Kobayashi Issa’s New Year’s Day haiku provides a healthy perspective.
The shootings in Aurora, Colorado call forth literary works about evil stalking the world, including “Beowulf” and “Paradise Lost.”
Depending on your point of view, literature reduced to tweets is either comic or horrifying.
Also posted in Austen (Jane), Flaubert (Gustave), Forster (E.M.), Kafka (Franz), Proust (Marcel), Salinger (J. D.), Steinbeck (John) | Tagged Catcher in the Rye, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Howards End, In Search of Lost Time, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, John Milton, John Steinbeck, Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust, Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Trial |
Seeing sin more as human separateness from creation than as disobeying God may be a more powerful way to teach the concept to today’s students.
One of my students who suffers from bulimia finds her condition mirrored in Satan’s rebellion against God.
For a description of a luscious Thanksgiving feast, turn to the luncheon that Eve prepares for Archangel Raphael in Book V of “Paradise Lost.”
By the end of “Paradise Lost,” John Milton has discovered a powerful response to suffering.
Rather than lament the loss of the his eyesight–and therefore potentially his writing–in “On His Blindness” John Milton resolves to accept the new road laid out for him.
Spiritual Sunday As I teach Beowulf for the umpteenth time, I am struck once again by its beautiful rendition of the Genesis creation story. I’m also struck by how the invocation of that beauty calls forth human horror. Exploring the linkage provides some insight into the mass killings we have almost come to expect. The [...]
Spiritual Sunday Today, as a member of my church choir, I participate in our service of Lessons and Carols (an indication that they will let anyone sing, especially if he is a guy). One of our featured songs is a lyric that I teach in my medieval literature survey. “Adam Lay Bound” is a beautifully [...]
Spiritual Sunday I have been teaching Paradise Lost this past week so, in the spirit of the Thanksgiving weekend, I share here some of Milton’s insights into gratitude. Let me start with the prayer of gratitude that Adam and Eve offer up to God in Book IV. They have been working in the garden [...]
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 [...]
