Monthly Archives: May 2016

Trump Sees Garbage and Rocks in Foes

I’ve compared Donald Trump to Murakami’s villain in “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Today I dig deeper into the comparison.

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Trump as a Haruki Murakami Villain

Donald Trump has an uncanny resemblance to the villain Noboru Wataya in Haruki Murakami’s masterful novel “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (1998). Both have a similar hollowness and both have the ability to separate people from the higher instincts and put them in thrall to their lower ones.

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Memorial Day: I Am the Grass, I Cover All

Carl Sandburg’s outward stoicism masks a deep grief as he memorializes those killed in battle in “Grass.”

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Trapped in Spiritual Crisis? Read Donne

John Donne can come to the rescue of students who are in spiritual crisis.

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Resisting the Witchery of Nuclear Warfare

Today Barack Obama will be the first American president to visit Hiroshima. Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko has an explanation for the development of the bomb: witches.

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Defending the Canon vs. New Attacks

Yale English majors have been complaining about requiring them to study canonical writers. Here’s is why they are wrong.

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Pope Foresaw GOP Capitulation to Trump

Alexander Pope warned, in “Essay on Man” that vice loses its ugliness once it becomes familiar. This is the danger we face with the normalization of Donald Trump.

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Hillary Clinton as Emma Woodhouse

Hillary Clinton shares certain characteristics with Emma Woodhouse. (And far fewer with Lady Macbeth.)

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Using Lit to Discover Purpose in Science

My Intro to Literature students, few of whom are English majors, are often startled to discover that literature understands them better than they understand themselves. Today’s post describes the encounters between two science majors and, respectively, Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior.”

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