Tag Archives: Samuel Johnson

Paul Ryan: No Country for Old Men

By Robin Bates | Published: September 25, 2012

Paul Ryan’s speech before AARP brings to mind the generational conflict described in Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas.”

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Rightwing Rewrites Reality

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2011

Today’s Republican right are practitioners of the Humpty Dumpty approach to communication: “I said it very loud and clear. I went and shouted in his ear.” Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty, they also believe that they can make reality, as Humpty makes words, mean whatever they want it to mean.

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Rasselas, a Bloglodyte’s Salvation

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2011

As a blogger, I sometimes spend excessive amounts of time in solitary contemplation. Samuel Johnson warns of the dangers of such a skewed perspective in his philosophic narrative “Rasselas.”

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Election Got You Down? Read Johnson

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2010

By the end of today in the United States, some will be celebrating and others will be rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. While I am not one to underestimate the significant of elections—I think voting is one of a citizen’s most important responsibilities—I also caution everyone not to become (in the words of […]

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Rising Again to Dance

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2010

Chidi Okoye (Nigeria)  Spiritual Sunday I refute Berkeley thus, Samuel Johnson famously said. And kicked a rock. Bishop Berkeley was the 18th century idealist philosopher who asked how we know reality is really there if we are dependent upon our senses for perceiving it. Is the rock in existence when we turn our backs? Johnson’s […]

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Mocking Adult Anxieties about Novels

By Robin Bates | Published: September 29, 2009

“Before,” by William Hogarth (1736) What can happen to your daughters if they read novels? According to William Hogarth, something like the above. Check out the lower left hand corner where a side table is falling over. The drawer has been left casually but deliberately open so that one can see the book that is […]

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Danger: Georgian Teens Reading Novels

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2009

Samuel Johnson  If we need proof that adolescence has always been a difficult age, we can look at those 18th century moralists that were panicked about young people reading novels. Of course if you’re young (to build off of a comment that Barbara makes in response to Friday’s post), part of the fun of reading […]

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Can Pastoral Elegies Ease the Pain?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2009

In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]

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