February 2025
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I first encountered the word "text" — as did everyone else of my cohort — as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual…
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Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter…
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Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title…
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When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it. As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere. If…
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I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country — the…
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I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but…
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After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so.…