Tag: orions belt essay
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“Every Story is a Teacher” by Joshua Fagan (Orion’s Belt Essay – September 2024)
There is a quote I particularly like from H.W. Garrod, an early twentieth-century literary critic: “What we resent in didactic poetry is not that it teaches, but that it does not teach, its incompetency.” Garrod perhaps came to this conclusion while studying Keats, whose writings he examined quite closely. Keats, in a letter to a…
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The Importance of Adventure Fiction by Joshua Fagan (Orion’s Belt Essay – August 2024)
Until the twentieth century, “romance” as a genre did not necessarily refer to a love story. It meant something much closer to The Lord of the Rings than Romeo and Juliet. The term survives, albeit in semi-obscurity, in the phrase “chivalric romance,” which suggests the general connotations of the idea. Romance meant travel and wonder, the interaction…
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Clarity, Art, and Life by Joshua Fagan (July 2024 Essay)
The idea of art as a reflection of reality is a sensible one in theory that is questionable in execution. Aside from a few intentionally provocative statements made by aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, few writers or thinkers have asserted that art should not attempt to reflect reality. The most common characteristic of bad art is…
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The Necessity of Writing Place by Joshua Fagan (June Poetry 2024)
Writing is about ideas, but it is not only about ideas. Writing is about people, but it is not only about people. Above all, writing is about life, the vivid propulsion of sensations and experiences that overwhelm narrow and rigid beliefs and ideologies. Place, a sense of environment and history and context, is the tapestry…
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“The Ongoing Relevance of Fairy Tales” by Joshua Fagan : Orion’s Belt Essay April 2024
Where fairy tales originally came from is contentious. The debate extends back at least to the nineteenth century and covers disciplines from comparative mythology to anthropology. A psychologist like C.G. Jung views these stories as emerging from the waters of the unconscious, illuminating all the “wants, fears, and longings that have accumulated down there,” reversing…