Literature

The Brothers Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor chapter argues

Can we really choose our own destiny?

Ivan Karamazov's rebellion against God is really about

Why do some people struggle with accepting suffering?

Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker to liberate himself from poverty

Notes from Underground

Underground Man's isolation is central to his character

The Idiot

Prince Myshkin's goodness leads to misjudgment by worldly characters

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's exploration of the 'Russian soul' through suffering and spiritual redemption

Demons (Dostoevsky novel)

"Demons" was Dostoevsky's response to the rise of nihilism in 1860s Russia

Beckett's Waiting for Godot dramatizes

Ever felt stuck in a loop, waiting for something that never comes?

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" is a 20th-century literary masterpiece

Beckett's Endgame depicts

Can you imagine a world where even ending is impossible?

Theatre of the absurd

Ionesco's The Bald Soprano shows everyday speech as meaningless automated noise

Ionesco's Rhinoceros allegorizes

What if turning into a mindless beast was just another form of conformity?

Comedy of menace

Harold Pinter coined 'comedy of menace'

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead retells Hamlet from minor characters who can't understand the plot they're in

Faust

Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge and pleasure

Faust (paintings)

Nabil Kanso's Faust series depicts scenes based on Goethe's play

Goethe's Faust

Faust, Part Two was published posthumously in 1832

the Faustian bargain has come to mean

A Faustian bargain: sacrificing future well-being for immediate benefits

Goethe's concept of Bildung means

Goethe's Bildung: Self-cultivation through experience, central to German humanism

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Werther inspired a wave of suicides across Europe

Hamlet

Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play

King Lear strips away

Does King Lear reveal the raw essence of humanity stripped of power and identity?

The Tempest

Prospero's renunciation of magic signals Shakespeare's farewell to the stage

Shylock's 'Hath not a Jew eyes' speech does

Why might Shakespeare's Shylock still resonate in today's society?

Soliloquy

Macbeth's soliloquy reveals the futility of life

Othello is about epistemology as much as jealousy

Iago's deceit shapes Othello's beliefs, questioning reality and knowledge

War and Peace

Tolstoy's War and Peace argues that history is shaped by events, not great men

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" on 24 November 1859

Chekhov's plays pioneer

Can silence speak louder than words?

Chekhov's gun

Chekhov's gun principle states that every element in a story should be necessary

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita satirizes Russian bureaucracy and atheism

Ivan the Terrible (1945 film)

Solzhenitsyn's novel exposed the brutal reality of the Soviet gulag system

Nabokov's Lolita forces the reader to confront

Can words charm us into forgetting what's right?

Dead Souls

Dead Souls satirizes 19th-century Russian bureaucracy

Fathers and Sons (novel)

Ivan Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons" introduced the concept of nihilism through the character Bazarov

Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses parallels three Dubliners with characters from Homer's Odyssey

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May 1925

The Metamorphosis

Kafka's novella "The Metamorphosis" features Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect

Proust's madeleine scene in In Search of Lost Time demonstrates

Did you know your memories can flashback without you trying?

The Land (poem)

Did T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land predict Europe's spiritual crisis?

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land was published in 1922

The Spirit of Romance

Ezra Pound's "The Spirit of Romance" advocates synchronous scholarship of literature

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

Gertrude Stein's famous quote "A rose is a rose is a rose" is a poetic expression of the law of identity

The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel contains all possible 410-page books

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Jorge Luis Borges wrote "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982

One Hundred Years of Solitude maps

How does a family story reflect a nation's history?

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow resists

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow resists any single interpretation, a novel that seems to know more than the reader

DeLillo's White Noise examines

Can consumer culture drown out our fear of death?

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest won Time magazine's 100 Best English-Language Novels list

Wallace means by 'the really important kind of freedom'

How do you decide what to focus on in a noisy room?

Beloved (novel)

Beloved is inspired by Margaret Garner's life

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian depicts violence as a fundamental condition of existence

McCarthy's Judge Holden represents

Did you know a single person's actions can spark a nationwide witch hunt?

