Alicia Silverstone in Clueless Film Friday I’m currently preparing to teach a first year seminar on “Jane Austen and the Challenges Faced by Regency Teenagers.” For years it didn’t strike me forcefully enough that most of Jane Austen’s heroines are either teenagers or recent teenagers. That’s because (1) Austen heroines seem fully adult and (2) […]
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Jane Austen’s Emma as Teenpic
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Amy Heckerling, Clueless, Emma, Film, Jane Austen Comments closed
Tom Sawyer’s “Behavioral Disorders”
Educational experts have long been concerned about the large numbers of underachieving boys in our school systems. My wife, once a public school teacher and now a member of our Education Department, provided me with some of the explanations. She notes that, of the three learning styles—aural, visual, and kinesthetic—the first two tend to get […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged ADHD, Behavioral disorders, Boys, Childhood, Education, Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Comments closed
American TV, the World’s English
Image from Poltergeist I am pleased that Jason Blake, who teaches English at the University of Ljubljana, is becoming a regular contributor to this website. As an English speaker living in Slovenia, Jason is particularly sensitive to questions of language. In the following essay he triggers memories for me when he talks about how television, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Bald Soprano, English Language, Eugene Ionesco, George Mikes, How to Be an Alien, Language Acquisition, Romeo and Juliet, teaching, Television, William Shakespeare Comments closed
The Holiness of Ramadan Fasting
A Ramadan poem by Rumi.
Absolutely Nothing Beats a Triple
Sports Saturday Last Sunday was a very good day for Colorado Rockies player Carlos Gonzalez. He hit for the cycle (a single, a double, a triple and a home run), a feat that has occurred only 291 times in the history of baseball. Furthermore, the home run was of the walk-off variety, occurring in the […]
Escape from Adulthood
Film Friday In the spirit of the final weeks of summer when Americans are going to the beach and visiting theme parks, I thought I’d turn to a thoroughly enjoyable film where a magical transformation takes place at a carnival. The film is Penny Marshall’s Big (1988), starring Tom Hanks as a 13-year-old (Josh) who […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Adulthood, Big, Film, Penny Marshall, Tom Hanks Comments closed
Learning to Live with E-Readers
Gustave Dore, Don Quixote An e-reader has entered our family. Here’s how it happened. My son Toby is studying for his English Ph.D preliminaries and wanted to spend a month reading 19th century British works in the family Maine cottage. He was accompanied by his girlfriend Candice, who is writing qualifying essays for her dissertation. […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Don Quixote, electronic books, Homer, Iliad, Miguel Cervantes, Odyssey, print culture, publishing, reading, technology Comments closed
