Last year I wrote a series of posts about my dissatisfaction with contemporary literary fiction: I wrote about the literary hype-machine, about literary short stories, about Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, about the lack of moral vision in contemporary novels| www.woman-of-letters.com
Once upon a time, a high school sophomore was assigned to write a paper about the use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. This sophomore was quite STEM-oriented, and she really questioned the premise of this assignment. Her understanding was that a 'symbol' was an image in the text that had some kind of meaning that wasn't directly obvious. But the question was: "Meaning to whom?"| www.woman-of-letters.com