The Hovel
“Hard by here is a hovel. Some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest.” – King Lear
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
The literary tradition imaginatively chronicles the experience of sinners and sufferers through the ages. When engaged with, it both enlarges our own limited perspective so we may see compassionately through the eyes of others, and also holds up a mirror to human nature – in particular, our weakness – thereby highlighting our need for true relationship. CenterForLit’s blog, The Hovel, aims to act as a doorway to this kind of community by facilitating life-giving conversation about the reading experience, literary education, and literature’s great ideas.
Deconstructing A Wrinkle in Time
“The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them: ‘Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the end of the earth, ye who go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!”…
“Close Reading” and Postmodern Criticism
My mother hates the term “Close Reading.” To her it is emblematic of the postmodernist deconstructive literary criticism she encountered during her own college years in the late 80’s. To engage in this sort of “close reading” was to focus so intently on the trees that you missed the forest entirely; to purposefully evade and ignore the overarching thematic meaning of an author’s text and to decide what the work “meant to you” by evaluating how the granular details of the story made you feel…
On “Getting the Right Answers” to Socratic Questions
One of my favorite, daily tasks at CenterForLit is answering emails from parents and educators who write with questions about literature and homeschooling. I look forward to these conversations, albeit virtual, because I remember the isolation endemic in much of my own homeschooling work. Taking on the monolithic task of educating any child in the face of armies of educators in the public and private educational sector, all of whom bear degrees and expertise in their single fields, requires a great deal of confidence, which many call temerity…
On Faith, Hope, and Fear
January and February were difficult months for us Andrews types. The new year brought with it two car accidents, a health drama, and a broken furnace in the coldest week of the season. I would love to report that we handled it all with faces “set like flint,” hearts full of faith and unflappable confidence in God’s goodness, but that wouldn’t be honest. Instead, we hunkered down, forgetting our responsibilities, alternately trembling and petitioning God for relief…
Sculpture and Sabbath in Jeremiah
Making Jeremiah the prophet relevant to modern day high school students is a neat trick, and I’d like to have a long talk with the teacher who can pull it off. The problem is Jeremiah’s preoccupation with idolatry, the crafting and worshiping of wooden statues. The entire prophecy is a diatribe against this practice, and since few of my students are pagan sculptors, they have a hard time relating…
In the House of Tom Bombadil
Blog articles always seem to start with some catchy hook – a ‘lede,’ we used to call them in my college writing class. A reader will only persist in finishing the article, so said my professor, if the earliest lines are pithy, terse, and challenging, like the turn in a sonnet or the rhetorical question in a stump speech. I don’t have one of those this time around. I do, however, have a rambling thought or two about human nature brought on by contemplating one of my favorite characters in all of literature: Tolkien’s master of the woods, Tom Bombadil…
Trapped by the Rules: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Emily and I just had the distinct pleasure of teaching a tricky and delightful poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Picture this: King Arthur and his noble Knights of the Round Table are busy throwing a Christmas feast, when in through the big double doors rides, you guessed it, a Green Knight. Now, before your 21st-century modern imaginations dress an entirely normal, if large, knight in green clothes and call it good, allow me to emphasize a poetic reality: this dude is green. His skin is green. His beard is green. His horse is green. His teeth are green.…
How Then Shall We Read? – An Apology for Literary Analysis
Much has been made in recent years of the prime opportunity childhood presents to shape lifetime readers. Reading aloud, in particular, is the word on the street where methodology is concerned. With videos and entertainment on the cultural rise, parents no longer have the luxury of throwing a book at a child and hoping it will “take.” Now, they must read it to them, guide them, captivate, and verily, enchant them into the magical kingdom of imaginative literature. Certainly, reading aloud may perform this function and a multitude of others that prove equally valuable…
A Review of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express
I’m just going to say it: I loved Kenneth Branagh’s recent film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel, Murder on the Orient Express. Partially this is due to the fact that it was visually stunning. But what did I expect? That a lavishly furnished steam engine, winding its atmospheric way through snow-capped mountain passes, carrying a richly costumed cadre of some of the finest actors of our generation would be difficult to look at? Being familiar with Branagh’s penchant for over-the-top-ness, I expected a spectacle, and ladies and gentlemen, this film delivered. It was beautiful…
