As I watched the amazing day of baseball last Wednesday, I found myself thinking (being the literature nerd that I am) that the English novel was invented to do justice to reality when it got this dramatic and complex.
Tag Archives: Daniel Defoe
Novels and Baseball Fans, Fixated on Time
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Baseball, Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Robinson Crusoe, Sports, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy Comments closed
Kiki Ostrenga as Sister Carrie
Columnist David Brooks recently turned to Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel “Sister Carrie” in an attempt to make sense of the strange and disturbing case of 13-year-old internet celebrity Kiki Ostrenga.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Internet, Kiki Ostrenga, Lolita, Moll Flanders, Sister Carrie, Theodor Dreiser, Vladimir Nabakov Comments closed
Crusoe, A Parable for Our Time
I have been teaching Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in an Introduction to Literature class and am struck once more by how important a book it is. I say this even though it is not read or taught as much as it once was. Robinson Crusoe continues to be relevant because it goes right to the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Capitalism, Economics, Religion, Robinson Crusoe Comments closed
Poeticizing the Pillory
Daniel Defoe pilloried Poetry comes to our aid in all kinds of situations. Including when we’ve been condemned to the pillory. That, at any rate, is one of the ways poetry was used by Daniel Defoe, subject of yesterday’s post. Here’s what happened. Defoe was a Dissenter (or Puritan), which is to say, a fundamentalist […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Dissent, Hymn to the Pillory, Punishment, Shortest Way with Dissenters Comments closed
Satirizing the Intolerant
Daniel Defoe My daughter-in-law sent me a wonderful poem by Daniel Defoe, “A True Born Englishman,” posted by Andrew Sullivan in response to a Patrick Buchanan editorial. Buchanan’s column was one of those hateful “they’re taking our country away from us” pieces, and Sullivan rightly asks who this “us” is. As Sullivan’s translates it, Buchanan is […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "True Born Englishman", Henry Fielding, Nationalism, racism, Tom Jones Comments closed
Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?
I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation. The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, David Copperfield, fathers and sons, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry IV, Homer, Human Stain, Lawrence Sterne, Nicholas Nickleby, Odyssey, Oedipus, Oliver Twist, Philip Roth, Road, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, Tristram Shandy Comments closed
