Eros, Dantesque and Freudian
12.17.2012

When I was younger, in college and grad school, I'd read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their, or anyone's, life better?

Set theory for poets / Poetry for set theorists
10.01.2012

One modern incarnation of the debate between nominalism and realism is to be found in philosophical arguments about sets.  There are two ways of characterizing a set: intensionally, through description (e.g. the set of all inhabitants of London, to use an example of Russell's), and extensionally, which is just a list of the members of the set.

Claude Lanzmann and Errol Morris
03.24.2012

Errol Morris is famous for being an amazing interviewer. I think I know why, having seen him with Claude Lanzmann last Friday at Brandeis.

Judging God
05.05.2011

Teaching Milton this semester, I think I made a couple of connections that must be obvious, but that I'd never quite seen before (or maybe I had: these days I'm finding the obvious striking again, which I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing).

Sheba and Newcomb's Problem
04.29.2011

Stanislas Dehaene, in his fascinating book The Number Sense, describes an experiment with the Sheba, a chimp who not only learned to count accurately but learned to order the Arabic numerals by size from 1 to 9, and could accurately compute the inequality between any two of them presented to her and pick the larger one, which shows extremely impressive symbolic and mathematical understanding.

Literary Need, IV: Love's Characters
04.21.2011

The topic of our attachment to words is allegorical of our attachments to ourselves and to other persons.

Literary Need III: Quotation, or Childe Roland to "CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" Came
04.11.2011

In an earlier post I wrote a little about Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Is reading a solitary or communal activity?
04.06.2011

Some comments here, and also off-list, helped me think further about these issues.

Acquired tastes and the pleasures of imitation
03.29.2011

I've been thinking about Pierre Bourdieu and also about what I think are common and reductive misreadings of Bourdieu. Bourdieu says two things which will often strike people as incompatible enough that they pay attention only to the first, to wit: That acquired tastes provide those who acquire them symbolic capital.

Free indirect style was so simple. He'd have to say something about it. How simple it was. Have to argue against Blakey's view.
03.22.2011

I've been thinking a bunch about free indirect style -- I may try to incorporate this issue into a short talk I'm giving in April. Or not.

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William Flesch's picture
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).

Publications

The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry: 19th Century
Facts on File | 2009
Comeuppance
Harvard University Press | 2008