in front of a bunch of snivelling fools when we get the classic epic from the monster's point of view. And in The Sunlight Dialogues, self-parody pops up in thoughts such as "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot." Veracity...