Tag Archives: Daniel Defoe

Novels and Baseball Fans, Fixated on Time

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2011

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.

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Kiki Ostrenga as Sister Carrie

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2011

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.

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Literature and Student Life Stories

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2010

This post will have to be quick because it’s been a busy week.  I’ve been involved in marathon grading sessions, attended a full day of senior project presentations (including one that I mentored on Hans Christian Andersen), met with multiple students who are revising essays, and have just returned from a session where students read […]

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Crusoe, A Parable for Our Time

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2010

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 […]

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Poeticizing the Pillory

By Robin Bates | Published: October 27, 2009

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 […]

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Satirizing the Intolerant

By Robin Bates | Published: October 26, 2009

 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 […]

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Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2009

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 […]

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