Revealing his prejudices, Aristotle tries to limit those whose suffering can be labeled tragic.
“Sandy” conjures up for me a traumatic childhood reading experience along with a passage from “The Tempest.”
An afternoon spent in a friend’s boat brought to mind Huck and Jim watching the Mississippi River.
When politics become harsh, we still dream, like Huck, of lighting out for the Territory.
A visiting lecture on “Slaves as Loyal Confederates” reminded me of the complex relationships between black and white as they are explored by Twain and Stowe.
Think of the elder Lear sisters as Barcelona and Madrid and Edmund as a spot in the Champions League final. This would make Goneril Barcelona since she’s the one that emerges (temporarily) triumphant.
Holly Blumner had a vision. A member of the St. Mary’s theater department, Holly wanted to stage Susan Zeder’s Mother Hicks, a adolescent girl’s identity quest, and then take it into area schools. This post is the story about how rightwing groups have so terrified our schools that the vision died.
Sports Saturday Once again, one of the most hated teams in the country resides atop the NCAA basketball rankings: Duke University. In today’s post I find literary equivalents for the general animus against the Blue Devils. For the life of me I can’t understand why Duke is so disliked. Granted, I myself dislike Duke, but [...]
The slaughter continues on in Libya, with the number of dead now in the thousands as Qaddafi turns his mercenaries, machine guns and tanks on his own people. While other parts of the country are in the arms of the resistance, he is holed up in Tripoli. It appears that he will indeed fight to [...]
Last week we had another fine presentation in the series of Twain lectures that my colleague Ben Click has been running. Once again a talk about race and Huckleberry Finn deepened my respect for that magnificent book. Here are some of the ideas I picked up, which I share with you from memory since I didn’t [...]
Writing about interracial friendships in yesterday’s post brings to mind the most famous interracial friendship in literature, that between Huck and Jim. The novel is once again in the news (is it ever out of it?) with a new edition of the novel where the n-word is changed to “slave.” The edition is the brainchild [...]
It is Mark Twain’s unrivaled ability to combine both laughter and enlightenment that makes him continually relevant.
Posted in Twain (Mark) | Also tagged Humor |
I have always been fascinated by the many ways that literature influences our lives, but, as a literary scholar, I also know that influence is a very hard thing to prove. That’s why I find censorship to be interesting. When people censor a book, they do so because they assume that it can have an [...]
“I hope that like Mark Twain, 100 years from now people will see my work and think, ‘Wow. That is actually pretty racist.’” –Tina Fey accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Thanks to a visiting lecturer in our Mark Twain series, I have a new understanding of Huckleberry Finn that is exciting me [...]
Educational experts have long been concerned about the large numbers of underachieving boys in our school systems. My wife, once a public school teacher and now a member of our Education Department, provided me with some of the explanations. She notes that, of the three learning styles—aural, visual, and kinesthetic—the first two tend to get [...]
Many readers of Huckleberry Finn enjoy laughing at Miss Watson’s approach to teaching Huck. She tries to use the Bible to scare him into good behavior, insists that he sit still, and prohibits him from smoking and drinking. Romantics that we are, we make fun of her educational philosophy and find her a hypocrite, especially [...]
Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, New England whalers had to venture further and further afield to find oil-producing whales (they had depleted the local stock). Melville’s apocalyptic vision is eerily prescient.
Last Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. To mark the occasion, Ben Click, our enterprising department chair, set up a panel to discuss what Twain had to say about ”race, religion, politics, and the ‘damned human race.’” On the panel were Peter Sagal, star of National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell [...]
As I am out of town this week, colleagues of mine have been gracious enough to loan me articles for my website. The following was written by Ben Click, our department chair and a Mark Twain scholar. In addition to talking about Twain’s remarkable stage presence, the article announces a Twain colloquium that Ben is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Ben Click |
Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain This past Friday was the 125 anniversary of Huckleberry Finn, a book that packed a wallop when it came out in 1885 and has continued to be controversial ever since. Last May I wrote a series of posts on Huckleberry Finn, including on its importance to me as a child [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Humor, Vice |
As a change of pace, I turn today’s column over to my very good friend and department chair, Mark Twain expert Ben Click. Ben is a 6’6″ Texan who is the funniest man I know and a kind of Mark Twain figure himself. His courses on the man who called himself “the American” have [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Humor |
I’ve had fun discussing the reading of Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas over the last couple of days, and while I’ve come up dry on further posts about the Supreme Court and literature, it has given me the idea of periodically dipping into reading stories of other political figures. I’ll start a list here, beginning [...]
Posted in Alexander (Elizabeth), Angelou (Maya), Bible, Camus (Albert), Carle (Eric), Dickey (James), Fleming (Ian), Frost (Robert), Marquez (Gabriel Garcia), Morrison (Toni), O'Neill (Joseph), Robinson (Edward Arlington), Service (Robert), Sheridan (Richard), Stendahl, Tolstoy (Leo), Twain (Mark) | Also tagged Abraham Lincoln, Al Gore, Albert Camus, Barack Obama, Bible, Bill Clinton, Book of Job, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Cremation of Sam McGee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Alexander, Eric Carle, From Russia with Love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George W. Bush, George Washington, Ian Fleming, James Dickey, John Kennedy, Joseph O'Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Maya Angelou, Mr. Flood's Party, Netherworld, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Proverbs, Richard Corey, Richard Nixon, Richard Sheridan, Robert Frost, Ronald Reagan, School for Scandal, Shooting of Dan McGrew, Song of Solomon, Stendahl, Teddy Roosevelt, The Red and the Black, The Stranger, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Toni Morrison |
As I look back over this past week of entries, what conclusions can I draw? First, that literature can serve the cause of race relations in this country. The friendship between Huck and Jim spurred my dreams of black-white friendship when I was a child being raised in segregated schools in the south, and it [...]
I think it was 13 years ago or so when I read in our county newspaper that a high school student was objecting to a book he had been assigned to read in an Advanced Placement English class. The book was Toni’s Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Song of Solomon, a book on the Advanced Placement list, and [...]
How much impact can images from a book like Huckleberry Finn have upon a reader? I’ve written about the importance of Huck’s courageous stand upon me as a young child, so I would answer, “ a tremendous impact.” But could there also be a negative impact? Could the docile and comic Jim undermine the self [...]
Yesterday I mentioned that Huckleberry Finn has been banned in some schools, perhaps because of Huck’s liberal use of the “n” word. Now Twain, of course, doesn’t use that language because he himself is racist but because he wants to capture Huck’s “white trash” ignorance, which Huck then magnificently transcends. But the argument has gone [...]
Here’s a personal story of how a literary classic came to my aid at a critical time in my life. When I was in sixth grade in Sewanee, Tennessee (the year was 1962), I was a plaintiff in a civil rights case. School systems all over the south were defying the Brown vs. Board of [...]
