Monthly Archives: December 2009

Using Twilight to Teach Antigone

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2009

Having compared Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight yesterday with Frances Burney’s Evelina, I feel I owe my readers an apology and an explanation. The apology is that I violated one of my principles for the website and judged the book by the movie. All I’ve read of Twilight is the excerpt on amazon.com. If I sell the […]

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Comparing Evelina and Twilight

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2009

We talked about the movie Twilight in the last gathering of my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class. That and France Burney’s epistolary novel Evelina (1775). Hang on as I spell out the connection. If you don’t know about Twilight, then you are probably neither a teenager nor the parent of a teenager. […]

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Austen’s Good Enough Match

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2009

First of all, a happy birthday to Jane Austen (thanks to my mother for pointing this out).  Jane would have been 234 today. My students have been bothered by the Marianne-Brandon marriage that concludes Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I’m inclined to agree with them.  Kat Vander Wende reasonably pointed out that the sought-after […]

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Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2009

I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today.  I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the scandalous poetry of the licentious […]

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True Love and a Steady Income

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2009

Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson as Edward, Elinor I’ve been reading essays on Sense and Sensibility and thinking of all the useful lessons it teaches, including about the influence of money on people’s dating decisions.  One of my students focused on the figure of Lucy Steele, whom she compared to a woman in the reality […]

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The Jane Austen Punishments List

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2009

It’s the last day of the semester (except for exams) and I’m swamped by term papers from my three courses. As a break from writing my own post on Jane Austen, therefore, I share with you a very funny item that I picked up from the Jane Austen Information Page. In addition to more serious […]

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Jane Austen’s Subtle Stiletto

By Robin Bates | Published: December 10, 2009

I’m teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility at the moment and, once again, recalling what a masterpiece it is.  The interactions between the sisters never fail to elicit sibling stories from my students.  Some of us see ourselves as the elder sister Elinor, others as the younger sister Marianne.  As the oldest in my family, […]

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Unspeakable: A Father’s Suicide

By Robin Bates | Published: December 9, 2009

Yesterday independent filmmaker Sally Heckel visited St. Mary’s and showed us her most recent film, Unspeakable.  Sally is most known for Jury of Her Peers, which was an Oscar nominee in the dramatic live-action short category.    As powerful as Jury of Her Peers is, I like Unspeakable even better. The film is about the suicide of her […]

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Rediscovering Wild Strawberries

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2009

My daughter-in-law’s recent blog post on children, discussed yesterday, has taken me back to a time when I myself wrestled with the question of whether we should bring children into an uncertain world.  A powerful work addressing this issue is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a magnificent film that feels like literature. The film is about a day […]

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