Monthly Archives: November 2017

Hardy Understood Sexual Predators Well

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2017

“Tess of the d’Urbervilles” is a prescient account of how sexual predators operate. It is no less relevant today in the age of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein than it was in 1892.

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Murakami on Ideology’s Hollowness

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2017

Murakami’s diatribe against rigid ideologues in “Kafka on the Shore” applies only too well to figures on the American right.

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Lit Encourages World Citizenship

By Robin Bates | Published: November 7, 2017

Political identity arguments that demographic groups should stay in their own lanes fail to acknowledge the power of literature to “cross group boundaries,” according to philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

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The Blue Guitar vs. Facebook

By Robin Bates | Published: November 6, 2017

Wallace Stevens asserts that art changes “things as they are.” So does Facebook. We need the first to counteract the second when it is taken over by hostile forces.

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How Can I Focus My Flickering Mind?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 5, 2017

If you have ever found your mind wandering as you knelt to pray, Denise Levertov knows how you feel.

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Beware of Literature’s Purity Police

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2017

Laura Moriarty’s “American Heart” has been attacked for being a white savior narrative. Such stories should in fact be critiqued, but the attackers are often a bigger problem.

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Bone-Crushing Prince of Dark Days

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2017

Trump regards Special Counsel Robert Mueller as the crows view the owl in Mary Oliver’s “In the Pine Woods: Crows and Owl.”

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Guinevere over the Centuries

By Robin Bates | Published: November 1, 2017

In her senior project, my student is applying feminist political theory to understand why depictions of Guinevere evolved as they did, from Chrétien de Troyes to Tennyson to modern Arthurian novels.

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