“I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd.” ~ Brideshead Revisited. 🎧 Listen to audio here Understanding Charles Ryder’s Conversion in Brideshead Revisited When we read a great novel and later discuss it in class, we might leave with a sense of deep confusion...
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” ~ From a letter O’Connor wrote to her friend “A” (Betty Hester) dated February 8, 1958, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. 🐦⬛ Before class, please invest in a careful read of the introduction in The Complete Stories. At the end of the post, I’ll include video links for a...
🎧 Audio Recording Here Finding Balance Between Modern Brevity & Classical Richness Keep it short The current push for brevity, what we might call the “Twitter-ization” of language, seems at odds with Waugh’s luxuriant descriptions and careful metaphoric constructions. Consider his famous “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint” – a metaphor that doesn’t just describe but evokes an entire aesthetic and emotional world in a way that...
From Satire to Salvation: Exploring Waugh’s Masterwork of Catholic Transformation 🎧Audio Teaching Click Here Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began his career writing satirical novels in the 1920s and 30s, including Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). His early work was marked by a biting, cynical wit that skewered British upper classes and their hedonistic lifestyles. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 significantly influenced his later works, particularly Brideshead...
Carney imagined beyond the façade; he was looking for something inside. Inside the brown stones have remained one family homes, or been cut up in individual apartments, and the rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint, color, and what have been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. ~ Harlem Shuffle 🎧Listen to the audio teaching here Handout link A Study in Transforming the Mundane into...
Time Jumps, Linked Stories, and the Art of Character Evolution 🎧Listen to Audio Teaching Here 🧐 Before getting started, ponder a couple questions: Considering Ray Carney’s progression, is this ultimately a tragedy plot? Examine the evidence for both this and other possible plot structures in the text. How does Whitehead’s technique of marking time through personal, political, and social details contribute to both character development and themes of transformation? Look for similar...
“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over,...
“There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.” ― C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces 🎧 Listen to the Audio Teaching Here How C.S. Lewis Crafts a Plot Structure as Complex as Faith Itself Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis is a retelling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Orual. The book was initially met with mixed reviews by his...
“…bad books get published to support good books by authors like me that you don’t know exist, but have something unique to say that publishers want to support. Bad books get published because publishing is a business like anything else, and those bad books make money.” – B.J. Mendelson. Social Media is Bullshit from St. Martin’s Press. In the complex ecosystem of modern publishing, commercial success and literary craft don’t always align. Marketing...
The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. ~ G. Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain In this Lit Lesson, we expand our teaching about character sketches and profiles/portraits by taking on Victory Lap by George Saunders which shows, brilliantly, three the deeper character creation technique. (NOTE: I’m using the...
