Books
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Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear — perhaps "female eunuch" — whatever that entails — or a gay male or possibly even a…
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After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest…
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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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I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by…
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I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time? Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart…
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I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023). The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean? (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm…
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To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012). My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster. Despite my good will,…