Category: Housekeeping
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Silence, True and Pure
Silence has shrouded this space for much of the last few months because, in my life offline, most of my recent thoughts have been bent around a different kind of silence, a silence true and pure. In April 2014, my wife and I became parents to a healthy and happy little girl named Ivy. Not…
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In the Classroom
As well as spending my own time this term teaching AP Literature and Composition, I’m happy to see that my article on Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg principle is being used as a resource in AP Literature classes elsewhere.
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Still Trying to Make Sense of the Trauma
Brian J. Phelps elaborates on my reading of post-9/11 literary fiction.
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Unchanging
The Captain America narrative has never changed. Sure, there were some slightly different nuances here and there, but for the most part, he was the same man. I knew who he was, I knew he was going to win at the end of the day and I knew he wasn’t going to be dead forever. That’s…
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Developments
In a recent Prezi presentation, Billy Cunningham cites my article on characterization in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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Towards Understanding
First published in 1940, Walter van Tilburg Clark’s The Oxbow Incident is an example of a literary western novel — that is, not a mass-market work. Clark’s novel presented the American West and the western hero in a very different light. The novel focuses on the violence inherent in the history and mythology of the West. Clark…
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Decline and Fall
Like the best examples of the genre [of the ‘decline of literary criticism’ polemic], [Gideon] Haigh’s glints with aphorisms, but it is also typically brief when it comes to articulating what is at stake. His piece informed a debate on Australian literary reviewing late in 2010, hosted by the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. The participants…
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A Reorientation
Links to Jacob Silverman’s notes “against enthusiasm” have been popping up in my RSS and Twitter feeds for a few of weeks now, first when they appeared as brief remarks on Silverman’s blog and again when Silverman turned them into an article published last week on Slate. In most instances the links have been accompanied by either praise for Silverman’s…