Writing back to authors and their works is essential to the literary culture; it also helps us answer our essential questions. Let's do some of that, then!

Where do we find irony, anyway? And how? An answer in an offer of cheese.

Where do we find people to talk to about our reading? And what do we say when we find them?

What do we mean by uncertainty in reading? And why do we have to look for it?

What questions do we carry with us as we leave Marvell's famous poem?

Who is the speaker in this poem? Who the audience? Who the Marvell?

We trace Marvell's poetry back to its perhaps distressing roots.

What did Marvell know and how did he use it? We look at the sexism in the poem and discover how this provocation is hardly unique in the carpe diem tradition.

What do we do with--how do we read--can we make us of--a classic and famous metaphysical poem which is also misogynistic?

We consider who is accountable for the text: author, character, or reader, and how writers build a narrative distance in texts to allow irony and meaning to operate (and shirking a bit of accountabili