Author Archives: Randy Fromm

Revisiting Brideshead Yet Again

10 May 2009 – 4:03 pm

Like our narrator, I find myself “awed and bemused between two realities and two dreams” (15, last segment of the Prologue). And I am looking back on earlier encounters with the text and the PBS mini-series through the same sort of aged and, possibly, jaded lens with which our narrator revisits his own past [...]

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Reading in a well lit room: Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida

6 July 2008 – 11:38 am

So . . . our first foray off of the Time Magazine list. And one which has some relevance to the book just finished: Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. But, to that in a bit . . .
Barthes is attempting to get at the idea of Photography or the Photograph (capitalized whenever used [...]

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Blind Readings — an oxymoronic experience

18 May 2008 – 11:11 am

Gerard Genette wrote a book several years back called Paratexts. While I have not waded through the whole thing (yet) I have through other avenues gained some sense of his arguments/ideas. They are core components of literary theory these days, particularly when thinking about texts and reader-response to those texts. Under the [...]

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“Shall I Compare Thee . . .”: the Importance of Comparison and Figurative Language

28 December 2007 – 9:19 am

For now, this is all going to be pretty much stream of consciousness. It is a post I have been mulling over since we started the current book—based primarily on the use of simile by our narrator in the first of the novels—but it took on a new sense of solidity when I started [...]

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