Dawes, Art, and Good Criticism
So, I’ve been listening to an album recently, and it has me thinking about the purpose of “art.” The album is perkily titled, We’re All Gonna Die, and I’m thoroughly obsessed with it. I’ve spent hours unpacking the lush orchestration, focusing this time on the perfectly liquid bass parts, next on the engrossing and sensitive drum tracks, and then on Taylor Goldsmith’s quietly pitch perfect voice. I just can’t seem to get enough. But, being a reader by nature, I also can’t help but be confronted with the sadness written into each track…
Of Possible Impossibilities
I feel a little bit like cheating writing this after reading Ian’s recent post on The Bronze Bow, but I, too, had an interesting discussion in my literature classes recently while trying to decide on where to place the climax of a story. I’ve been slowly teaching my students the elements of fiction, and chose The Quiltmaker’s Gift by Jeff Brumbeau in order to talk about characters. The Quiltmaker’s Gift is a picture book about two people. The first is a powerful, greedy, unhappy king who fills his castle with gifts that he constantly demands from his subjects. The second…
Literary Education and the Reformation
As the Western world observes the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation – just kidding; I know most people are trick-or-treating instead – I am struck by its lasting effect on all things literary. It is amazing how, no matter what we believe theologically, we read and teach in a world informed by Martin Luther and those crazy 16th century theologians…
Foreshadowing and the Judgment of Christ in “The Bronze Bow”
The climactic moment of the children’s classic, The Bronze Bow, is a simple smile. As I was preparing to teach this work to a room full of eager Junior High students, I was refreshed by Elizabeth George Speare’s elegant style and careful attention to detail. Master that she was, she brought her novel to a perfect crescendo, using all her considerable literary tools to highlight one shining moment of turning: the climax…
What is a Literary Education?
The capacity for self-knowledge is the thing that makes us human. Since education is the cultivation of mature humanity in students, we conclude that education happens when a student catches a glimpse of himself as a thinking creature. In the best case scenario, this glimmer of self-knowledge leads him further, to understand himself as an imperfect creature – a sinful creature, desperately in need of Grace…
What Mathematics Can Teach Us About Literature
Missy and I spend a lot of time showing parents how to teach short stories with pictures by means of simple questions like “does the main character succeed?” This approach has helped thousands of teachers get young students started in literary reading with children’s classics like Mem Fox’s Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, Patricia MacLachlan’s All the Places to Love, or Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon. But what, we are often asked, should older students do? Are there other methods necessary to develop students at the high school level?…
Me and Mr. Toad
I recently began re-reading The Wind in the Willows for the umpteenth time, and, as classic novels are wont to do, it communicated to me in an entirely different way than it has before. I’ve been struck over the years by a lot of wonderful things in this little book, from Mole’s once-earned-never-lost loyalty, to Rat’s effortless hospitality, and Badger’s deep and abiding self-confidence. But one thing I hadn’t realized until now is that Mr. Toad and I are remarkably similar…
Flowers, Seeds, and Students
I can’t stop thinking about the passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory that I wrote about in my last post, where he cautions us against idolizing our memories of the past: “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found,” he says. I am sure he chose that image because of a flower’s beauty, but I wonder if he also had in mind how fleeting that beauty was designed to be…
Teaching the Past with Woody Allen
Woody Allen’s 2011 movie Midnight in Paris has it all: a star-studded cast, fantastic music, beautiful settings, and great camerawork. However, its greatest feature is the story itself. The protagonist is aspiring writer Gil Pender, who stumbles into a magic vortex that allows him to travel back to 1920s Paris, a place and time that he considers the high point of Western culture…
CenterForLit Staff Current Reads
Introducing a new feature of The Hovel, in which CenterForLit staff will occasionally be forced to confess what it is that they are currently reading, no matter how nerdy or frivolous…
Paltry Deities in “The Heart of the Matter”
Recently, I reread an old college essay I wrote on Graham Greene’s bleak classic, The Heart of the Matter. Immersing myself in thoughts which consumed my every waking hour for a whole semester two years ago, I remembered in a flash how dissatisfied I had been with the resolution of the piece…