Allan Bloom’s “Shakespeare’s Politics” (1964) argues that, through the Bard, we better understand politics.
Tag Archives: New Criticism
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, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, Norman Holland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, racism, Reader Response Theory, reception theory, Sigmund Freud, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed
Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?
Friday My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Feminism, formalism, ideology, John Keats, Marxism Comments closed
Arguing against Lit for Lit’s Sake
Nabokov’s aestheticism in the 1960s tried to separate literature from history.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged aestheticism, formalism, New Historicism, Vladimir Nabokov Comments closed
Donne as an Aid to Teenage Angst
Well, the semester is underway. Yesterday I began teaching one of my favorite classes, the early British Literature survey (Literature in History I). Along with Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Wife of Bath, Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Paradise Lost, I will be teaching the poetry of John Donne. I […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Good Morrow, adolescence, John Donne, Margaret Edson, teaching, W;t Comments closed
Saving Poetry from English Teachers
Poetry used to play a much larger role in our culture than it does today. That, at any rate, is the opinion of literary scholar Robert Scholes in his wonderfully provocative The Crafty Reader (Yale, 2001). Scholes’ book is provocative in part because of where he puts the blame: “I would like to suggest that […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Allen Tate, Crafty Reader, English teachers, poetry, Robert Scholes Comments closed
