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A JavaScript Iambic Pentameter Generator

June 13, 2018

computer, iambic, literature, poetry, programming, technology

First of all, before I explain why I made an iambic pentameter generator, we need to know what an iambic pentameter is.

Chances are, if you found this article you already know, so I’ll be brief. An iambic pentameter is a line of poetry consisting of five “feet”, or groups of syllables. “Penta” in Greek means “five”, so pentameter means that the line consists of five groups of syllables. The iamb refers to a pair of syllables where the first is unstressed and the second is stressed. For instance, the word desPAIR (capitals indicate the emphasis). Hence, an iambic pentameter line consists of ten syllables, of which the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th are stressedTechnically, this is not necessary. What should occur is that the rest of the syllables (1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th) are not stressed..

Here’s four lines of iambic pentameter:

And you, my sinews, grow not instant old
But bear me swiftly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
(Hamlet, I.v.94–97)

And now, without further delay, let’s get to the why’s and how’s of the iambic pentameter generator.

iambic pentameter generator in JavaScript — The Bard would approve!

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Review of The Bell Jar

June 6, 2018

Book Review, Criticism

Bell Jar, book, criticism, depression, review, Sylvia Plath

I have a confession to make: I never liked Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Call me old-fashioned, but I have a real problem with modern poetry, and Sylvia Plath is no exception. Now comes another confession: I shamefully admit (the shame is double since I have a PhD in English literature) that I didn’t know that Sylvia Plath had written a novel. The Bell Jar is her only novel. Furthermore, it’s a semi-autobiographical* work.

*I don’t get the term “semi-autobiographical”. Deep down, all works are autobiographical, because they are based on the author’s subjective experience of the world. But if we want to make a separation between fictional autobiography and non-fictional autobiography, The Bell Jar is definitely a sample of the former category.

Review of The Bell Jar — Depression might appear peculiar from the outside – and that’s how The Bell Jar occasionally does, too

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Children in Gothic Fiction: Dialectics of In-betweenness

June 1, 2018

Criticism

academia, ambiguity, children, criticism, Gothic, time

Note: the following article on children in Gothic fiction s a modified excerpt (pp. 96-97) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Children in Gothic fiction possess extraordinary allusive power. The reason is that they personify in graspable terms the ambiguous area between past and future. Children in Gothic texts become a link that both separates and connects the old and the new.

Essentially, the Gothic child becomes a metaphor for the eternal present. It carries the past within – both literally, as the continuation of the parents’ genetic code, as well as metaphorically, as the continuation of a cultural, social, or simply family tradition – yet it is also the future. More important, still, it is a potential future, that is, it is neither determined nor materialized.

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