Wednesday A friend the other day asked where my ideas come from, especially when I apply a passage from one century to incidents in another. Yesterday, for instance, I said that Trump confidant Roger Stone reminded me of a passage in Herman Melville’s Confidence Man. So how did that enter my head? To answer, let […]
John Gatta’s “Spirit of Place in American Literary Culture” explains why we find certain places, in nature and in civilization, to be infused with spirit.
Base your New Year’s resolutions on your favorite characters. I look to the Wife of Bath.
When compared to people called “dotard” in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Trump fits the insult hurled at him by Kim Jong-un. His statement to African leaders, meanwhile, makes him sound like a “Heart of Darkness” ivory trader.
Donald Trump’s non-ending falsehoods have sometimes been described as “gaslighting,” after the old Charles Boyer-Ingrid Bergman film. An early literary example of a gaslighter is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, although her use of the tactic is far more justifiable.
A racial flair-up at our college has given me an opportunity to stress the relevance of the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale. Like our African American students, she too feels disrespected. One has to dig beneath her seeming confidence to realize how vulnerable she feels, however.
The rightwing attacks on female sexuality have a long tradition, going back to Pliny the Elder, and include Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. Expect the tradition to continue if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
The power of a “King Lear” passage is a refutation of Scott Walker’s attempt to redirect higher education to “work force needs.”
