Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about constructing a fascism in literature syllabus. Right now, I keep going back and forth on whether or not to focus specifically on American literature or to expand it and make it a world literature course. For this post, I am doing the latter because I feel that reading novels about fascism in a broader context … Read More Fascism in Literature Syllabus
Last year, I read Magda Szabó’s Kaitlin Street, and after finishing it, I knew that I wanted to teach because of the ways that the novel explores themes of memory, love, family, and more during turbulent times. As I constructed my syllabus for “The Reverberations of World War II,” I toyed with adding Szabó’s Abigail, a novel about a young girl at a boarding school in Hungary during … Read More Memory of the Past in Magda Szabó’s “Katalin Street”
In the previous post, I started examining some of the themes in Tanja Maljartschuk’s Forgottenness. Today, I want to continue that exploration by looking at two specific passages in the novel that detail the passage of time and why we need to think about history and the ways it impacts our present. One of these moments occurs when Lypynskyi decides to give a history lecture in … Read More The Roots and Soot of Time in Tanja Maljartschuk’s “Forgottenness”
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”
+ african american literature, american literature, ernest j gaines, gothic literature, louisiana literature, of love and dust, southern literature
Whenever I look I look at a list of the most important twentieth century American novels and novelists, the same names pop up again and again: William Faulkner, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison. While each of these authors and their works are important, for various reasons, I do not see any of them as penning the quintessential twentieth … Read More The Most Important Twentieth-Century American Novel
Interminable Rambling 