A Wall Street Journal columnist argues that Rousseau is responsible for today’s lost youth. That and not reading classic lit.
Tag Archives: Madame Bovary
History’s Arc Bends Towards Kafka
The late Kundera has fascinating insights into how the novel has intersected with history.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Art of the Novel, authoritarianism, Castle, Don Quixote, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Milan Kundera, sexuality, Slowness, Trial Comments closed
Austen on the Simple Country Life
In the strawberry picking scene in “Emma,” Austen wields her satiric pen to take apart social climber Mrs. Elton.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged class anxiety, Emma, Gustave Flaubert, indirect style, Jane Austen Comments closed
Great Literature Shifts Expectations
In which I sum up Reader Reader Response theory as formulated by Hans Robert Jauss, who believes that great lit expands horizon of expectations.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Gustave Flaubert, Hans Robert Jauss, Reader Response Theory Comments closed
Flaubert Would Have Had Trump’s Number
“Madame Bovary” gives us insight into why Trump botched the Covid response.
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, Huckleberry Finn, intellectual history, J. Paul Hunter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jerome Beaty, Karl Marx, Literary Theory, 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
What Lit Is Good For–A Debate
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Herbert Marcuse, King Lear, Little Dorrit, Tempest, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Great Lit Changes Expectations Horizons
Hans Robert Jauss’s believes that great literature changes horizons of expectation whereas lesser lit simply confirms them. If “Madame Bovary” was brought to trial, Jauss says, it is because it charted a new course in literary history that people didn’t understand.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged censorship, Gustave Flaubert, Hans Robert Jauss, reception theory Comments closed
