The world doesn’t revolve around you! Many children, and plenty of adults too, have heard this from parents, friends or partners. It’s easy and kinda satisfying to view others around you as minor characters in the drama of your life. But Paula Moya wants us to recognize that this arrogant self-centredness can lead people to believe that everyone else is just there to serve them. Paula argues that Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy not only depicts harmful arrogance among its characters, but also teaches readers to be less arrogant in their own lives.
Category: Episodes
Many people today surround themselves with crystals, whether for healing properties or as part of their spirituality. But the question of whether crystals can affect the body or the spirit goes back millennia. Marisa Galvez has identified two distinct traditions for understanding crystals. First, there’s a Christian tradition that focuses on how crystals might allow us to transcend the body into a realm of pure spirituality. But there’s also a tradition that links crystals to erotic love. In medieval poetry, the shimmering qualities of crystals are used to capture an experience of love that’s dizzying yet pleasurable.
We usually don’t pay much attention to pauses in language – it’s easy to assume they’re just meaningless gaps between the meaningful words. But pauses are everywhere in spoken language – and, as Andrew Leong has been studying, in written language too. Pauses are not just an absence of meaning, but can drastically shift the meaning of the words around them. From an American short story, to a Japanese coming-of-age novel to a Japanese-American play, Andrew argues that pauses are a device for hinting at things left unsaid.
Spectacular dance sequences are one of the most recognizable elements of Indian cinema, and female dancers are the biggest stars. Although some critics view dance sequences as just interruptions that don’t push the story forward, Usha Iyer argues that distracting from the story is actually a good thing. Whereas the stories are typically marriage plots in which women give up their independence, focusing on women’s dancing allows us to recognise the power and skill not only of the characters but also of the dancer-actresses who have shaped these films behind the scenes.
It’s difficult to maintain attention when surrounded by distractions. Even if we’re just trying to focus on our own thoughts, distracting words have a way of popping into our head uninvited. David Marno has been studying early Christian thinkers, for whom prayer meant paying attention to God, leading them to worry that distracting thoughts were caused by evil demons. But avoiding these demons of distraction wasn’t the goal for everyone: the poet and preacher John Donne believed that true attention could only emerge out of distractedness, and so wrote poetry that moves readers from distraction to spiritual attention.
For many people, binge-watching is a guilty pleasure. In the Golden Age of Television, we might feel guilty because great tv shows deserve to be watched slowly and thoughtfully, not rushed through. If we’re just watching for what happens next in the story, we’ll probably miss out on subtler kinds of artistry. But Michaela Bronstein wants to defend bingeing, and points out that people had similar worries a hundred years ago about the novel: concerns about binge-reading then and binge-watching today reflect a shift from viewing each medium as just entertainment to viewing it as high art.
It’s hard to find time for undistracted reading, and it’s easy to blame modern developments like digital technology. But Christina Lupton says that people have been feeling this way for more than 200 years. For centuries, people have been struggling to balance a desire for undistracted reading with their professional and family duties. By studying past struggles to make time for reading, we can pick up strategies to apply in our own lives – and understand why finding time for reading is not just a personal but a political issue.
There’s a negative stereotype of teenage readers as naively absorbed in their favourite books – think of young readers obsessed with Harry Potter. But Jill Richards believes that the best books and films aimed at teenagers actually create space to think for yourself. These works invite us to relate to them as fans, but in contrast to the stereotype of fans loving everything about their favourite fictional universe, Jill argues that fandom is about mixed feelings – loving some aspects of a work and rejecting others – and thus making it your own.
Life experiences can transform us in many ways, and Laurie Paul wants us to appreciate how experiencing works of art can be powerfully transformative too. Works of fiction can change how we understand our own lives going forwards, or experiences we’ve already had. But art doesn’t always transform us for the better – when we truly open ourselves up to transformation, we can’t know in advance, or ultimately control, what the results will be.