Activity

the formal term for the attempt to reconcile the suffering and meaninglessness of life with the notion of a providential, benign and powerful deity. Theodicy is a project at times ingenious, bleak, necessary, magnificent and platitudinous.

Fulsome explainers like George Eliot

the elimination of those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers

Thus Raskolnikov's mad need to confess his crime to the police and to Sonia the prostitute, presages Freud's comment on the action of the supergo

there is something piquant about a man who is at once an omnivorous roamer of the world's knowledge and literatures, and at the same time a little Welsh provincial