Sørina Higgins (www.iambicadmonit.com) is an Instructor at Penn State Lehigh Valley. Her full-length poetry collection, Caduceus, is available on amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. She is the Book Review Editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal and a blogger about the arts and faith at iambic admonit. She holds an M.A. from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. Sørina and her husband live in Kutztown, PA, in a home they built themselves.
Sorina Higgins on how Peter Jacksons’ Hobbit failed to render Tolkien’s three essential elements of good fantasy: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.
A review of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
What we think of as the standard book occupies merely a 400-year period (at most!) in the thousands of years of stone carvings, jade engravings, painted wood, rolling scrolls, folding scrolls, papyrus sheets, cyclical texts, microscopic texts, mirror texts, words on walls, words on clothing, words on signet rings and words on a grain of rice.
The recent publication of, “The Fall of Arthur”, an unfinished poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, should rock the literary world. It should knock the socks off its readers half way through.
This article should be illegal.
What would happen to the entertainment industry if it banned images of gun violence for one year? Sørina Higgins asks around.
What would happen to the entertainment industry if it banned images of gun violence for one year? Sørina Higgins asks around.
Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit": Embellishment is an Understatement
Perhaps the time has come for a cinematographic revolution in which directors throw off the tyranny of the text, re-invent narrative chronology, and dare to imagine wild new ways of making movies—gritty, unusual, groundbreaking movies—freely, from textual hints and cues. There should be more, and more daring, experiments in the art of literary cinema.
Packing for "An Unexpected Journey"
Inevitably, Jackson’s Hobbit will not be Tolkien’s Hobbit. Many rabid Tolkien fans and serious Tolkien scholars will be disappointed. How, then, can these people prepare themselves to handle the disappointment on December 14th?
But the academic study of literature will not kill a really robust talent. In fact, truly elastic genius can turn abstraction into story.
Just as lawyers are asked legal advice over dinner and doctors are asked to diagnose conditions over cocktails, so writers are regularly asked to give free consultations on How To Get Published. Much more rarely are writers asked How To Write Well. The second is a lifetime’s vocation; the first should be the natural result […]
A review of Tania Runyan’s A Thousand Vessels.
That’s the whole idea: you look at the art while you wait for your haircut, listen to the music between clacks of the shears, stay and have tea for another song or two, and maybe bring home an original oil painting along with a new look.
On the Validity of the Vogel Collection
Here’s the rub: I do believe the Vogel Collection is a fraud.
Anonymous is little more than a showcase for pretty boys to strut about in gorgeous, historically inauthentic costumes, speaking anachronistic lines and participating in fictional events.
Beauty does not wait for peace.
Maybe my life will make sense if it matches the triangulation of a fairy tale, novel, or epic.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II is such an overwhelmingly powerful experience, sweeping up emotions and senses in its tidal wave of sights and sounds, that it well-nigh defies critique of any kind.
The image of the Starving Artist in the garret has been supplanted by the Savvy Artist-Administrator in the office, on the stage, and on the iPhone.
When a painting is hung in the White House, is it propaganda? If it stays in the White House when the administration changes, does it switch parties? Does art comment on policies, laws, and wars, or does art inhabit a politics-free zone?
The Failure of the Dawn Treader
There are many different ways to analyze a film based on a book. It can be assessed simply as a movie without reference to the book; or on its success in translating all the details of plot, character, dialogue, and description from the page to the screen; or as an expression of the original author’s worldview. Unfortunately, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader fails on all of these grounds.
Autobiographical or not, volumes of poetry feather open the writer’s human heart and lay it, pinned and spread, on butterfly pages.
Apparently, it can be as difficult to define “Art” as to define “Reality.”
What a world of solemn thought their monody—or polyphony—or even cacophony—compels! Still your dither for a few moments and listen.
Posthumanism: A Christian Response
We shouldn’t be afraid of Derrida or of the big, bad Wolfe. After all, they’re only—human?
Whether you agree with Cary Wolfe or not, it would be wise to understand posthumanism.
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