Rilke's 'You must change your life' demands

Can art just sit quietly, or does it need to shake things up?

Duino Elegies

Rilke's Duino Elegies were written over a decade, starting in 1912

Celan's 'Death Fugue' does

Did Celan write about the Holocaust in the language of the perpetrators?

Neruda's poetry does with everyday objects

Neruda's poetry elevates everyday objects like onions and socks into profound symbols of love and wonder

Dickinson's dashes do

Dickinson's dashes fracture syntax to mirror the fluidity of thought

Whitman's Leaves of Grass celebrates

Can freedom and equality be captured in verse?

the Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley) elevated

Why do we sometimes prefer feeling to facts?

John Keats

Keats died at age 25

Les Fleurs du Mal (Sopor Aeternus & the Ensemble of Shadows album)

Can beauty emerge from the shadows?

Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of all the senses' sought

Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of all the senses' sought a new poetic language through extremity

Russian formalism

Russian Formalism introduced 'defamiliarization' (ostranenie)

Death of the Author (novel)

Nnedi Okorafor's novel explores themes of authorship and narrative

Derrida's 'there is nothing outside the text' means for literary criticism

Can everything we know be just words on a page?

New Criticism

New Criticism focused on the poem as an autonomous object

The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory aired for 12 seasons

Tradition and the Individual Talent

T. S. Eliot coined the term 'anxiety of influence'

Bakhtin's concept of the 'dialogic' novel means

Ever felt like a novel is just one person's story?

Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin coined the term 'carnivalesque'

Said's Orientalism exposes

"What Said's Orientalism exposes — Western literary representations of the East as a form of cultural domination."

Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' asks

Can unheard voices shape history?

Iliad

The Iliad centers on Achilles' wrath

Odyssey

The Odyssey explores themes beyond adventure — homecoming, identity, and whether you can return to who you were

Aeneid

Virgil's Aeneid rewrites Greek epic to legitimize Roman imperial destiny

Metamorphoses

Ovid's Metamorphoses chronicles over 250 myths of transformation

Divine Comedy in popular culture

Dante's Divine Comedy maps a spiritual journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise

The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji

Gilgamesh

Can you escape death?

Oedipus complex

Oedipus Rex illustrates the inevitability of fate

The Acharnians

Aristophanes' The Acharnians won first place at the Lenaia festival

Songs of Experience (David Axelrod album)

David Axelrod's Songs of Experience juxtaposes childhood purity against adult corruption through Blake's poems

Blake's 'The Tyger' asks

Can one creator design both beauty and terror?

The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley wrote "The Doors of Perception" after his psychedelic experience with mescaline

Hell

Can you imagine a world without opposites?

Milton: A Poem in Two Books

William Blake's epic poem explores the fall and redemption of the human imagination

William Blake

William Blake was both a poet and a visual artist

Stalker (1979 film)

Stalker explores a mysterious 'Zone' granting innermost desires

Tarkovsky means by 'sculpting in time'

Tarkovsky's 'sculpting in time' — cinema's unique art is shaping the viewer's experience of duration

The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman directed The Seventh Seal

Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey leaves unexplained

Why does HAL 9000's behavior puzzle us?

Breathless (1960 film)

Breathless introduced jump cuts to cinema

Italian neorealism achieved

How did Italian neorealism change cinema?

Rashomon

Rashomon reveals four incompatible truths from one event

Mulholland Drive (film)

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive dissolves the boundary between dream and reality

8½

Federico Fellini directed 8½, an influential avant-garde film

French New Wave

French New Wave rejected Hollywood's polished studio system

Soviet montage theory

Eisenstein's montage theory posits that meaning is created by the collision between two shots, not within a single shot

Ozu's style achieves

Ozu's style achieves a contemplative, static realism that emphasizes the quiet beauty and poignancy of everyday life

Un Chien Andalou

A razor slices an eye in Un Chien Andalou

Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire features invisible, immortal angels in Berlin

Guernica (Picasso)

Guernica depicts the bombing of Guernica, Spain

Cubism

Cubism shatters Renaissance single-point perspective by depicting subjects from multiple viewpoints

Fountain (Duchamp)

Did Marcel Duchamp really redefine art?

