Category: american literature

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+ african american literature, american literature, citizen: an american lyric, claudia rankine, georgia literature, killers of the dream, lillian e smith, southern literature, twentieth century literature

The “historical self” and the “self self”: Part I

by Unknown's avatar

Last post, I wrote about the ways that racism, subjugation, and history imprisons everyone, the oppressed and the oppressor alike. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream and connected her discussion with a couple of the vignettes in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. While Smith focuses, predominately, on the white psyche, Rankine focuses on … Read More The “historical self” and the “self self”: Part I

+ a rose for emily, american literature, art, dessa, ernest j gaines, gothic literature, music, my own devices, southern literature, the autobiography of miss jane pittman, the sound and the fury, william faulkner

Art and Creation

by Unknown's avatar

In “Going Empty,” Dessa writes about filming the music video for her song “Sound the Bells.” She talks about learning to control her breathing to dive underwater amidst Jason deCaires Taylor’s submerged sculptures off the coast of Mexico. She ruminates about her career, writing about the fears that time is rapidly running out on commercial success. She thinks, Yet all my life I’ve been … Read More Art and Creation

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+ alabama literature, american history, american literature, atticus finch, boo radley, harper lee, scout finch, southern gothic, southern history, southern literature, to kill a mockingbird, william apess

American History and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”

by Unknown's avatar

Last post, I wrote about the Southern paradoxes in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Today, I want to look at the opening of the novel because Scout traces the events of the novel deep into our nation’s history, before Jem, Scout, or Atticus arrived on the scene. This is important because for all of the missed moments of reflection in the novel, the … Read More American History and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”

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+ a small place, american literature, antigua, caribbean literature, innocents abroad, jamaica kincaid, lillian e smith

Why do we travel?

by Unknown's avatar

One of my favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain. Talking about what travel does to one’s worldview, he wrote in Innocents Abroad, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” … Read More Why do we travel?

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+ american literature, Ben Railton, f. scott fitzgerald, jesmyn ward, modernism, nick carraway, nineteenth century literature, stephanie powell watts, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature

The Great Gatsby Lecture

by Unknown's avatar

For my lecture last fall on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), I decided to focus on the ways that Fitzgerald’s novel does not speak for all of its readers but also how the novel overtly challenges the myth of the American Dream. This challenging of the myth does not only occur with Gatsby. Rather, it occurs from the very beginning of the … Read More The Great Gatsby Lecture

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