Word Vomit.

As in a theater the eyes of men After a well-graced actor leaves the stage Are idly bent on him that enters next Thinking his prattle to be tedious — Richard II, Shakespeare  Known for her Oscar-winning debut feature, Promising Young Woman (2020), and the seductive, surrealist spectacle of Saltburn (2023), director Emerald Fennell returns to the screen with a bang: a fresh adaption of Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel, Wuthering Heights . As the press peeled back the curtain in the months leading up to February 14th, 2026—revealing the casting of “Barbie” Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and the pale Jacob Elordi as “gipsy” Heathcliff—the audience turned anxious then cynical about Fennell’s take on the beloved classic. “Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave,” users’ commented under the trailer for the provocative, deconstructive, and orally fixated feature film. Fennell should stick to the original, they said; she’s ruining the Brontë image. “There’s an enormous amount of sadom...

"The more perfect a thing is, the more susceptible to good and bad treatment it is." — Dante, Inferno According to Leo Tolstoy, high society in the 19th-century Russia perpetuated a trivial and artificial social order. Throughout his life, he remained steadfast in the belief that modern society corrupts the innate goodness of mankind, and that familial unity is a mandatory component of ethical living. The corrosive effect of the Russian aristocratic etiquette and the restorative power of familial servitude are demonstrated by the character of Daria Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly) and Alexis Alexandrovich Karenin in Tolstoy’s 1878 novel Anna Karenina . In this paper, I discuss how the eulogization of Dolly, a loyal proponent of the traditional family, and the vilification of Karenin, a simultaneously corrupt and exemplary member of high society, illuminate Tolstoy’s theory of human nature and the cause of its continuous degradation. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy rejects Anna Karen...

Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou art not conquered.                                                           — Romeo and Juliet           In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), the Christlike Ottilie dies a sacrificial death to atone for the sins of herself and others. Following a series of disillusioning events—which cumulate in the death of Charlotte’s son, Otto, by drowning—Ottilie is alerted of her anomalous presence in the family politic. Her subsequent view of the human body as a transient medium of art and posthumous portraiture as “a sort of second life” reconciles her with the inevit...