By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ is one of Wallace Stevens’s most assured, and popular, short poems. It belongs to his early period: it was first published in 1915 before being collected in his first book-length collection, Harmonium, in 1923. You can read ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Stream of consciousness’ is a common term in literary criticism, and often used to describe the distinctive style employed by some of the most famous writers of the twentieth century. But what is ‘stream of consciousness’? Why a ‘stream’? A few words of introduction may help to clarify this common, and widely misunderstood, literary term.
In fact, ‘stream of consciousness’ began life not as a literary term at all, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – a psychological one.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
We remarked at the end of our summary of ‘After the Race’ – a short story from James Joyce’s 1914 collection Dubliners – that there isn’t exactly much ‘plot’ to summarise. So how might we gesture towards a literary-critical analysis of this challenging story? Many of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners focus not on an event itself but on what happens just afterwards.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the remarkable modernist poem, Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land is often quoted, especially every time that spring month comes around again.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Boarding House’ is one of the 15 stories that make up James Joyce’s 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).