The Channel Posts

Cohen’s poem “The Last Dance at the Four Penny” demonstrates the Montreal Jewish community’s connection to their heritage in the aftermath of immigration, the Holocaust, and assimilation into Canadian culture.

With the bloody endings of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Duchess of Malfi, in which both women are killed by their brothers, the playwrights suggest that incestuous male desire stems from a selfish and possessive impulse, resulting in vengeful acts of violence against their sisters.

Melville comments on the self-gratifying element of charity that reveals the donor’s interiority; the indulgence of the donor’s interior desires demonstrates a disconnect between the giver and receiver of charitable acts. 

Munro depicts a world where other people’s minds and histories are frustratingly inaccessible. Anyone may in fact realize that there are latent monstrous qualities within their loved ones.

Through their radically different art forms, two groups of Queer Black women artists in the 1920s—Blues singers and Black female poets—provide alternatives to the Black middle-class respectability that stifled autonomy, desire, and possibility for homosexual experiences.

Parallel scenes between The Underground Railroad and Colson Whitehead’s other novels, most notably Sag Harbor, point to a frustration over the lack of racial progress across the decades, but they also indicate that more privileged Black people today can choose to act like their ancestors did with pride by having similar events as their ancestors.

It’s not a zombie novel without boarded-up windows. Throw in a kook in the basement who thinks boarding up windows is a waste of time, maybe a few zombie hands reaching between the boards, and then busting them apart at the moment of climax, and you have yourself a zombie genre hit.

In Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, Frances Burney showcases the caricature of the Jew as a conspirator through the character of Mr. Zackery; he lacks description, agency, and dialogue, but his involvement with the titular character through usury puts her fortune at risk, and his peripheral presence throughout the novel threatens her reputation.

The poet employs aesthetic distance, shielding himself and his audience from raw discomfort, and weaving his intimate vulnerabilities and skillful aesthetics until they are indistinguishable from each other.