This past year I was surprised to suddenly find myself a fan of the 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It would be hard to find a television show with a wackier premise, but it somehow works. In this entry I want to draw some parallels between the show and Beowulf and, especially, between […]
Tag Archives: Beowulf
Willow Rosenberg as Grendel’s Mother
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dragon, Grendel's mother, grieving, Wiglaf, Willow, Zander Comments closed
Battling with Monstrous Grief
I said in the last blog that I am kept fresh by the variety of ways that my students respond to the works that I teach. Sometimes their reactions are entirely unexpected and altogether marvelous. To make this point dramatically, I share here a Beowulf reading story. The student was a 19-year-old African American woman […]
High Impact Literature
I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Like Leslie Marmon Silko in her novel Ceremony, I believe that stories are […]
