FeaturesMay 2001 After my own heart: Dorothy Sayers's feminism by Susan Haack Reflections on Gaudy Night, the philosophical novel, and old-school feminism.
Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face,
however difficult it may be.
—Gaudy Night (1935) Might as well admit it: once upon a time, disinclined to mix business with pleasure, I found the very idea of the “Philosophical Novel” off-putting. It was Alison Lurie’s Imaginary Friends, a deliciously comic exploration of cognitive dissonance and of the pitfalls of social-scientific inquiry, that changed my mind and persuaded me of the merits of mixing pleasure with business. I began to appreciate how a work of fiction may explore philosophical questions and— by means of statements which, being about fictional characters, are not true—convey philosophical truths; and I soon began to acquire a taste for (not the epistolary but) the epistemological novel. In this genre, I have a particular admiration for Samuel Butler’s ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 May 2001, on page 10 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/sayers-haack-2180
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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