In which I recount growing up in segregated Tennessee and recount the books that helped me cope.
Tag Archives: Huckleberry Finn
My Life in Lit – Segregation
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Harper Lee, integration, Mark Twain, May Justus, New Boy in School, racism, segregation, To Kill a Mockingbird Comments closed
The U.S. Ignored Kipling’s Cautionary Tale
Would the USSR and the USA have saved themselves a lot of blood and money in Afghanistan by reading Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” before going in.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "White Man's Murden", Afghanistan, Edward Said, Man Who Would Be King, Mark Twain, Orientalism, Rudyard Kipling Comments closed
Caste in a Multicultural Democracy
To grapple with Wilkerson’s understanding of racism as a caste system, I turn to Langston Hughes, Twain, and Arundhati Roy.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Ku Klux", Arundhati Roy, Caste, Dalits, God of Small Things, Isabel Wilkerson, Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, Origins, racism Comments closed
Soliloquies Changed Us Fundamentally
Hamlet’s soliloquies changed the way we see ourselves and others and led the way to the novel.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Angus Fletcher, Charlotte Bronte, Hamlet, Harold Bloom, Harper Lee, humanism, Jane Eyre, Le Cid, Pierre Corneille, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, soliloquies, Sorrows of Young Werther, To Kill a Mockingbird, transcendentalism, Wonderworks Comments closed
Lit that Features the N-Word: What to Do
Now to teach White literature that employs the n-word? Balance with Black literature.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Absalom Absalom!, Beloved, Mark Twain, n-word, racism, Song of Solomon, To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner Comments closed
Why I Think the Way I Think
I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Antonio Gramsci, Beowulf, Carl Jung, Carleton College, Hans Robert Jauss, Harper Lee, intellectual history, J. Paul Hunter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jerome Beaty, Karl Marx, Literary Theory, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, New Criticism, Norman Holland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, racism, Reader Response Theory, reception theory, Sigmund Freud, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed
Which Literary Conman Is Trump?
To understand Trump as conman, I compare him to the King and the Duke, Mac the Knife, Melville’s Confidence Man, Satan & Iago.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Beggar's Opera, Confidence Man, conmen, Donald Trump, Herman Melville, John Gay, John Milton, Mark Twain, Othello, Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare Comments closed
