Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio , a modernist collection of interconnected short stories that critics dismissed as Freudian primitivism, is actually an insightful meditation on the emotional basis of consciousness. Grotesque characters, resembling subcortical brain regions, interact with protagonist George Willard, the town reporter, in ways that reproduce the interactions of the hindbrain...
"Oceanic Wonder":Arthur Koestler and Melville's Castaway James Duban This study proposes that "The Castaway" (Moby-Dick, chapter 93) helped shape Arthur Koestler's interpretation of "The Sermon" (Moby-Dick, chapter 9), which figures prominently in Insight and Outlook:An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art and Social Ethics (1949). Koestler expanded the work into The Act of...