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 […]
Tag Archives: Matthew Arnold
Do Endings Reveal Meaning of Life?
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", "Second Coming", Alexander Pope, endings, Frank Kermode, King Lear, modernism, post-apocalyptic fiction, Samuel Beckett, Sense of an Ending, William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare, world weary ennui Comments closed
The Declining English Major
An English prof, sensing obsolescence, turns to “In Memoriam” (also Fowles, Wordsworth & Arnold).
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", Alan Bennett, Alfred Lord Tennyson, English major, French Lieutenant's Woman, History Boys, Humanities, In Memoriam, Intimations of Immortality, John Fowles, William Wordsworth Comments closed
My “Last Lecture”
I share here my “last lecture” from my retirement ceremony. (But rest assured: I will not be retiring from this blog.)
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aristotle, Bertolt Brecht, Chinua Achebe, Divine Comedy, Goethe, Heart of Darkness, Horace, Huckleberry Finn, integration, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Martha Nussbaum Wayne Booth, Percy Shelley, Plato, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Samuel Johnson, segregation, Sir Philip Sydney, Terry Eagleton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayne Booth Comments closed
Theories about Lit’s Impact
A transcript of a talk given at the University of Ljubljana on “how literature changes lives.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Aristotle, Bertolt Brecht, Chinua Achebe, Frederick Engel, Horace, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, Percy Shelley, Plato, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Samuel Johnson, Sir Philip Sidney, Wayne Booth Comments closed
Liberal Arts–Only for Elites?
Frank Bruni and Fareed Azkaria may be guilty of Matthew Arnold-type class superiority as they argue that a liberal arts education is useful for power elites.
How Poets Are the Legislators of the World
Shelley saw great literature as changing the way we see reality. Sometimes, however, it takes hundreds of years for this to be evident.
Coming Home Like a Lamb to the Fold
Ruth Pitter’s “Estuary” works as a response to Matthew Arnold’s crisis of faith in “Dover Beach.”
The End of the World As We Know It?
A number of poets have written poems about the apocalypse. But it’s always figurative, never literal.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Hellas", "Second Coming", "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse", Alexander Pope, Apocalyptic literature, Between the Acts, Dunciad, Mayan Apocalypse, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats Comments closed
