The Compleat Heretic's Publications:
Literary Commentary
This page was last modified on 20 April 2012.
When I returned to UNCG in 2005 to finish my B.S. in Finance, I was required to take a couple of literature classes. I resigned myself to taking them; in high school, English was second only to P.E. as my least favorite subject. Oddly enough, I found that I actually enjoyed them! I enjoyed them so much that I continued as a second degree undergraduate to get a B.A. in English. As a bonus, all of the discussion board posts, short responses, papers, essays, and other writings that are de rigueur in the formal study of literature make legitimate web content.
On the "Hallelujah Giant" in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (10 July 2006)
Discussion board post performing a "close reading" on an amazing sentence in Winterson's novel
On Jeanette's Mother in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (13 July 2006)
Discussion board post examining both the author's purpose and growing up by use of the character Mother in Winterson's novel
Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: Good or Evil? (19 July 2006)
Discussion board post examining the moral status of the character Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Vonnegut's novel
Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the Journey of the Dead Man (19 July 2006)
Discussion board post examining the relationship between the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb and Vonnegut's novel
"Understanding" Postmodernism (27 July 2006)
Discussion board post attempting to clarify the nature of Postmodernist literature and art
Approaching Joe Wenderoth’s "Letters to Wendy’s" (27 July 2006)
Discussion board post offering a strategy for making "sense" of Wenderoth's prose poem collection (WARNING: Offensive Content)
Christian Anti-Semitism in Margery Kempe's "Vision of the Passion" (5 September 2006)
Short response examining one of Christianity's traditional perversities through a medieval hagiography
Metaphor and Homonym in Much Ado About Nothing (28 September 2006)
Short response examining symbolism and wordplay in the penultimate scene of Shakespeare's play
Christian Nihilism in George Herbert's "Death" (17 October 2006)
Short response examining the Christian love of death and nothingness as expressed in Herbert's poem
Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room": Misogyny or Misandry? (28 November 2006)
Short response examining sexism in one of Swift's controversial "excremental" poems
Modernism and the Creation of an American Poetics (19 June 2007)
Final paper examining the contributions of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to the development of a uniquely American poetry
The Shrinking God of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (26 June 2007)
Short response examining the challenge to traditional conceptions of "God" in Whitman's "Song of Myself #48" and Dickinson's "The Brain—is wider than the Sky—" (632)
Recreating God: Religious Imagination in Whitman, Dickinson, and Stevens (24 July 2007)
Final paper examining the rejection of Christianity and redefinition of "the holy" in Whitman's "Song of Myself #48," Dickinson's "The Soul selects her own Society—" (303), and Stevens's "Sunday Morning"
A Close Reading of William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" (18 September 2007)
Short response examining Blake's sociopolitical critique of late 18th-century British society in his poem from Songs of Experience
A Close Reading of Alfred Tennyson's "Ulysses" (15 November 2007)
Short response examining the father-son relationship between Ulysses and Telemachus as portrayed by Tennyson in his poem
A Literary Analysis of Psalm 14 (3 June 2008)
Interpretive close reading paper examining the true meaning and purpose of Psalm 14 ("The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God")
Violating Virtue: Aaron's Rape Plot Speech in Titus Andronicus (22 October 2008)
Close reading paper examining Act 2, Scene 1, lines 104-132 of William Shakespeare's play
A Response to Paul Stevens's "Milton in America" (4 December 2008)
Response paper discussing the question of how Miltonic is America and how American is Milton with a trenchant diversion into the experience of my indentured English ancestor, Thomas Whicker (1652-1704)
A Devil of a Problem: Satan as Hero in Paradise Lost (8 December 2008)
Research paper examining the hero problem in John Milton's Paradise Lost within the context of William Blake’s infamous comment that Milton "was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it"
Iago's Foul Music (12 February 2009)
Close reading paper examining and defending the comedic Clown passage in Act 3, Scene 1, lines 1-28 of William Shakespeare's Othello
The Rhyme and Reason of Justice (9 April 2009)
Close reading paper examining the Duke's soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1, lines 481-502 of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
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