A comic exercise imagining how a teenage John Roberts would interpret various classics.
Tag Archives: Huckleberry Finn
Childhood Imagination: Encourage It or Lose It
Reflections of childhood imagining and how too often our society fails to foster it.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Children, Imagination, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain Comments closed
Why Aren’t More Kids Reading?
An Atlanta article attacks utilitarian arguments for reading. I push back.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Adam Kirsch, Ars Poetica, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Horace, John Stuart Mill, Judy Blume, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, Martha Nussbaum, Paul and Virginia, Perks of Being a Wall Flower, Samuel Johnson, Sorrows of Young Werther, Tom Jones Comments closed
My Life in Lit – Segregation
In which I recount growing up in segregated Tennessee and recount the books that helped me cope.
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

