Spring 2025

When Viola asks, near the start of Twelfth Night –“What country, friend, is this?"– she’s a stranger in a strange land, and so leans into the fact that she’s lost. She needs to listen and learn, not lecture.

That’s the message of the Humanities. The best thing we can ever do is to lend an ear. It’s also the first thing we should do. Listening carefully is how we know what is, and what isn’t, the Truth.

When we listen to relatives, friends, politicians, and ads we are meant to test them for veracity. We have –or ought to have– been schooled in this

by the novels, plays, poetry, paintings, and all the arts we were exposed to at school. Reading Dickens, Fitzgerald, and Vonnegut, we hear people constantly lying. It’s the same with plays. So many lies.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights made hay with their soliloquies, brief scenes where one character tells the truth privately to the audience, with no one else on stage to ruin the plot. Such scenes were important because all the lying, allthe time, was confusing audiences. Similarly, if Iago reveals the shocking truth “I follow him [Othello] to serve my turn upon him” in front of anyone other than his dupe Roderigo, the play would be over. And so would Iago. He’s a creature of lies. But innocent people die because of him. Hence, the Tragedy.

The mantra that should be forever close to us when we consider all the arts should be the question “What is this about in the deepest sense?” It should be posterized on brick walls and tee-shirts.

In the British Museum, there’s a fine example of the power of art to ask tough questions – as if we weren’t thrilled that Chekhov, Auden, and Stoppard do this all the time. In this case, it’s an example of “Conceptual” Art, a category for which the idea of the work is more important than the way it’s painted, written, or built. Called Cradle to Grave, this is a 40-foot-long, narrow table that in fact is a meditation on the ideas of life, death, and medicine. Its power comes from its depiction of the lives of two typical contemporary Britons, one male and one female, via a linear display of every one of the pills, shots, medicines, and other medical interventions that would have cushioned and prolonged their lives over some 90 years. The vials and tablets are all there, from year to year, sometimes also illustrated by hazy snapshots of baptisms, bandaged heads, and legs in plaster casts stood outside the pub on crutches, but also the inevitable funeral.

It’s moving & emotional –and a carpe-diem moment– making the museum-goer feel grateful for all our docs, dentists, nurses, medical researchers, pills, drugs, and vaccines. I.e, all those things that art & poetry & architecture try to help us with. They make us see. And think. And human.

Just so, the five contributors selected for the 2025 Paper Shell Review have worked to separate the wheat from the chaff, and truth from guilty certainty, obfuscation, and lies, in a wide variety of books and poems. They have spotted just what young Johnny Keats told us when he was about the age of an undergraduate: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." If it’s the truth, then it’s beautiful. If it’s a lie, it can never be. . . . 

The first essay, contributed by Allyson Ye, a Junior at the University of Pennsylvania, is “The ‘Glass Case’ of Anthony Trollope’s World: Reality or Microcosm?” In it, she makes the case that Trollope’s fiction is always a celebration of the ordinary and the arbitrary and not an attempt to make a perfect copy of Victorian life –as if his novels were meant to be seen as cute, tiny landscapes in “glass cases.” That is, the novels were meant to surprise us, to teach us things, not give us what we might have blandly expected.

In the second paper, Charlotte Parent, a senior at the University of Michigan, dilates on the value of keeping politics and culture, emotion and reality, under control in two graphic novels. Her paper, “Drawing on Politics: How Sattouf & Sacco Balance the Personal with the Political” is based on two books: Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future (2018) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2002). It seems that the adage is correct. A picture is worth a thousand words.

The third essay, by Emerson College junior Nancy Cordon, is “’Not by a Jury of Our Peers’: The Roles of Privilege and Critique in Dark Academia.” It’s about the books spawned by Diana Tartt’s original novel, The Secret History (1992), a category of fiction to do with violence at generally posh schools. All of which leads to way too many rich, white, male characters. Says Ms. Cordon: “If authors are not willing to reconstruct the genre instead of simply placing more diverse characters in the same scenarios as white men, they are not allowing the genre to do the very thing it was created for.”

“Women Silenced in Theodore Prodromos’ Rhodanthe and Dosikles and Other Ancient and Medieval Stories” is the fourth paper in this Paper Shell, submitted by Carolina Correia dos Santos, a December 2024 graduate from the University of Maryland, College Park. In this 12th-century tale, Rhodanthe exists mainly as a beautiful but static artwork in marble or paint. And while a feature of female beauty here seems to be a predisposition to subjugation, males are valued for their tendency toward control and possession. This cannot end well.

The fifth and final contributor is Felicity D’Souze, from the University of Victoria (sixth year, working on her second degree). Her paper, “’To Strive after the Law’: A Queer Reading of Franz Kafka’s Before the Law,” deals with the painful denial of justice to a man who’s simply different. It should be noted that Kafka was once known as the Dante of central Europe. He understood bureaucracy and its never-ending trouble with truth.

At the end of the day, we are all meant to be scholars, turning to our books of an evening not just to read and root for our heroes, but to join Keats and just listen. . . to everything, not just the celebrated voices, but also the voices and the silences of the powerless and unrecognized. That's where the power and enlightenment come from. And it's not just what you read or saw, but what you learned from it all, from visionary and provocative and concerned Art.

Michael Olmert
Professor of the Practice
English Dept., University of Maryland