May 29, 2011
“Real Men Read Austen.” That’s the title of chapter 1 of Peter Leithart’s excellent book, Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen.
Leithart says if he could have dinner with a dozen of the greatest British and American writers, he’d want the seat next to Jane Austen because she would be the most [...]
May 29, 2011
Just read a fascinating article by Brian Brown at Humane Pursuits. Here’s the gist of his answer:
“I think we like Jane Austen because we like stories with men in them. Do not misunderstand me. We don’t watch a Jane Austen movie because Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne aren’t men. But we face—and have been facing [...]
April 14, 2011
One of my favorite authors, Eudora Welty, was born 102 years ago today. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 10 years since I attended her funeral, which I wrote about for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook.
I was privileged to meet Miss Welty at a writing conference in the late 1980s. In this photo, [...]
March 29, 2011
Back when sports fans were filling out their college basketball brackets, I wrote on Facebook that these were the only brackets that interested me:
[ ] ( ) { } < >
I was wrong.
Even better than punctuation brackets is a book bracket. Now this is a competition I can really get into!
Voting on contenders from [...]
March 22, 2011
David Kern of the Circe Institute proposed a baseball team of America’s greatest authors.
I especially like his choices of F. Scott Fitzgerald as shortstop and William Faulkner in left field.
Clever!
January 17, 2011
If you’ve ever heard of John Buchan, it’s probably because of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of his novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Buchan was an amazingly productive author of over 100 works of fiction and nonfiction, averaging five books a year from 1922 to 1936. He wrote a 24-volume history of World War I during the war, [...]
November 6, 2010
Jane Eyre provoked quite a heated discussion in my literature class for 9th-12th-grade homeschoolers. Some loved the book; some despised it; and others liked only parts of it. St. John Rivers was universally despised.
To bring out the students’ creativity, I asked them to write an alternate ending to the novel. My only requirement was [...]
August 25, 2010
My high school literature class for our weekly homeschool co-op follows the time period we are studying in George Grant’s Gileskirk Humanities curriculum. Here’s our reading list for this year’s Modernity class:
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
The Antiquary by Sir Walter Scott (1816)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860-61 serial, [...]
