Articles by: Robert DiNapoli

Author Biography:

Robert DiNapoli is a poet, translator, essayist and erstwhile lecturer on English language and literature. His books include A Far Light: A Reading of Beowulf (2016), Engelboc (2019) and Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost (2021).

Monsters from the Id: On ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956)

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

5 Apr 2024

The luminous sheen of progress and technological advance, which promised the Krell an endlessly ascending future, was undermined at last by atavistic impulses, sprung from roots sunk in their evolutionary past.

More Light Shining in Oxbridge

Arena Quarterly no.16

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2023

Eagleton’s brisk summaries of their legacies afford a window into a time of sudden and tumultuous change both in modern Western culture at large and within the cloistered environs of academic literary criticism.

That Bad Eminence: Genesis B, Paradise Lost and the dark politics of resentment

Arena Quarterly no.13

Robert DiNapoli

Mar 2023

Satan’s prefiguring of today’s hard- Right ‘great replacement’ paranoia would be just a delicious irony were the latter not turning the heads of so many susceptible souls in our time.

Solastalgia: Every climate change challenge has an internal as well as external dimension

Arena Quarterly no.12

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2022

In the end, the notion of solastalgia may prove more helpful looking forward, for it charts much of the difficult mental terrain that the world will have to traverse.

Vintage and Vantage: The Redress of Old Literature

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

24 Feb 2023

To catch a glimpse of what that word ‘human’ might actually mean at different removes of historical and evolutionary time demands slow reflection.

To Boldly Go: What’s in a Song?

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

6 Oct 2022

The stunnng tone deafness of US foreign policy pronouncements across the past few decades shows no sign of slowing its descent into further depths of denial and sheer unmeaning.

Who Are You?

Arena Quarterly no. 8

Robert DiNapoli

Dec 2021

What caught me by surprise was how quickly I’d lost touch with all the nuances of whole-body presence that, once upon a time (was it really only twenty months ago?), we routinely read and responded to in any of scores of encounters on any given day…

Apocalypse Wow!: The thing about conspiracies

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

15 Apr 2021

When you realise that the very same itch to get to the bottom of things underlies the book of Revelation, The Wizard of Oz and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you can begin to perceive what a big, rough beast the apocalyptic genre really is.

The Princeps and the Pauper

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

11 Feb 2021

…we have seen a collation of pro-gun, anti-abortion, lib-baiting, QAnon-addled, fact-free, anti-republican Republican banshees howling for the blood in the name of Donald J. Trump, America, and Jesus, in roughly that order.

Dust in the Wind: The Transformation of University Culture

Arena Online

Robert DiNapoli

19 Nov 2020

As universities competed to attract student dollars, advertising, once unheard of, consumed progressively larger proportions of stressed budgets. It also adopted the play of illusion and conditioned reflex practised by its forerunners in more commercial quarters, trafficking in fatuous slogans like ‘Dream Large’, ‘I Believe’, and ‘Worldly’ (huh?).

Unacknowledged Legislators

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Robert DiNapoli

Jul 2020

All the received wisdoms and shibboleths of contemporary politics and economics, which have (among much else) lifted Donald Trump to his present bad eminence and left parliaments in many lands beset by extreme right-wing parties and ideologues, need reviewing in a fresh light.
"Pestilence, plague, epidemic: outbreaks of contagious disease have punctuated human history for as long as…

Informit: Unacknowledged legislators

Arena Quarterly no. 2

Matteo de Mayda, Robert DiNapoli

Jul 2020

PDF available from Informit

Pestilence, plague, epidemic: outbreaks of contagious disease have punctuated human history for as long as humans have gathered in communities and told one another stories about how they got there. Given how much human labour has been devoted to the matter of simply not dying, spectacles of mass death arrest our attention. Whether its cause be natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes or storms, the human folly of war or the deeper shock of…