Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks; Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice; William Shakespeare, Pericles; Bill Schutt, Bite; William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats, how horses shaped human history; Laura Brown, The Counterhuman Imaginary; Mary Antin, The Promised Land; Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone; Leonard Cassuto, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter; Cathy Caruth, Literature in the…
From the new non-fiction shelf of the Boulder Public Libary, I borrowed On Being Jewish Now (2024). It s an anthology of a hundred or so short pieces written in response to the savagery of October 7, 2023. The essay are repetitively, predictably sorrowful, indignant and nationalistic. I skimmed my way through three hundred emotional pages. [ ] The post More on Starokonstantinov appeared first on…
I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade. When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. [ ] The post New Old Books from the 1940s appeared first on Dr. Metablog .
Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him 'a gelding or a mare.' A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear perhaps 'female eunuch' whatever that entails or a gay male or possibly even a [ ] The post Trump, Chaucer, etc. appeared first on Dr. Metablog .
After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest [ ] The post Cornell English Then and Now 6 appeared first on Dr. Metablog…
Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a 'cultural convergence' perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say. Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused [ ] The post Driftin appeared first on Dr. Metablog .
Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by [ ] The post It s Big! We re Little! appeared first on Dr. Metablog .
I first encountered the word 'text' as did everyone else of my cohort as the first component of 'textbook.' At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual [ ] The post Words of My Life Text appeared first on Dr. Metablog .
Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores 'lyric moments' in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter [ ] The post Cornell English Then and Now 5…
Vivian de St. Vrain writes: 'Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title [ ] The post Cornell English Then and Now 4 appeared first on Dr. Metablog .