Laura Moriarty’s “American Heart” has been attacked for being a white savior narrative. Such stories should in fact be critiqued, but the attackers are often a bigger problem.
Posted in Moriarty (Laura) | Also tagged Alice Walker, American Heart, censorship, cyber bullying, Edith Wharton, Francine Prose, Herman Melville, House of Mirth, Huckleberry Finn, Kirkus Reviews, Langston Hughes, Laura Moriarty, Lucille Clifton, Mark Twain, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird |
If teachers should teach controversial lit to discomfit their students, is “To Kill a Mockingbird” a good choice? There’s a problem if those most discomfited are black students.
I’m somewhat sympathetic with the Biloxi parents who want to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird” in an 8th grade classroom. At the very least, I want it supplemented with works by writers of color.
In his farewell speech, Obama quoted Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In light of the white backlash against having had a black president, however, the Atticus Finch of “Go Set a Watchman comes to mind, making Obama’s allusion seem a bit weak.
As Toni Morrison sees it, William Faulkner’s observations about white panic go a long way toward explaining Trump’s victory.
Posted in Faulkner (William), Lee (Harper), Morrison (Toni) | Also tagged 2016 presidential election, Absolom Absolom, Donald Trump, Go Tell a Watchman, racism, To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison, white privilege, William Faulkner |
“Gp Set a Watchman” is not as polished a book as “To Kill a Mockingbird” but it is more ambitious and more honest. Something important got lost in the editing process.
A top ten list of classics with positive depictions of parent-child relationships.
Posted in Dickens (Charles), Eliot (George), Hughes (Langston), Lee (Harper), Stowe (Harriet Beecher) | Also tagged "Mother to Son", Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Francis Hodgson Burnett, George Eliot, Golden Bowl, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding, Henry James, Huckleberry Finn, Langston Hughes, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mark Twain, Parent-child relationships, Silas Marner, Tempest, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Jones, Uncle Tom's Cabin, William Shakespeare |
When a Maine hermit is arrested after 27 years in solitude, we project our stories upon him.
Important though it was, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was also a white liberal fantasy.
White Liberals suffer a downward spiral in 1960’s Civil Rights Literature, from heroic Atticus Finch to “Radical Chic” Leonard Bernstein.
Posted in Baldwin (James), Lee (Harper), Wolfe (Tom) | Also tagged Blues for Mister Charlie, Civil Rights Movement, Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin, Radical Chic, Soul on Ice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Wolve, White Liberals |
Tom Robbins and Scott Bates regard the mockingbird as an emblem for the consummate artist.
Michael Gerson writes that “Lord of the Flies” gives kids a picture of the bullying they experience and “To Kill a Mockingbird” the courage to stand up to it.
Like much of America, I am still in a state of shock over Saturday’s shooting of a Congresswoman, a judge, and 16 others. Like many I wonder if this was an example of a disturbed mind encountering the inflamed political rhetoric that has come to characterize American political discourse. (Add Arizona’s permissive gun laws into […]
Posted in Aesop, Baum (L. Frank), Bradbury (Ray), Bukowski (Charles), Carroll (Lewis), Hemingway (Ernest), Hesse (Hermann), Hitler (Adolph), Homer, Huxley (Aldous), Juster (Norton(, Kesey (Ken), Lee (Harper), Orwell (George), Plato, Rand (Ayn) | Also tagged Adolph Hitler, Aesop, Aldous Huxley, Alice through the Look Glass, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Arizona killings, Ayn Rand, Brave New World, Charles Bukowski, Communist Manifesto, Ernest Hemingway, Fables, Fahrenheit 451, Gulliver's Travels, Hermann Hesse, Homer, James Barrie, Jared Lee Loughner, Jonathan Swift, Karl Marx, Ken Kesey, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Mein Kampf, Meno, nimal Farm, Norton Juster Phentom Tollbooth, Odyssey, Old Man and the Sea, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Peter Pan, Plot, Pulp, Ray Bradbury, Reading George Orwell, Republic, Siddhartha, To Kill a Mockingbird, violence, We the Living, Wizard of Oz |
Saturday’s New York Times had a column by African American novelist Ishmael Reed attacking those leftists that are excoriating President Obama for his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for a second stimulus package. What particularly galls Reed is that many of these critics refer to themselves as Obama’s base (as in, […]
Harper Lee National Public Radio reminded me yesterday that this summer is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I have written a couple of times about the book, once talking about its importance to me growing up in the segregated south and once examining Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of […]
If race has been the subject of these past two weeks of posting it is because, as a Sherrilyn Ifil article notes in the on-line publication Root, we are having a hard time talking about race this summer, what with the furor over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination and the Henry Louis Gates affair. I haven’t […]
An interesting Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker has complicated my views of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I posted on last week. I now better understand why the book, while a comfort to me as a child going through the desegregation battles, proved so inadequate when I went […]
I mentioned yesterday the debt I owe to the NAACP, which this year is celebrating its 100-year anniversary. Today I will talk about some of my past history with the organization, along with a discussion of how Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird helped me in some difficult years during the Civil Rights era. I’ve […]
