The Tissue Thin Difference

Happy trails to John Updike, the novelist and essayist who died of cancer today.  I was supposed to read several of his short stories through the course of my undergraduate career in English, I’d imagine, but I’ll always remember him for his essay, “Hub Fan Bids Kid Adieu,” which is probably up there with H.G. [...]

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A City Built Upon a Hill? Political Rhetoric, Imperialism, and American Exceptionalism

On our Election Day last month, I woke up, put on my sandals and a jacket, and walked across the street to cast my vote in the presidential election. My expression of democratic freedom marked the end of a three month stretch, in which I along with many others have been saturated with blather [...]

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Least Favorite Book of the New Testament?

I’m interested to see what people think about the New Testament.
Feel free to share reasons in the comments!

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The Word of God in the Age of the Toyota Prius

*Special thanks to Stephen Greenblatt, whose clever palimpsest of Walter Benjamin may be the best title formula ever.
It’s time to discard your old Bible and purchase the new HarperCollins Green Bible.  That’s right, the Bible, much like just about everything else in our culture these days, is going green.  It has gone green.  No wait, that’s [...]

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The Politics of Sex at Academic Conferences

It’s been a while since I last checked in to The Well Wrought Urn.  There’s much to talk about in the land of academia, but since I’ve been away at a conference, and I have conferences on my mind, I thought I’d share a Call for Papers from this year’s MLA Convention in San Francisco.
Conference [...]

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The Bleak State of a Career in an English Department

Every year around Christmas time there’s one thing I look forward to getting more than anything else:  my MLA Profession volume.  Each year, the Modern Language Association (MLA) publishes a volume that summarizes the state of scholarship in English Departments and attempts to assess the plight of humanities scholarship.
This year’s issue is especially compelling, and [...]

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Why Can’t the Lexington Media Leave UK English Alone

I hope everyone interested gets a chance to check out Randall Roorda’s editorial in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader.  Randall, my dissertation adviser, condemns the journalistic irresponsibility of local Lexington television news reporter Heather MacWilliams of Channel 36 news, and he also refutes the near-sighted argument of an earlier Herald-Leader editorial.
For those unfamiliar, there’s a backstory here.  [...]

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Review: The Tempest at the Guignol

The venerable literary critic Harold Bloom writes of The Tempest that no other play in the Shakespeare canon has been misperformed more frequently or drastically. Bloom loathes interpretations of The Tempest that over-politicize the play, turning it into an allegory of the post-colonial quandary, and he sees such interpretative agendas to be the bane of [...]

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The Secret to Graduate School

Tonight I discovered a guide to studying for my qualifying exams.  It’s a book called How to Talk About Books You’ve Never Read.  In fact, this book may well be a guide to graduate school, or what this reviewer refers to as “a boot camp for strategic fakery.”  Is anyone else laden with the burden [...]

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A Caravan of Camels Through the Eye of a Needle

Many of you might know that I am teaching a class on the New Testament as Literature.  A couple days ago in class, the infamous “Camel going through the Eye of a Needle” passage surfaced, a discussion that illustrated just how weird interpretation of the Gospels can be. In this instance, what does it mean [...]

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