Category: Reading

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Listen and Respond

[S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action… – Hamlet

I once had a whole batch of School Certificate answers on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by boys whose form-master was apparently a breeder of poultry. Everything that Chaucer had said in describing Chauntecleer and Pertelote was treated by them simply and solely as evidence about the precise breed of these two birds. And, I must admit, the result was very interesting. They proved beyond doubt that Chauntecleer was very different from our modern specialised strains and much closer to the Old English ‘barn-door fowl’. But I couldn’t help feeling that they had missed something. – CS Lewis

Paul admonishes the Roman church to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. There’s an aptness there, a symmetry, a decorum. Hamlet wants his actors to adopt a similar method. Match what you say with what you do. Respond accordingly. Reciprocate. Continue reading “Listen and Respond”

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A Question about Reading

This week, I finished Alan Jacobs’s provocative A Theology of Reading.

This is a book I’ve needed to read. Last week, I wrote a statement about faith integration for a promotion application, and the book’s refrains of love and generosity were ringing in my ears. Jacobs explores the way our readings can change over time, exemplified by a detailed examination of WH Auden’s relationship to Soren Kierkegaard (probably my favorite part of the book). And most of all the book gave me some follow-up reading; the book convinced me to return to John Milbank and (especially) Mikhail Bakhtin.

The book also left me with a question. At the book’s close, Jacobs examines Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and its satirical take on the “institutionalization of charity,” a dangerous pitfall if one substitutes a bureaucratized love for one a personally vulnerable one. Jacobs turns his eye to the academy at the book’s conclusion, but I was left wondering about another extension of Jacobs’s insight.

As an English professor, I feel conflicted about the fact that I am part of the institutionalization of literature and of a certain kind of reading.

My question then: is this kind of “institutionalization” a potential problem?

Does it contribute to the analogous problems as charity’s institutionalization?

If so, what are some ways we can combat those potential problems?

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The Story Grid and King Lear

I’ve been working through Shawn Coyne’s book The Story Grid and its accompanying podcast the past couple of weeks, and it’s been creeping into my teaching.

Coyne edited novels for Random House and Doubleday for 25 years and wants to teach fiction writers how to become their own effective editors. At the heart of Coyne’s work are the five building blocks of every scene:

The five elements that build story are the inciting incident (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a crisis question that requires a choice between at least two negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods, the climax choice and the resolution.

I’ve started internalizing this heuristic by applying to things I’ve been teaching. When we add to this five-part structure Coyne’s idea that every longer work should have a beginning hook, middle build, and final payoff, we get this schematic for Shakespeare’s King Lear.

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A couple of comments:

  1. The play is divides more evenly into three acts then five: banishment, reconciliation, final separation.
  2. The play’s heartbreaking conclusion (which Shakespeare famously altered from the play’s sources) is so crushing because of the reconciliation that ends the Middle Build.
  3. The Gloucester subplot works more as a two-act structure: Edmund’s deceit through Gloucester’s punishment through Edgar’s performance for his father through his final battle with Edmund.
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Wrestling with Othello

We happened to read and talk about Othello the same week we celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While the play’s early (white) audiences may not have reacted to the play’s racial dynamics, I cannot, in 21st Century America, read Roderigo, Iago, and Brabanzio’s descriptions of Othello and not think of our nation’s own conflicted relationship to black men and women (#blacklivesmatter). This is a play that asks us to balance the duties of individual and social responsibility. We can lay blame for what happens to Desdemona on Othello alone or even extend the blame to Iago (whatever his real motivation is). But what responsibility does the larger society have for enabling a world where Othello associates the color of his skin with sin? Continue reading “Wrestling with Othello”

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Learning to Smile

Confession: my default facial expression is not a smile. Typically my screen-saver face vacillates between “I’m thinking deep thoughts” or “I’m vaguely upset about something.” I have to think about smiling, be intentional about it, because I have been practicing for years not doing it without even knowing it. And the thing is that there’s so much to smile about (e.g. chocolate chips)! Continue reading “Learning to Smile”