This speech by Benjamin Disraeli gives a good entrance into certain issues we might want to take into consideration as we move into tech and cuture issues in English Literature, especially concerning cultural movements, such as Chartism. I urge the BL students to read it and follow the hypertext links. I’ll have more to say [...]
March 17, 2004 – 11:48 pm
The recent Brit Lit exams are evaluated. One of the issues that makes reading exams interesting is to note how students answer questions and what those answers tell me about study habits, note-taking skills, what gets heard, and what needs emphasis in discussion. As a lit teacher I don’t think that reading poetry for its [...]
We had a pretty good discussion of Shelley’s Frankenstein in MBL this evening. People will be coming back with a couple of relevant questions that demand reading the tensions between Frankenstein and his creation, now known as Victor Jr or VJ. Is the bargain they come to reasonable given the context of the agreement? Does [...]
February 15, 2004 – 2:40 am
The ideas of energy, action, and power are going to take different forms in English literature through various voices and imagined worlds, such as Blake’s and Shelley’s. The authors will reflect on permanence, change, and relationships. We’re always going to be working with a subtext of philosophic and/or emperical materialism and various kinds of spiritualism [...]
January 27, 2004 – 12:16 am
A snippet from Joshua Micah Marshall’s essay Power Rangers in The New Yorker. A worthy read: In this latest turn of neoconservative thought, the trappings of optimism and the hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect have been abandoned. Where Ferguson is all cool confidence, Perle and Frum are fire and foreboding. Theirs are not [...]
December 19, 2003 – 12:17 am
Michael Drout has an interesting post on the subject of Christianity, Tolkien and Beowulf in response to another writer’s critique of this scratch and sniff on Tolkien’s Christianity. Drout suggests that Tolkien and the Beowulf poet took similar positions in their works about how to deal with religion when telling tales about people who haven’t [...]
December 2, 2003 – 11:19 pm
A Pope writes: Heavn from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribd, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleasd to [...]
December 2, 2003 – 10:54 pm
Spinning writes about the importance of sharing ideas in a group. The richness of the experience of story is indeed made that much more powerful by sharing ideas and testing them. This is foundational to college which, in my mind, is an action. My friend Lawrence Johnson always argued that college was a place where [...]
December 1, 2003 – 11:50 pm
For the british liters. We will be covering Locke and Pope on Tuesday so come in prepped and ready. We are going to be focusing on what people have thought about the human sphere and the human condition in a sense in a context way beyond Beowulf. Here’s a question: is all the knowledge that [...]
November 25, 2003 – 11:06 pm
We had a nice conversation today in British Literature about the historical situation pertaining to Dryden and on the notion of individuality. We’ve also had some more individual discussions about the exam essay having to do with the idea of the disguise in King Lear. I wanted to emphsize that the disguise or mask has [...]
November 14, 2003 – 12:35 am
The issue of the nature of an all powerful or all knowing deity keeps coming up in BL, which is, of course, the reason for the Great Lettuce Head: tell me about the deity you might ask and I’ll say: he’s green and has lots of leaves; other than that I’m silent on the issue. [...]
November 11, 2003 – 11:52 pm
In section 40 of Bacon’s Novum Organum, the author writes: “The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use; for the doctrine of Idols is to the interpretation [...]
November 11, 2003 – 12:15 am
We have the religion question, the politics question, and the question of what makes a good king concerning the subject of the 17th century. Shakespeare in Lear goes after the alternative to the rational King in Lear who gives away his authority. The divisions that proceed during the Civil Wars which will result in the [...]
November 10, 2003 – 11:05 pm
I wanted to schedule a couple of posts reserved for Bacon and Hobbes. I wonder at the ability to tie three authors together–Milton, Hobbes, and Bacon–into a coherent whole, but the only way to do this is to talk about history and to try and organize things focus, say the English Civil Wars of the [...]
November 9, 2003 – 11:38 am
Wanderlust writes: “A quote that I discovered by Charles Metcalfe, a civil servant for the EIC goes, ” Our dominion in India is by conquest. It is naturally disgusting to the inhabitants and can only be maintained by military force. It is our positive duty to render them justice, to respect and protect their rights.” [...]
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
