Tag Archives: reading

What Would Homer Say? Model Writers at Your Shoulder as a Tool for Writing Improvement

Posted on August 20, 2013 by

Imitation and emulation. The ancient Greek teacher Longinus is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history of rhetoric and literary criticism: the sublime (elevated emotion; ecstasy). His reflections on the sublime can … Continue reading →

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Read

Posted on August 19, 2013 by

At The Daily Beast, academics and writers were asked to name “one book that [college] students shouldn’t escape campus without having read.” MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, picked Toni Morrison’s Beloved because it “stabs straight at the heart … Continue reading →

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Dance With Me (In The Interpretation Of Lines From Yeats)

Posted on December 29, 2012 by

When reading something, guessing about an author’s exact state of mind is sometimes tricky, but it’s still fun to play. Take for instance William Butler Yeats’s poem, “Among School Children.” The Yale literary critic Paul de Man once noted that … Continue reading →

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Does Critical Theory Kill Aristotle or Does Aristotle Kill Critical Theory?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by

Within the humanities, contemporary critical theorizing typically entails left leaning political commitments accompanied by some line of attack or qualification on Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle—his idea that every communicative act necessarily requires three things: an author or speaker (Greek: ethos), a … Continue reading →

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Practice Makes Perfect: David Hume Teaches Us How To Read Closely And See

Posted on November 13, 2012 by

In 1757, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) published four essays under the title, Four Dissertations, one of which he called “Of the Standard of Taste.” In it, Hume attempts to tackle the question of why people vary in opinion … Continue reading →

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Write Better Than You Do: Four Writing Tips From 2000 Years Ago

Posted on October 31, 2012 by

Want to write better than you do? Consider trying these four ancient tricks: Focus on the sublime. The Greek writer, Longinus (first century CE), is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history … Continue reading →

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Louis CK Does a Close Reading of the Story of Abraham and Isaac

Posted on August 30, 2012 by
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Reading the Poem, “Advice for Dying Fathers,” at Butler’s Coffee

Posted on January 30, 2012 by

On Friday night, one of my poet friends (Niccelle Davis) took a picture of me reading a poem to an audience at Butler’s Coffee in Palmdale, California, and posted it at her blog. I didn’t look too fat, so I asked her … Continue reading →

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How to Really Make a World of Humanists: Helen Vendler Urges Training in Close Reading

Posted on September 13, 2011 by

In a recent essay for Harvard Magazine, the great Helen Vendler pushes back against our teach-to-the-test/Twitter-texting culture, eloquently calling on parents and teachers, including those teaching college, to train young people in close, as opposed to merely proficient, reading: Without reading, there … Continue reading →

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James Wood: Literature Complexifies the Atheist-Theist Debate

Posted on September 5, 2011 by

In a recent essay for the Guardian, Harvard English professor, James Wood, identifies four ways that literature complexifies the atheist-theist debate. As Wood sees it, literary writers tend to: explore fluctuations in the human psyche; track messy mixtures of truth and error; imaginatively walk in … Continue reading →

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Chris Hedges the Prophet on Print Culture Turning to Image Culture

Posted on March 17, 2011 by

Former New York Times war correspondent, Chris Hedges, has, over the past couple of years, taken on the mantle of a secular prophet—an emperor has no clothes truthteller—writing scathing (and I think powerful) books and essays documenting the messes that we find ourselves … Continue reading →

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Close Literary Reading 101: Thinking about How Stories End

Posted on February 15, 2011 by

I thought it might be fun (at least for me) to lay out, in a series of short blog posts, some of the basic terms and ideas that I present to my students when talking about the “close reading” of literary texts. … Continue reading →

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Andre Glucksmann One More Time

Posted on January 1, 2011 by

I think this is a great quote. It comes from the French philosopher, Andre Glucksmann: Socrates’s uncertainty revealed a rupture that gave birth to philosophy. The divine word is a mystery; it can mean everything or nothing. Zeus neither speaks nor … Continue reading →

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A Sign from Zeus: Andre Glucksmann on Textual Interpretation and Emphasis

Posted on December 29, 2010 by

A quote doesn’t get more profound than this, so I’ll post it twice (so that you’ll read it twice). It comes from the French philosopher, Andre Glucksmann: Socrates’s uncertainty revealed a rupture that gave birth to philosophy. The divine word is … Continue reading →

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Google Books App for iPad

Posted on December 7, 2010 by

Free books by the millions? I haven’t downloaded the app for my iPad yet, but this looks really seductive. I wonder what the catch is: Here’s the link: books.google.com/ebooks And I looked up Thoreau’s Walden. It reads pretty nice: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=yiQ3AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader

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A Great Quote on Theory Sludge

Posted on May 13, 2010 by

This quote comes from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in the New York Times Book Review recently: The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology … Continue reading →

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Thought for the Day

Posted on May 8, 2010 by

Dogs can’t read books, which is sad. But wouldn’t it be more sad if dogs could read books, but didn’t? Below is an image of the remains of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, which was completed circa 135 CE. It could hold 12,000 … Continue reading →

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Two lives, no books

Posted on May 2, 2010 by

This post comes from a brief exchange that I overheard, at a garage sale, yesterday morning. A man and a woman, both looking to be in their forties, paused at the same moment and gazed down into a box of books that was for … Continue reading →

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The dispiriting cultural politics of shallowness transformed into the cultural politics of humanity

Posted on March 20, 2010 by

A stunning ad if you watch it to the end. It will completely blow you away: Press rewind on despair. I felt like the first half of this ad I was watching Fox News and the second half I had come … Continue reading →

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Mental Health Break

Posted on February 20, 2010 by
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