Although reading and grading student essays is the most demanding aspect of my job—I graded around 535 formal and informal essays this past semester, as well as reading another 100 essay proposals and early drafts—it can also be the most rewarding. That’s because I will regularly see students working through major life issues at the […]
William Dyce, “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm” (1851) There’s been a lot of talk about bubbles in recent years. Tiger Woods’ bubble, which cut him off from his fellow human beings, may have led to some of his self-destructive behavior. The Vatican has been living within a bubble for a while, unable […]
One of the memorable moments in the history of the U.S. Congress occurred in 1954 when Joseph Welch, head counsel for the United States Army, found one of his young lawyers being attacked by Joseph McCarthy. The turning point in the hearings occurred when Welch said forthrightly, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have […]
As I am out of town this week, my colleagues have been loaning me articles they have written to share on the website. Here my colleague Beth Charlebois, our Shakespeare scholar, recounts as instance of literary impact at its most dramatic–in this instance, the effect of Shakespeare on inmates of a Missouri correctional institute. […]
In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories. I understood this about the play at an early age. In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]
Brown and Lemmon Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways. I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class. Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]
In a discussion of Twelfth Night last Friday, my British literature survey class discussed the challenges of a first date. The scene that sparked our conversation is the one where Viola, passing as a man, carries Orsino’s love proposal to Olivia. Of course Olivia falls in love with Viola instead. We started talking about Orsino’s decision to […]
In yesterday’s examination of universal health care legislation in terms of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, I mentioned E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988). Hirsch believes that cultures need a set of common texts to function effectively. While I have some reservations about that work, I wholeheartedly support Hirsch’s contention that […]
Everyone has something to say about Barack Obama, who has been the subject of non-stop scrutiny since last year’s Democratic primaries. It therefore is not surprising that some would turn to literature to understand what he means. Including, in recent weeks, two New York Times columnists. Stanley Fish, the subject of three posts this […]
