Monthly Archives: October 2009

Honoring Our Inner Wild Rumpus

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2009

Illustration from Where the Wild Things Are I see that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has been turned into a film, which has led Slate columnist Jack Shafer to revisit a controversy about the book. Apparently Sendak still can’t let go of a critique by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. I was surprised to learn […]

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You, Sir, Are No Jay Gatsby

By Robin Bates | Published: October 16, 2009

  Everyone has something to say about Barack Obama, who has been the subject of non-stop scrutiny since last year’s Democratic primaries.  It therefore is not surprising that some would turn to literature to understand what he means.  Including, in recent weeks,  two New York Times columnists. Stanley Fish, the subject of three posts this […]

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Ignoring the “Advice” of Doctors

By Robin Bates | Published: October 15, 2009

Oscar Wilde    Among literature’s gifts is its ability to bring humor into even the darkest of situations. On Tuesday I mentioned that one of Alan’s doctors told him that he’d probably be dead by this past June. I’m thinking that Alan decided not to follow the advice of his doctors—unlike Bunbury in the Oscar […]

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Yes, Stanley, Lit Can Change Lives

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2009

  George Herbert I’m trying to figure out why Stanley Fish bothers me so.  Maybe it’s because I’m already worried that our society doesn’t take poetry seriously enough.  Then an English professor with a national forum comes along and confirms that people should consider the study of literature as an arcane study yielding satisfactions only to […]

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Lit Is More than Just an End in Itself

By Robin Bates | Published: October 13, 2009

Alan Paskow      Yesterday I talked about how Alan Paskow (in philosophy) and I violently disagreed with a series of columns that Stanley Fish wrote on his New York Time blog about the humanities.  Fish was going after those who use the humanities “instrumentally”—as good for something else rather than as ends in themselves.   Alan, […]

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Fish’s Claim that Lit is of No Use

By Robin Bates | Published: October 12, 2009

Stanley Fish    Last week I was talking to my colleague in philosophy Alan Paskow about a Stanley Fish New York Times column. (Cancer update: Alan had one of the five tumors in his lungs removed two weeks ago through cyberknife surgery.) Although an old post—last January—it had stuck with us because it contradicts so […]

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Now for Something Completely Different

By Robin Bates | Published: October 9, 2009

Georgia O’Keefe This past week I seem to have taken as a challenge Elaine Scarry’s observation (in The Body in Pain) that representations of physical pain in literature are rare. Two more I add to the list are the Blake professor in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband, who is dying of cancer, and Rosie, the […]

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Trusting that Good Can Come from Ill

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2009

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 […]

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Breaking through Pain’s Solitude

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2009

  I’ve had a chance to revisit the two classics that immediately came to mind the other day when I thought about literary depictions of pain.  Both were as powerful as I remember.  In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the death of the mother goes on and on, page after page.  As her son […]

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