We needn’t sit helpless in front of the TV, of course; one of the great debates in cultural studies over the past couple decades has been waged over the notion that consumers of mass media might have access to real agency, real power. There are a couple of steps in becoming a self-conscious media consumer-cum-producer, [...]
So I don’t want to pursue the allegorical reading of the novel this evening, as easy and as tempting that is. I want to look at a related question—the novel’s enactment of various narrative strategies that are meant to suggest, precisely, the power of narrative. Throughout the course of the novel, Ishiguro demonstrates the power [...]
I had the pleasure on Sunday night to address the incoming Pomona first-year students on the topic of the first-year reading: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I thought I’d post those remarks here, broken down across a few days into easily digestible installments. Two things I should probably say before diving in. First, I don’t [...]
Like anyone who has a Facebook account, I get e-mails occasionally telling me that someone or other wants to be “friends.” I’m normally pretty accommodating, I think; though like most thoughtful people, I resist the idea that these shared data streams actually constitute friendships. I could write the rest of this post putting the terms [...]
Let me begin by thanking my colleagues Rosemary Feal (Executive Director of the MLA), Professor Erin Templeton, and Chronicle of Higher Education writer Jennifer Howard for correcting my error: the Los Angeles Times did run one feature story on the recent MLA Convention last week, focusing on the role of the humanities, and the job [...]
One of the holiday season’s hallowed traditions has abruptly shifted this year: the annual convention of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association (MLA) moved from its time-honored slot of horror right between Christmas and New Years (December 27–30) to the newly civilized and more family-friendly first week in January—this year, January 6–9. Another American ritual has [...]
I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many [...]
It had to happen: one of my favorite bloggers (and good friend and colleague) Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is away on leave this year (and currently, I believe, in Germany?), blogged about the Pippin essay yesterday, more or less simultaneously with my post. I’m not going to read hers until after I finish this, for fear [...]
My friend Ken pointed me toward a piece in the on-line version of the New York Times that ran last Sunday, October 10. I don’t want to misrepresent him, and I trust he’ll weigh in here; but my impression was that Ken appreciated the piece because it articulated something that sounded right to him about [...]
Back to the primal scene: the roads from Champaign, Illinois, to St. Louis, Missouri. Roads paved . . . with poetry. I don’t just mean the poetry at the end of the road, a dollop of T. S. Eliot at the end of the rainbow of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: I’m talking about that quintessential [...]