I grapple today about why it is essential to read lit. And what happens to us when we don’t.
Posted in Krauss (Nicole), Milton (John), Oliver (Mary), Williams (William Carlos) | Also tagged "Blossom", Asphodel, ethical reading, Great House, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, Mary Oliver, Nicole Krauss, Paradise Lost, reading, William Carlos Williams |
How to handle instances of prejudice in the classics? Let the values battles fly.
Posted in Lawrence (D. H.), Milton (John), Rabelais (Francois), Woolf (Virginia) | Also tagged D. H. Lawrence, Dion Boucicault, Heidi, Johanna Spyri, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Octoroon, Paradise Lost, Prejudice, Rabelais, racism, Sexism, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf |
Fans’ obsession with autographs are like the Baron’s obsession with Belinda’s locks in “Rape of the Lock.”
Posted in Milton (John), Pope (Alexander) | Also tagged Alexander Pope, college football, Football, Johnny Manziel, NCAA, Paradise Lost, Rape of the Lock, Sports, sports autographs, Todd Gurley |
Reading literature through the eyes of others brings special pleasures and insights.
Scott Bates’ animal fable about an epic mole parodies “Paradise Lost” and provides a skeptical look at poetry and religion.
Suggestions that certain classics come with “trigger warnings” leads of the following reflection.
Posted in Chaucer (Geoffrey), Homer, Milton (John), Sir Gawain Poet, Sophocles, Wilde (Oscar) | Also tagged censorship, Geoffrey Chaucer, Homer, Iliad, Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, Paradise Lost, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wife of Bath |
Paul Ryan’s hypocrisy about the poor deserves a Miltonian rebuke.
An argument that “Last of the Mohicans” is the great American epic that 19th-century authors were striving to write.
To match my 10 strongest literary women characters, here are my 10 most sensitive male characters.
Posted in Austen (Jane), Baldwin (James), Dickens (Charles), Dostoevsky (Fyodor), Fielding (Henry), Fitzgerald (F. Scott), McCarthy (Cormac), Melville (Herman), Milton (John), Steinbeck (John) | Also tagged Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry Fielding, Herman Melville, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck |
Kobayashi Issa’s New Year’s Day haiku provides a healthy perspective.
The shootings in Aurora, Colorado call forth literary works about evil stalking the world, including “Beowulf” and “Paradise Lost.”
Depending on your point of view, literature reduced to tweets is either comic or horrifying.
Posted in Austen (Jane), Flaubert (Gustave), Forster (E.M.), Kafka (Franz), Milton (John), Proust (Marcel), Salinger (J. D.), Steinbeck (John) | Also tagged Catcher in the Rye, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Howards End, In Search of Lost Time, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust, Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Trial |
Seeing sin more as human separateness from creation than as disobeying God may be a more powerful way to teach the concept to today’s students.
One of my students who suffers from bulimia finds her condition mirrored in Satan’s rebellion against God.
For a description of a luscious Thanksgiving feast, turn to the luncheon that Eve prepares for Archangel Raphael in Book V of “Paradise Lost.”
By the end of “Paradise Lost,” John Milton has discovered a powerful response to suffering.
Rather than lament the loss of the his eyesight–and therefore potentially his writing–in “On His Blindness” John Milton resolves to accept the new road laid out for him.
Spiritual Sunday As I teach Beowulf for the umpteenth time, I am struck once again by its beautiful rendition of the Genesis creation story. I’m also struck by how the invocation of that beauty calls forth human horror. Exploring the linkage provides some insight into the mass killings we have almost come to expect. The […]
Spiritual Sunday I have been teaching Paradise Lost this past week so, in the spirit of the Thanksgiving weekend, I share here some of Milton’s insights into gratitude. Let me start with the prayer of gratitude that Adam and Eve offer up to God in Book IV. They have been working in the garden […]
Since the World Cup is underway in South Africa, I watched Clint Eastwood’s Invictus last week, about the 1995 World Cup Rugby Tournament held in South Africa. Based on a true story, the film notes that, while in prison, Nelson Mandela, like many black South Africans, would root against the South African rugby team, beloved […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Invictus", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Apartheid, Clint Eastwood, Faisal Shahzad, Nelson Mandela, Paradise Lost, politics, Sports, Timothy McVeigh, Ulysses, William Ernest Henley |
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering […]
Posted in Marlowe (Christopher) | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christopher Marlowe, death of a child, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Rachel Kranz, Suffering, Umberto Eco |
In yesterday’s post I began giving an account of a car conversation I had with my two sons regarding stories that explore father-son relationships, as well as my desire for a story in which fathers and sons collaborate to handle the world’s challenges. Darien, my older son, felt that the archetypal conflict as it […]
In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]
