Michael Bryson's
Academic Writing

Page

1. Dismembering the Body/ Remembering the Community: The Dismemberment of the Corporal Body and the Formation of the Communal Body as Movements Toward Centralized Authority in The Hebrew Scriptures--Yes I know, it's a damned cumbersome title . . . . This focuses on the relation of dismemberment to community formation in Genesis, Judges, 1 Samuel, and Ezra. If the idea of approaching the Bible as literature is your cup of tea, you might want to have a look.
   
2. Reclaiming the Self: Transcending the Fragmentation of the Individual Subject--This is intended, eventually, to be an academic publication; it deals with literature, literary theory, Jungian psychology, and myth, among other things. This page will let you have a look, and it will facilitate e-mailing Michael with any comments you might have.
   
3. Alchemy, Witchcraft, and the Magus Figure in The Tempest--A hypertext presentation on Prospero as an inheritor of the ancient, medieval, and Elizabethean/Jacobean Magus Figure tradition.
   
4. Turn, and Turn, and Turn Again: The Discourse of Honesty and Whoredom in Othello--An essay arguing that Jacobean attitudes toward gender and marriage roles are at least as important as attitudes toward race in looking at Othello.
   
5. The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute: The Mystic's Movement from Ancient Sacrifice to Supreme Fiction in Wallace Stevens--An essay exploring Wallace Stevens as a secular poet/mystic in "Sunday Morning" and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."
   
6. The Via Negativa in Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man"--A short essay on Stevens' poetic mysticism.
   
7. Glands, Perverts, and Misers: Economies of Dominance and Submission in Relation to Productive and Unproductive Labor in Frank Norris' McTeague--An essay considering the roles of dominance and submission (both fiscal and physical) in what may very well be the strangest novel in American Literature.
   
8. The History of Literary Criticism Page--A series of analyses/summaries of critical positions from Plato to Postmodernism. It is necessarily incomplete; the selections are arbitrary, and the readings may be--in places--tendentious and/or idiosyncratic. Take them for what they are worth.