Tag Archives: Feminism

Lit and Life: My Intellectual Trajectory

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2019

I’ve long held that great literature impacts history harder than lesser literature. I trace the evolution of my ideas in today’s post.

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Pakistani Girl Saved by “Little Women”

By Robin Bates | Published: July 30, 2019

Wednesday NPR has done it again. Ira Glass’s recent This American Life episode about a classic novel coming to someone’s rescue reminds me of Morning Edition’s account of Anna Karenina doing the same for an unjustly imprisoned Somali prisoner. (See my account here.) The radio program reported on how Little Women came to the aid […]

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Amelia Bedelia, Working Class Rebel

By Robin Bates | Published: June 13, 2019

Friday Here’s a literary comparison I never would have anticipated: Amelia Bedelia as a feminist Bartleby. Reader Donna Raskin alerted me to this New Yorker article by Sarah Blackwood, who came up with the comparison after reading the series to her children. Amelia Bedelia is a maid who gets in trouble because she takes every […]

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Conrad and White Male Panic

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2019

Tuesday This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about how Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness provides special insight into white terrorism. At one point I mentioned Conrad’s own racism and sexism, which leads to an interesting literary question: can we consider a work a literary masterpiece if it has one-dimensional depictions of women and Africans? […]

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Morgan Le Faye through the Ages

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2019

Monday Last week I finished teaching a short “Wizards and Enchantresses” course for Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning program and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Having already talked about my class on Merlin (see here, here, and here), today I share what I had to say about Morgan Le Faye and her successors. With Morgan, we looked at how […]

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Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2018

Friday My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics […]

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Yes, GOP Is Atticus, but Not in a Good Way

By Robin Bates | Published: October 9, 2018

John Cornyn compared the GOP to Atticus Finch? The comparison holds if he has in mind the Atticus of “Go Tell a Watchman.”

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Howl’s Empowerment Drama

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2018

In “Howl’s Moving Castle,” Diana Wynne Jones breaks free of confining fantasy narratives.

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Why an Af-Am Meg Is Important

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2018

Having an African American Meg in the film version of Wrinkle in Time adds an important dimension to the novel.

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