Sports Saturday March Madness—the American college basketball play-offs—is officially underway. As is the tradition, the first round has witnessed a host of upsets, including Georgetown, a favorite in my area. (Another favorite, Maryland, won late last night.) As I scan the scores, I find myself wondering why there isn’t more good literature about basketball. In fact, […]
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Hoops for Madness, Baseball for Lit
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Baseball, Basketball, Football, March Madness, Sports Comments closed
Laughing at Male Anxieties–or Not
Bringing Up Baby Film Friday This week I have been delivering a series of four lectures on “Women in Film” at the University of Ljubljana, where I was twice a visiting Fulbright lecturer. Tuesday’s talk was originally to have been about Katharine Hepburn and screwball comedies, particularly Bringing Up Baby (1938). Because people evinced an […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant, Film, gender, Katharine Hepburn Comments closed
Shakespeare in the Prisons
As I am out of town this week, my colleagues have been loaning me articles they have written to share on the website. Here my colleague Beth Charlebois, our Shakespeare scholar, recounts as instance of literary impact at its most dramatic–in this instance, the effect of Shakespeare on inmates of a Missouri correctional institute. […]
Books that Cook
Jennifer Cognard-Black As I am out of town this week, I am asking colleagues in the St. Mary’s English Department to contribute articles to my website. Jennifer Cognard-Black teaches a course called “Books that Cook” that is so popular that it has a two-year waiting list of students who want to get into it. You […]
“No one could resist him”
As I am out of town this week, colleagues of mine have been gracious enough to loan me articles for my website. The following was written by Ben Click, our department chair and a Mark Twain scholar. In addition to talking about Twain’s remarkable stage presence, the article announces a Twain colloquium that Ben is […]
Crossing the Great Gender Divide
In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories. I understood this about the play at an early age. In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]
take it to the hoop, magic johnson
Sports Saturday We are entering that time of year when the country goes crazy over college basketball and March Madness. Actually, March Madness came early to my school because the small college Division III tournament begins two weeks before that of the big boys. St. Mary’s College of Maryland seldom wins conference titles in sports—it’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "A Poem for Magic", Basketball, Quincy Troupe, Sports Comments closed
The Temporary Transvestite Comedy
Brown and Lemmon Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways. I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class. Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Billy Wilder, gender, Some Like It Hot, Transvestism, Trevor Nunn, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Comments closed
The Challenges of Asking Her Out
In a discussion of Twelfth Night last Friday, my British literature survey class discussed the challenges of a first date. The scene that sparked our conversation is the one where Viola, passing as a man, carries Orsino’s love proposal to Olivia. Of course Olivia falls in love with Viola instead. We started talking about Orsino’s decision to […]
