Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to itself resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
The work of Omar al-Khayyam makes it pretty clear that Middle Eastern scholars were light-years ahead of their European counterparts durin
Gertrude Stein may challenge Jacqueline Susann as the biggest self-promoter of twentieth-century letters. Stein had a habit of proclaiming herself a "genius" and each of her works a "masterpiece." She was perhaps stretching it a bit, but she did become a pivotal figure in Modernism, influencing a
Crowds, conspiracies, consumer society, and futile attempts to thwart despair -- these are the trademark features of the work of Don DeLillo, a prolific American novelist at the edge of contemporary trends.
DeLillo is undoubtedly an ironist, as his characters relentlessly mock their relation to
French critic and novelist Simone de Beauvoir reinvented the feminist debate with her shocking text, "The Second Sex" (1953), which has become a theoretical bible for those interested in Existentialist and Marxist analysis of women's societal subservience. Since the arrival of Postmodernism at the ce