Category Archives: Charles Dickens
From the Archives: The Last Time I Taught Bleak House…
For some reason this phrase has been running through my head to the tune of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” I don’t know why I would be feeling nostalgic about teaching Bleak House, though it was rather a while ago–it was Fall 2008, to be precise. Because we’ve started work on it in my 19th-century [...]
This Week in My Classes: Fun with Fiction
In Close Reading we have finished our poetry unit (yay, say the students–no more scansion!) and been working on short stories. The basic idea is the same: our focus is on paying attention to the various ‘technical’ elements in them, to see how they work to support the effects and ideas of the stories overall. The [...]
This Week in My Classes: The Morals and the Stories
Though everyone is looking a bit peaked around the department these days–students and faculty alike–and I’m certainly feeling the usual pressures as we move into the term’s final phase, I am also finding myself intellectually invigorated by the novels we’re working through in all of my classes. It is just such a pleasure to be [...]
Reading Around: Spinoza, Dickens, and … Ruxton?
Apparently Spinoza’s philosophical “stock” is rising: Another scientist who was passionately Spinozist (going so far as to write him a gushing poem) was Albert Einstein. In Spinoza’s conception of nature, he recognised intuitions matching his own, concerning the elusive unified field theory. Einstein also relied on Spinoza to get him out of trouble when queried [...]
Read Better!
I admit, I have some sympathy with Hillary Kelly’s lament about the whole Oprah Does Dickens thing. I don’t share, or like, Kelly’s condescending assumption that Oprah’s readers are incapable of appreciating the novels, that they will have to “scramble about to decipher Dickens’s obscure dialectical styling and his long-lost euphemisms” or that “with no [...]
Reading David Copperfield
‘Amateur Reader’ is doing a lovely series of posts on his reading of David Copperfield over at Wuthering Expectations. Up so far: I had seen it somewhere. But I could not remember where. – In David Copperfield, Dickens tames his prose. Dickens had reached a dead end, and he knew it. Many of his most [...]
Kind Words: Thackeray Reviews A Christmas Carol
Here’s a bit of Thackeray’s review of A Christmas Carol from Fraser’s Magazine (1844): Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; [...]
Bad Writers, Good Books
The invaluable Arts and Letters Daily alerted me to an essay by Sam Schulman at In Character (“A Journal of Everyday Virtues”–really?) on the topic “Good Writers. Bad Men. Does It Matter?” Schulman’s interest is in the relationship between our knowledge of a writer’s life and character, as revealed, for instance, through literary biography, and [...]
This Week in My Classes (October 5, 2009): It’s Sensational!
In 19th-Century British Fiction, we’re wrapping up our discussions of Great Expectations this week. I’ve written before about teaching this novel. Here’s a bit from that post, in which I focus on Pip’s moving speech to Estella after he learns Magwitch is his true benefactor and Estella, though she “cannot choose but remain part of [...]
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
I think there is a contradiction in my response to this book, one I’m not sure yet how to resolve. Why do I feel–how can I justifiably feel–that the novel conveyed very powerfully to me an experience wholly unlike my own, that is, the experience of suspense, deprivation, and, ultimately, horror, of the young narrator, [...]
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