Tag: LiteraturePage 3 of 4
First, above all else, I consider myself a student of literature. Perhaps I’ve chosen this phrase to generalize my pursuits, or maybe to conceal the small place in…
I could go on and on regarding literature or art that has altered my perspective on life. I was tempted to write about watching beautiful sunsets that show…
James Hackett describes how his early encounters with some classics of American and British literature—including Moby-Dick—caused him to become more reflective about life. They also taught him the…
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands was one of the assigned texts in my U.S. Mexico Border class this semester. In this book, Anzaldua writes about borders she encounters between herself…
I was always an avid reader as a child. As a matter of fact, I read a majority of the Harry Potter books when I was in elementary…
I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn…
I was born and grew up in rural Southern Appalachia. Books and stories were my pathway out of the holler and into a world of hope and possibility….
For teenagers, the world they live in is often described as “normal” and everything else is “weird.” One of my goals as a history teacher is to help…
Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people…
Mike Rizer used to avoid reading at any cost, even buying CliffsNotes when necessary. But in his sophomore year of college, Ernest Hemingway changed all that. Since then,…
To get an ALP (Arts, Literature, & Philosophy) credit I took an English class about books and short stories that were turned into movies. What I thought would…
Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to…
Thomas J. Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the…
In this account, William E. Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about…
From reading Crime and Punishment as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces Absalom, Absolom! and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in college, Gil Greggs describes…
In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in…
Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to…
This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my…
English teacher Justin Parmenter describes how his encounters with essays by Thoreau and Emerson, and later with the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” helped…
Mirah Horowitz describes the lessons imparted from her mother, an English professor, on reading and writing as ongoing practices of critical inquiry. Building on their shared love of…