Modern Bengali language poet Jibanananda Das’s short poem, “The Hunt” has been described as bitterly ironic yet appropriate to utter in especially benighted times (Radice 2003):“…To warm their bodies through the cold night, up-country menials kept a fire goingIn the field – red fire like a cockscomb blossom,Still burning, contorting dry asvattha leaves.Its color in […]

In a 2010 article by Aaron Kunin, an entertaining connection is brought into view between art – “(d)ecoration in the sense of the elaboration of abstract surface patterns ‘for the pleasure of art, without seeking to convey any truth with it’” – and cruelty (“Decoration, Modernism, Cruelty,” Johns Hopkins UP).I’m not talking about the already […]

Among the prevailing arguments today against factory farming is the refutation that the dominion passage from the Book of Genesis authorizes this practice. The argument essentially rejects the extension of the dominion doctrine to cover this widespread practice even though it was made to serve at one time (and for many continues to serve) as […]

Under the gaze of a closely policed semantic horizon, what unfolds are not playful accidents productive of ‘semantic mirage’ but a mirage of play whose badly acted mirth is discomfiting to the onlooker for the deadly seriousness with which it defends its interests. Yet, while it can’t be said definitively that something understood falsely, i.e., […]