“I read somewhere that most people’s favorite teacher is a high school English teacher. That doesn’t mean that English teachers are better than other teachers. It means that rather than talk about amoebas or equations, we talk about feelings – Holden Caulfield’s, Hamlet’s, Hedda Gabler’s – and teenagers are full of feelings, so we’re right up their alley. Teaching literature is like shooting fish in a barrel and damned near solipsistic; every great book is, after all, about me.” Continue reading
Tag Archives: George Eliot
BLOOMERS AT LARGE: Asking Smart Questions
by Vicraj Gill
It’s an issue we also consider here at Bloom, though we ultimately side with Parks, who concludes that thinking about writers’ lives is an honest attempt to fill the space that inevitably exists between a book and the person who wrote it. Continue reading
BLOOMERS AT LARGE: Looking Forward and Living Up
by Vicraj Gill
When self-described “46-year-old chump” Rod Dreher found himself facing a midlife crisis, he turned to the classics for succor—namely, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. Continue reading
STAFF CORNER: Unread Classics
This week—in the spirit of candidness, “zigzag paths,” and the ways in which “shoulds” affect our writing and reading lives (and vice versa)—members of the Bloom staff share their “Unread Classics.” Continue reading
BLOOMERS AT LARGE: “Spend Some Time Thinking”
by Vicraj Gill
With Roger Angell’s “Life in the Nineties,” the New Yorker brings us an excellent example of the kind of writing years of life experience can produce. Continue reading
You’ve Come a Long Way, Lady James
by Jill Kronstadt
The author unveils facts as the characters experience them . . . “The detective can know nothing which the reader isn’t also told . . . It would be a very, very bad detective story at the end if the reader felt, ‘Who could possibly have guessed that?’” Continue reading
Bloomers At Large: Women, Winning, and Waiting
by Vicraj Gill
Maybe literary success is less about winning than about waiting—about observing and understanding the world rather than asserting yourself in it as quickly and dramatically as possible. Continue reading