Caroline Carlson

James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room is obsessed with literary form. The story pits an unnamed black author against his similarly anonymous white editor, positioning the narrative framework in a space of literary revision rather than publication.

Daniel the Abbot reveals, in an obsession with quantity, measurement, directional mapping and physical detail, his preoccupation with the tangibility of Christianity, building with his words a materially precise replica of the Church of the Resurrection for readers of The Life and Journey of Daniel, Abbot of the Russian Land to explore.

Today the bulk, brunt, and brute force of my written words are absorbed by the keys of a thirteen-inch MacBook Pro.

Two simultaneous and intricately paralleled hunts occur at the center of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Lord Bertilak engaging in the gentlemanly sport of hunting wild game, and a corollary hunt, his lady wife’s indecent and unrelenting seduction of courteous Sir Gawain.

In the very first sentence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown, Goodman Brown exchanges a “parting kiss with his young wife” (1). And this kiss, in all its seeming innocence, both introduces and betrays an undercurrent of eroticism in Hawthorne’s text.

In his book The Classical Style, Rosen says that the history of music cannot be understood in the same way that the history of a language can, even though both are communicative by nature and often compared.