William Styron Archive
Sophie’s Choice and Radical Acceptance
I first read Sophie’s Choice the summer after I graduated from college. I don’t know why I waited so long. I had spent large portions of my childhood compulsively reading Holocaust memoirs. My mother, a children’s librarian, made phone calls and drove me to libraries in other towns to
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: The Tragic Possibilities
Tragedy opens up aesthetic possibilities, allowing suprahuman forces to partake as literary subjects that overwhelm individual characters. It is a mode of expression that goes beyond what realistic fiction can provide.
The Poetics of Madness: Reading and Writing Mental Illness
In a sense, madness (to use an archaic but attractive term) is a problem of narrative. To put it plainly: mental illness makes it difficult to know just what the heck is going on, or to what extent one’s perceptions of events can be trusted.