By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas has been told numerous times, and Henry Purcell famously turned it into one of the first English operas in the late seventeenth century. Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is a wonderful piece of music, powerful and moving: you can listen to it here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Like many of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, the short 1933 story ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ uses its spare, direct dialogue to hint at the relationships between the characters and the themes the story is delicately and obliquely exploring. The story is about an old man who frequents a Spanish café at night, and the two waiters who discuss why the old man comes to sit there every night and is always reluctant to leave.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The miracle of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana is the first of Jesus’ miracles recounted in the Gospel of John, and as such it marks a decisive moment in the story of Jesus’ divinity. But there are several mysterious details about the story which are worthy of closer analysis, not least the matter of where ‘Cana’ exactly was.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’: so begins Othello’s last major speech before he stabs himself. His last words, famously, are ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’. But between these two lines are a number of other noteworthy moments which call out for closer textual analysis. Let’s go through Othello’s speech, which can be found in Act 5 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Othello, and offer a summary and analysis of his language and meaning as we go.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story, a man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man’s father condemns his son to death by drowning, and the son goes and throws himself into the river.