Literature

The Good Catastrophe: Why Everyone Should Read Great Literature 4
- Literature
- February 16, 2023
When I first attended a Shakespeare play, I have to admit that for the first few scenes I was pretty lost. Shakespeare’s English is of a much older and more formal style than ours, so sometimes experiencing his work is almost like hearing another language. Confused and concerned that the play wasn’t going to make
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The Death and Resurrection of Bilbo Baggins 1
- Literature, Religion
- February 16, 2023
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…. The opening sentence of The Hobbit is one of the most famous first sentences in all of literature. Simple and short, like its subject, it ignites the imagination the moment we read it. What on earth, and in its comfortable hole in the earth, is a hobbit?
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Not Your School’s Reading List 7: Great Women and Their Deeds 0
- Literature
- February 9, 2023
At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this ongoing series of literature recommendations. This week’s entries feature extraordinary women and the history they lived through. From monarchs to scholars to pioneers, the
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Not Your School’s Reading List 6: Great Men and Their Deeds 2
- Literature
- January 26, 2023
At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this ongoing series of literature recommendations. This week’s entries feature extraordinary men and the often-tragic circumstances they journeyed through. From explorers to soldiers to writers
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The Importance of Reading Difficult Books 3
- Literature
- January 25, 2023
In his work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote that a “reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.” The apparent message in Bloom’s flourish is that a reader ought to be after something more difficult to attain than mere pleasure. Passive consumption of entertainment
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What is Writing? Why We Misunderstand the Coming of ChatGPT 2
- Education, Literature
- January 23, 2023
Is high-school English dead? A Dec. 9 article published in The Atlantic by Daniel Herman, a high-school English teacher, says yes. Herman asserts that the new AI chat program ChatGPT drastically changes the nature of education, especially the teaching of writing. The software can respond to prompts of almost any kind—even very complicated ones—in a
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