League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on June 1, 2010

To accompany my new series “LOST Retrospective”–in which I’m blogging through all the episodes of LOST, reconsidering them in light of how the show ended–I’m accumulating a list of online articles and posts that I found particularly helpful in forming my take on the meaning and importance of LOST. I’ll update and repost this list from time to time as I come across other resources I think are worthwhile. Recently added articles are at the top of the list.

RECOMMENDED READING:

• “Lost in Myth: The End?” (by Marc Oromaner at When Falls the Coliseum). Oromaner argues the pros and cons of flash-sideways vs. island as the real purgatory of the series. Along the way, some intriguing discussions of the relationship between myth and reality, and how it’s not always so easy to tell which is which.
• “The End” (Thoughts by Gatesy, on the Doc Arzt & Friends Lost Blog). Gatesy coins a new term for the “flash sideways” parts of season 6: flash upwards. Upwards, because we found out in the end that the Losties were really on their way “up” to the afterlife. As James McGrath put it, this article “takes seriously the revelation that the show is at its heart profoundly theological.”
• “Communion, Community and Redemption in ‘The End‘” (Blog: Lost: A Transmedia Story. The whole blog is worth perusing. Blogger Sarah Clarke Stuart has written a book titled Literary LOST: Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature due out this fall. You can bet I’ll be picking up this book. It will be an in-depth examination of all the literary references in LOST.)
• “LOST Place in the Heart: Making Sense of LOST Now That It Is Over” & “The Ending of LOST Explained” (Blog: Exploring Our Matrix by Dr. James F. McGrath, associate professor of religion at Butler University. McGrath has been blogging about LOST for some time now from a theological [and often humorous] perspective.) Here also from McGrath is an editorial he wrote for USA Today: “God, the Devil and TV’s ‘LOST‘”
• “The LOST Finale: Why I Loved It” (Blog: The Hog’s Head.org. Blogger Travis Prinzi is the author of Harry Potter and Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. In the linked post he explores parallels between LOST’s final episode and Harry Potter’s after-death reunion with Dumbledore, as well as an interesting comparison/contrast between LOST’s “sideways world” and Graytown in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• A LOST Retrospective: The LOST Eschaton, or Knowing the End from the Beginning (foolishsage.com)
• Reconsidering Lost, in Light of the Finale (tunedin.blogs.time.com)

Category: It`s All About Me, LOST Retrospective
Tags: Lost, myth, television