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 […]
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to […]
My wonderful daughter-in-law Betsy, in response to one of my posts about father-son relationships, began meditating about father-daughter relationships on her own blog. We agreed that, while the dynamics are different, in one way they are similar: daughters like sons must establish separate identities, a process that is difficult and often involves a struggle. […]
Since I’ve been writing a lot about the longing for lost innocence in the past few weeks, I’ll share a couple of personal stories about the subject. Included are a traumatic creative writing experience that drove me away forever from writing serious poetry again and a very strange moment in my courtship of the woman […]
When I was a child, I was fascinated by works containing characters of ambiguous gender. Specifically, I was drawn to images of boys who either looked like girls or who were, unbeknownst to them, actually girls. I was also drawn to images of girls (and women) who passed themselves off as guys. The prevailing culture […]
