Punch and Judy Let’s declare another comedy Friday and celebrate again the wit of Henry Fielding. My first passage is a continuation of the mock epic encomium (expression of praise) to the book’s heroine that I posted yesterday: Reader, perhaps thou hast seen the statue of the Venus de Medicis. Perhaps, too, thou hast seen the gallery [...]
The Princess Bride, True Love Triumphant In my Tom Jones class earlier this week, one of my students (Erin Hendrix) noted that one of the passages made her think of a scene in the movie The Princess Bride. This led to a discussion of how both works employ irony to help us hold on to [...]
Rumi Rumi seems to be everywhere these days and has been for a while. This past weekend I was at the wedding of Micah Vote, the son of a family friend, and a Rumi poem served as the foundation of the ceremony. Here it is: May these vows and this marriage be blessed. May it [...]
Daniel Defoe pilloried Poetry comes to our aid in all kinds of situations. Including when we’ve been condemned to the pillory. That, at any rate, is one of the ways poetry was used by Daniel Defoe, subject of yesterday’s post. Here’s what happened. Defoe was a Dissenter (or Puritan), which is to say, a fundamentalist [...]
Daniel Defoe My daughter-in-law sent me a wonderful poem by Daniel Defoe, “A True Born Englishman,” posted by Andrew Sullivan in response to a Patrick Buchanan editorial. Buchanan’s column was one of those hateful “they’re taking our country away from us” pieces, and Sullivan rightly asks who this “us” is. As Sullivan’s translates it, Buchanan is [...]
William Hogarth, “Morning.” I’ve just written a series of serious posts about literature and virtue, but since it’s Friday, let me go out of the week on a light note. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is not admired the way it once was, but one would be hard pressed to find any novel that is funnier. [...]
William Hogarth, “The Harlot’s Progress,” plate 4. Continuing our discussion of whether literature can teach virtue, I present as an interesting case study Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which I am currently teaching in my 18th Century Couples Comedy class. I’ve mentioned in a past post that moralist Samuel Johnson attacked Tom Jones for corrupting young people. Furthermore, the Bishop of London accused [...]
Hansel and Gretel In honor of the film release of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, I’ve been writing about children’s literature, when it’s truly moral and when it’s merely pious. It’s bad enough that the Victorians required their children to recite Issac Watt poems or that Christian fundamentalists rail against In the Night [...]
Mother Goose I was highly critical of Stanley Fish last week for attacking those who are “instrumental” about the humanities. My claim that the classics can change your life attributes an instrumental dimension to literature. But when I look at how certain parents have tried to foist preachy moralistic tales on their children, I find [...]
Illustration from Where the Wild Things Are I see that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has been turned into a film, which has led Slate columnist Jack Shafer to revisit a controversy about the book. Apparently Sendak still can’t let go of a critique by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. I was surprised to learn [...]
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 [...]
Oscar Wilde Among literature’s gifts is its ability to bring humor into even the darkest of situations. On Tuesday I mentioned that one of Alan’s doctors told him that he’d probably be dead by this past June. I’m thinking that Alan decided not to follow the advice of his doctors—unlike Bunbury in the Oscar [...]
George Herbert I’m trying to figure out why Stanley Fish bothers me so. Maybe it’s because I’m already worried that our society doesn’t take poetry seriously enough. Then an English professor with a national forum comes along and confirms that people should consider the study of literature as an arcane study yielding satisfactions only to [...]
Alan Paskow Yesterday I talked about how Alan Paskow (in philosophy) and I violently disagreed with a series of columns that Stanley Fish wrote on his New York Time blog about the humanities. Fish was going after those who use the humanities “instrumentally”—as good for something else rather than as ends in themselves. Alan, [...]
Stanley Fish Last week I was talking to my colleague in philosophy Alan Paskow about a Stanley Fish New York Times column. (Cancer update: Alan had one of the five tumors in his lungs removed two weeks ago through cyberknife surgery.) Although an old post—last January—it had stuck with us because it contradicts so [...]
Georgia O’Keefe This past week I seem to have taken as a challenge Elaine Scarry’s observation (in The Body in Pain) that representations of physical pain in literature are rare. Two more I add to the list are the Blake professor in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband, who is dying of cancer, and Rosie, the [...]
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering [...]
Posted in Marlowe (Christopher) | Tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christopher Marlowe, death of a child, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, John Milton, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Rachel Kranz, Suffering, Umberto Eco |
I’ve had a chance to revisit the two classics that immediately came to mind the other day when I thought about literary depictions of pain. Both were as powerful as I remember. In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the death of the mother goes on and on, page after page. As her son [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Body in Pain, Canticle for Leibowitz, D. H. Lawrence, death and dying, Death of Ivan Ilych, Elain Scarry, Euthanasia, Leo Tolstoy, Pain, Sons and Lovers, Suffering, Walter Miller |
Here’s a poem that deals directly with pain, from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I don’t entirely understand it but I’m intrigued by some of its claims: “And a woman spoke, saying, “Tell us of Pain.” And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone [...]
Nick Ut’s famous photo of children burnt in a napalm attack In Friday’s post I mentioned how we read and discussed the first few pages of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World in our most recent salon, held to support colleague Alan Paskow as he battles with cancer. Scarry [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Body in Pain, Book of Showings, cancer, D. H. Lawrence, Death of Ivan Ilych, Elaine Scarry, Julian of Norwich, Leo Tolstoy, Midsummer Night's Dream, Sons and Lovers, Suffering |
This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing on literature and pain. There are a couple of reasons why I write about this now. First, in last night’s salon in honor of my cancer-stricken friend Alan Paskow, we discussed the introduction to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making [...]
Yesterday I taught my 18th century literature class how to play the card game ombre. Ombre is played by the characters in Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (which can be found in its entirety here). The poem is a mock epic account of a severe breach of etiquette at a gathering at [...]
