In “The White Christian and His Conscience,” Lillian Smith breaks down the ways that religion, specifically Christianity, works to maintain power and how it causes individuals to lose their conscience, causing them to live, ostensibly, with the warring teachings of Jesus and the white supremacist society they exist within. Smith, also, presents readers with analogies between Southern white Christians and Nazi Germany, at one … Read More We Must Transform the World!
+ anna seghers, graphic memoir, graphic novels, joe sacco, keum suk gendry-kim, mana neyestani, marjane satratpi, nora krug, rutu modan, syllabus
Last semester, I taught a course entitled The Reverberations of World War II where students read works by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magda Szabó, Intizar Husain, and Yasa Katsuei. The course focused, specifically, on the lead up to the war (Katsuei), the war itself (Seghers, Serge, and Szabó), and the aftermath of the war (Szabó and Husain) across the world from Korea to France to Hungary … Read More World Literature and Graphic Novel Syllabus
Over the past few months, I have read a lot of Eastern European authors, specifically from Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. I started with Hungarian writer Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go, a graphic memoir that details the lingering impacts on the Holocaust on Katin, especially as she visits Berlin to see her son then to go to a museum exhibit highlighting her work. I picked up Polish … Read More Time and Memory in Tanja Maljartschuk’s “Forgottenness”
Last year, I read 79 books. I really wanted to hit 80, but I fell one short. This year, my goal is to read at least 80 books, and as of the end of March I’m on track to read 10 books a month, so 120 books overall. I really doubt I’ll hit that goal, but I may. To reach that goal, I have … Read More Some of My Favorite Books So Far in 2024
+ african american literature, all the sinners bleed, american literature, ernest j gaines, Literature, s.a. cosby, southern literature, the autobiography of miss jane pittman
Recently, I wrote about some of the ways that S.A. Cosby addresses religion and faith in his recent novel All the Sinners Bleed. Today, I want to look at another aspect of his novel that stood out to me, namely the ways that he examines the roots of enslavement and racism buried deep within the soil of Charon, the South, and the nation. He does this … Read More Literary Influences in S.A. Cosby’s “All the Sinners Bleed”
Interminable Rambling 