I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.
Tag Archives: reception theory
Why I Think the Way I Think
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, New Criticism, Norman Holland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, racism, Reader Response Theory, Sigmund Freud, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed
Lit and Life: My Intellectual Trajectory
I’ve long held that great literature impacts history harder than lesser literature. I trace the evolution of my ideas in today’s post.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Denis Diderot, Discourse on Inequality, Feminism, Hans Robert Jauss, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Letter on the Blind, Martin Chuzzlewit, Marxism, post-colonialism, queer theory 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, Madame Bovary Comments closed
Invisible Man & Lolita Changed the ’50s
Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Nabokov’s “Lolita” both challenged basic 1950s assumptions. The former changed public perceptions on what it meant to be black while the latter violated a tacit agreement not to go digging under neatly manicured lawns bordered by white picket fences.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 1950s, aestheticism, formalism, Hans Robert Jauss, horizon of expectations, Invisible Man, Lolita, modernism, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, social protest novel, Vladimir Nabokov Comments closed
