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Tag Archives: Literature
The Heroic Couplet; Children’s Literature (originally aired as Kids and Couplets)
Paul Hunter [NHC Fellow 1985-86, 1995-96] describes the heroic couplet–”its rhyme, its reason, its artistic and ideological functions in English literature.” [Wayne Pond]
Ulrich Knoepflmacher [NHC Fellow 1995-96] “talks about children’s literature and ‘cross-writing’ — a device by which authors who write for children create a dialog between past and present selves.” [Wayne Pond]
Posted in Episodes
Tagged English literature, Heroic couplet, Literature, Ninteenth century, Poetry, Victorian
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Classrooms and Correctness
David Denby discusses his book Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
Stanley Fish discusses his new book, Professional Correctness, which is an account of literary studies and political change.
Asking for Love
The critics agree — Roxana Robinson‘s fiction is masterful (Alice Munro), elegant and tender (Mary Gordon), a striking blend of nuance, empathy, and wit (Publishers Weekly). She writes about old-moneyed families of Manhattan, Connecticut, Long Island, and Maine, the inhabitants of summer homes and town houses, boarding schools and private clubs. But her characters are as contemporary as today’s teenagers rendered in a style that is concise and unsparingly honest yet tempered by sympathy and a basic understanding of human nature. Ms. Robinson reads from and talks about her new collection of stories, Asking for Love.
Writing God’s Life
Jack Miles provides an overview of his new book, God: A Biography, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography. In it, he contemplates the life of the Divinity as expressed through a variety of epic roles, from creator to destroyer to friend of the family. The result, according to The New York Times, is a scintillating work of literary scholarship that will forever color, if not downright alter, our perception of the Bible as a work of art.
Legal Lit
Read a book or go to jail. That choice is key to an innovative alternative sentencing program called Changing Lives through Literature. One of its inventors, literary scholar Robert Waxler, describes it for Soundings. Also Robert Feguson offers the opinion that courtroom trials are among our most important social ceremonies.
License to Speak
Moving from John Milton in the 17th-century to present-day controversies, two of the country’s leading literary and legal experts provide a lively overview of the modern interpretations of freedom of speech.
Death in a Delphi Seminar
Norman Holland reads from and talks about his new novel, Death in a Delphi Seminar, which he calls a post-modern mystery. The setting is an English department where the complexities of literary theory turn grim and lead to murder in the real world.
The Information
British literary bad boy Martin Amis reads from and talks about his latest novel, The Information, a searing and satiric send-up of envy and angst in British publishing and pop culture. The New York Times calls Amis’s new book wonderfully edgy, delivered in street-smart prose.
Hard Boiled Lit
“Dashiell Hammett gave legions of readers memorable characters such as the Continental Op, the Thin Man, and Sam Spade. His most recent editor, literary scholar Steven Marcus [NHC Fellow 1980-82], of Columbia University, talks [...] about Hammett’s life, times, and artistry.” [Wayne Pond]
Home Is Somewhere Else
“Lilian Furst [NHC Fellow 1988-89], a distinguished scholar of comparative literature, calls herself ‘an Anne Frank who survived.’ Her new book recounts her family’s escape from the Holocaust and presents an ‘autobiography in two voices’ – the counterpoint of her own voice with her father’s memoir, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938.” [Wayne Pond]
Friends
“Classics scholar David Konstan [NHC Fellow 1994-95] of Brown University is working on a new study of friendship. In a wide-ranging conversation [...] Konstan surveys the literature of friendship and talks about its changing meanings from antiquity through the present.” [Wayne Pond]
Do You Read Me?
“According to the distinguished literary critic Denis Donoghue [NHC Fellow 1991-92, 1995-98], to stress reading in American education today sounds dated, almost quaint. But without proper emphasis on what Donoghue calls ‘disinterested reading’ as a means to exercise the moral imagination, American schools run serious risks.” [Wayne Pond]
The Literature of Women’s Lives
“It’s been a long time coming, but the literature of women’s lives — diaries, autobiographies, journals, and memoirs — has firmly established itself on the popular as well as academic literary scenes. Phyllis Rose talks about her recent anthology, The Norton Book of Women’s Lives.” [Wayne Pond]
The House of Percy
Walker Percy is one of the defining figures in American literary culture in the 20th-century. In a thoughtful analysis of six generations of the Percy family, Bertram Wyatt-Brown discusses The House of Percy, an account of honor, melancholy, and imagination in a Southern family.