It’s late January, another semester is gearing up, and yet once more I’m preparing another round of Lit Hum — must be time for Stanley Fish to say something risible about the humanities. Last year around this time, Fish reveled in the inutility of it all: “To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, …
In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of “learning object repositories” (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that predate the digital on-demand world. We …
“Vices” may be “glaring as the noon-day sun,” but poems can go mighty dark. Hidden since 1811, Poetical Essay by a young Percy Bysshe Shelley appears in 2006. Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . . When legal murders swell the lists of pride; …
Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last. – Samuel Johnson Wrong! — I gleefully thought, way back when I was slogging through an eighteenth century literature class in college — bored silly by Johnson’s lumbering, moralizing, psuedo-Oriental Rasselas, and, in contrast, completely delighted by Lawrence Sterne’s goofy carnival of the mind, Tristram …
Something about the enormous endless novel … I can’t quite figure out its spell. There’s the comfort of inhabiting (or being inhabited) across seasons and locations. There’s the marvel at Sisyphean endeavor. There’s the irrational exuberance of pushing through to four-digit pages. Whatever the causes, I rarely get through a short story, but give me …
