Isaac Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (1972) is a poignant tale of life amid the ruins of lang... more Isaac Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (1972) is a poignant tale of life amid the ruins of language. In it Singer reflects the concern George Steiner, George Orwell, and many other critics of postwar culture have expressed about the inflations and distortions of language in recent history that threaten to leave us all inarticulate.1 Language, they claim, has become divorced from the sources of spiritual vitality that give it power. The living word has become a corrupted and corrupting agent, and those who deal in words are endangered by the infectious plague of meaninglessness: those who live by the word shall die by the word. The story of Herman Broder, talmudic scholar and writer, illustrates how tragically "the letter kills" when cut off from the living spirit of the tradition it encodes. Herman is a man who lives by words: he interprets Talmud, writes sermons and books, edits manuscripts, reads incessantly, and writes compulsively. In fact, he treats his own life as a fictional narrative, weaving a web of lies that literally creates the environment in which he lives, suspended between his two mistresses, alternating between them as an author might between plot and subplot. Gradually Herman loses "authorial control" over that life: the stories he tells his women conflict; his fictions become unconvincing, his promises hollow. He no longer knows how to make language connect with experience
What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national characte... more What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's "Walden" and ending with Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping". Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.
Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literat... more Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to disease in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" or in Harold Pinter's "A Kind of Alaska"; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine.It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada.This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions.The thirty-four essays in "Teaching Literature and Medicine" describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.
Isaac Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (1972) is a poignant tale of life amid the ruins of lang... more Isaac Singer's Enemies, A Love Story (1972) is a poignant tale of life amid the ruins of language. In it Singer reflects the concern George Steiner, George Orwell, and many other critics of postwar culture have expressed about the inflations and distortions of language in recent history that threaten to leave us all inarticulate.1 Language, they claim, has become divorced from the sources of spiritual vitality that give it power. The living word has become a corrupted and corrupting agent, and those who deal in words are endangered by the infectious plague of meaninglessness: those who live by the word shall die by the word. The story of Herman Broder, talmudic scholar and writer, illustrates how tragically "the letter kills" when cut off from the living spirit of the tradition it encodes. Herman is a man who lives by words: he interprets Talmud, writes sermons and books, edits manuscripts, reads incessantly, and writes compulsively. In fact, he treats his own life as a fictional narrative, weaving a web of lies that literally creates the environment in which he lives, suspended between his two mistresses, alternating between them as an author might between plot and subplot. Gradually Herman loses "authorial control" over that life: the stories he tells his women conflict; his fictions become unconvincing, his promises hollow. He no longer knows how to make language connect with experience
What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national characte... more What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's "Walden" and ending with Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping". Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.
Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literat... more Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to disease in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" or in Harold Pinter's "A Kind of Alaska"; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine.It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada.This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions.The thirty-four essays in "Teaching Literature and Medicine" describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.
New Thoughts on Old Books: Why Read Homer, Milton, or a Medieval Nun at a Time like This?, 2022
The reasons to read contemporary works, and older ones, by people of color, indigenous peoples, a... more The reasons to read contemporary works, and older ones, by people of color, indigenous peoples, and other groups underrepresented in anthologies until recently are compelling and should be obvious. The reasons to continue reading "classic" texts that have until recently held places of honor in anthologies and English curricula are, however, less obvious to many contemporary readers. This book is emphatically not a defense of the literary "canon" of generations past, but does bring the thoughts of a range of professors of English to bear on a question about which many undergraduates and adult readers wonder. These thoughtful, engaging, personal responses to why read Homer or Milton or Spenser or James, among others, are meant as invitations to revisit "old assignments" in new terms.
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