Tag Archives: Joseph Conrad

Shaw Cuts through the Bull

By Robin Bates | Published: November 19, 2009

Last night I gave a short lecture and then moderated a talkback following a college production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894), directed by my colleague Michael Ellis-Tolaydo.  I hadn’t read the play since I was in high school, when I went on a Shaw kick.  (I first became enamored with […]

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Trusting that Good Can Come from Ill

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2009

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering […]

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Shadow Projections on the President

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2009

A couple of months ago I wondered on this blog whether some of the vitriolic attacks on Obama (as distinguished from reasoned disagreement) were driven by racism, and now I see that others are wondering the same, including Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter.  But a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish has a more […]

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Literature as a Leadership Handbook

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2009

Joseph Conrad  I have just begun reading a book that is very much in tune with this website: Joseph L. Badaracco’s Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). I report here on the introduction. The author talks about assigning Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” to a […]

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