Growing up, I’d be riding with someone and as we drove through a parking lot, the person may look at a Cadillac or a car that was not parked correctly and say, “Gotta be a Democrat.” Or, while waiting in line somewhere, a person might say, “Look at that Canadian acting like that.” In each of these cases, the speaker attempted to code their … Read More The Importance of Critically Engaging with Language
This semester, I’m teaching Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” again, and every time I teach it something new stands out to me. I read and thought about Morrison’s story in connection with the relationship between the author and her audience. Morrison invites her audience to become a co-creator of the text, and in this manner the author and audience engage within a dialogic where they each … Read More Collaboration between the Author and Reader
+ american literature, language, quentin compson, shreve, southern gothic, southern literature, spoade, the sound and the fury, william faulkner
Last post, I started discussing the ways that William Faulkner, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), explores the ways that language and words construct meaning and social hierarchies. Today, I want to continue that discussion by zeroing in on a couple of more scenes in Quentin’s section, specifically the scene where he talks with the three boys who are going fishing and the … Read More Language in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”: Part II
+ american literature, ernest hemingway, in our time, language, margaret wright-cleveland, modernism, the battler, twentieth century literature
Last post, I wrote about the ways that Ernest Hemingway highlights the ways that language constructs race in his story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” There, I examined the ways that Dick Boulton and Henry Adams describe the logs that they pull out of the sand. Are they “stolen” or free for the taking. While Hemingway zeroes in on the ways that Boulton … Read More Language in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler”
+ american literature, ernest hemingway, in our time, language, margaret wright-cleveland, modernism, the doctor and the doctor's wife, twentieth century literature
Writing about the connections between Jean Toomer’s Cane and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Margaret Wright-Cleveland argues that both texts examine social constructions of race. Specifically, she notes that Hemingway’s text “makes clear that both whiteness and blackness are racial constructions.” As such, both Toomer and Hemingway position “race as a formative idea for American modernism.” Today, I want to look at the ways … Read More Language in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”
Interminable Rambling 