Tag Archives: King Lear

Are We Watching Shakespeare or Beckett?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2019

Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]

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Do Endings Reveal Meaning of Life?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2019

Monday My wife Julia alerted me to an intriguing although somewhat frustrating article in Atlantic about the end of time. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s 1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Megan Garber wrestles with an issue recently raised by The Washington Post: how do we live with constant reminders […]

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Lit as a Survival Toolkit

By Robin Bates | Published: January 3, 2019

Thursday Friend and occasional guest blogger Carl Rosin alerted me to a heartfelt Commonweal article by an English professor describing how literature helped her confront and work through childhood abuse. Cassandra Nelson’s difficult history leads to some remarkable insights into trigger warnings, which she opposes. Nelson’s view on trigger warnings is pretty much my own […]

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An Incel Killer and an English Major

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2018

Maura Binkley was an English major killed by an incel killer in a Tallahassee yoga studio. Her department chair turned to Shakespeare in his grief.

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What Lit Is Good For–A Debate

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2018

Thursday Tim Parks has written a provocative essay for The New York Review of Books, asking, Is literature wise? In the sense, does it help us to live? And if not, what exactly is it good for? If you follow this blog, you already know my answers: –Yes, literature is wiser than we are (and […]

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Battered by a Raging Stormy

By Robin Bates | Published: March 28, 2018

Stormy Daniels’s power over Donald Trump brings to mind various literary storms, such as Lear’s and those described by Mary Oliver and H.D.

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Grieving for a Loved One

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2018

Someone I love very dearly has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I turn to “Sonny’s Blues” and “King Lear” to find adequate words.

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Corruption Starts at the Top

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2018

The spread of Trumpian corruption is an instance of the fish rotting from the top. “King Lear” shows this process at work.

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Act in All Things as Love Will Prompt

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2018

My lectures on Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Shakespeare and Sophocles all seem to track back to Lent these days.

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