On the mythological and biological necessity of work: "You can only survive if you work, since so much is working against you."
04.09.2015
Though Shakespeare may not have invented parapraxes, he certainly exploited their psychological depths long before Freud.
02.10.2015
Some thoughts on the potential evolutionary genesis of intersubjectivity
10.07.2014
We has them. I want a cheezburger, and I can has cheezburger, but I don't want to want one.
12.19.2013
A book that furnishes no quotations is no book—it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.
11.05.2013
Plays have to end, but no one so well as Shakespeare understood how to use them to offer the hospitality of time, the interim of friendship.
10.03.2013
There's a way in which everything you see in a poem should be obvious when you see it, should be a duh!-moment.
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William Flesch
William Flesch is the author, most recently, of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Harvard, 2008), and The Facts on File Companion to 19th Century British Literature. He teaches the history of poetry as well as the theory of poetic and narrative form at Brandeis, and has been International Chair Professor at the National Taipei University of Technology (2012) and Old Dominion Fellow of the Humanities Council and Visiting Professor at Princeton (2014-15).