Color field

Color field painting emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s

Pollock's drip paintings achieve

Did you know Pollock's paintings are more about the action than the image?

Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol produced 32 Campbell's Soup Cans paintings

Chiaroscuro

Caravaggio's chiaroscuro creates theatrical drama from biblical scenes

the Impressionists broke

Ever wondered why sunsets look different in paintings?

Abstract expressionism

Kandinsky's abstract art aimed to visually represent music

Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian reduced painting to primary colors and perpendicular lines

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Hokusai's Great Wave depicts three boats moving through a storm-tossed sea

Bauhaus (typeface)

Bauhaus unified art, craft, and technology under the principle that form follows function

Frida (2002 film)

Frida Kahlo's self-portraits express pain, identity, and the female body without flinching

Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh created around 860 oil paintings

Rembrandt's late self-portraits achieve

Why Rembrandt's late self-portraits reveal more than just beauty?

A Visit to William Blake's Inn

William Blake's Inn won the Newbery Medal in 1982

The Cantos

The Cantos includes Chinese characters and quotations in multiple languages

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's confessional poetry turned personal suffering into art

Howl (poem)

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" opens with "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

Inferno (Dante)

Dante's Inferno features nine concentric circles of Hell

Shelley's Ozymandias captures

Can a king's pride crumble like sand?

Kubla Khan

Coleridge's Kubla Khan was inspired by an opium-influenced dream

Milton's Paradise Lost reimagines

Paradoxical hero challenging Heaven's rule

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was published in 1847

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18

Sturm's theorem

Can you always split a polynomial into simpler pieces to find its roots?

The Walt Disney Company

How did CGI change Hollywood movies?

Interpretations of quantum mechanics

Can tiny particles behave in ways that defy our everyday logic?

Cat in a box

Can a cat be both alive and dead at the same time?

The Tell-Tale Heart

Can guilt make itself heard?

Wave function

What happens to a variable when you call a function twice without resetting it?

Bauhaus

How can we design a chair that's both beautiful and practical?

Turing test

Can machines ever truly think like us?

Pythagorean theorem

Ever wondered how architects ensure buildings are straight and stable?

Fast Fourier transform

How can we quickly understand the hidden rhythms in a song?

Glossary of engineering: M–Z

Can calculus functions flip between smooth and abrupt?

Golden ratio

Did you know math shapes our world?

Signified and signifier

Ever wondered how we understand words beyond just hearing them?

Dialectical materialism

How does our mind evolve to understand the world better?

Macbeth (Nesbø novel)

Can Shakespeare's timeless themes still resonate in today's world?

Spanish Civil War

Why did Tolstoy write War and Peace?

Gibbs phenomenon

Why does a Fourier series overshoot at sharp edges?

Euclidean space

Ever wondered how maps can twist and turn in surprising ways?

History of science

How can a particle be in two places at once?

Einstein's thought experiments

How does gravity bend light?

Constructive set theory

Why can't you always find the smallest number in a list?

Alan Turing: The Enigma

Ever wondered why computers can't solve every problem?

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (character)

Can a person split into two personalities?

Colony collapse disorder

Did you know a bee colony's disappearance could hurt your breakfast?

List of publications in mathematics

Ever wondered how shapes can morph without cutting or gluing?

History of the nude in art

Can symbols in movies unlock hidden meanings like dreams reveal the subconscious?

Existence of God

Can words mean the same thing every time?

Uniform convergence

Ever wondered why some infinite sums add up nicely while others don't?

Fourier series

Did you know a smooth curve can be broken down into simpler waves?

Cubist sculpture

Can you see depth in a flat painting?

The Da Vinci Code (film)

Fibonacci sequence uncovers hidden patterns in nature

What's So Amazing About Grace?

Why does Shakespeare's play still resonate with themes of mercy and justice?

Timeline of quantum computing and communication

Can computers solve problems faster than humans?

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

How did CGI change film realism?

Differential geometry of surfaces

How many corners, edges, and faces does your favorite 3D shape have?