Literature

Tell us, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:31:58 +0000

Tell us, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/15/2026 - 16:31

Director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens Friday and stars Matt Damon as the titular Odysseus. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Rachel Sauer

With Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey opening in theaters Friday, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� classics scholar John Gibert considers why Homer’s epic is a tale that endures

The city of Troy likely existed. Scholars and historians broadly agree on this, citing its probable location as the mound of Hisarlık near modern Çanakkale in Turkey at the Aegean end of the Dardanelles, the waterway connecting Greeks and inhabitants of the Black Sea region.

Because of this desirable, strategic location, scholars and historians further agree that it’s likely wars were fought there. What’s much less likely is that a warrior king named Odysseus devised a scheme to build an enormous horse and hide Greek soldiers in it so they could sneak into Troy and win a 10-year war that began when the Trojan prince Paris kidnapped the king of Sparta’s wife, Helen.

Also unlikely: that Odysseus and his crew, on their journey home to Ithaca from Troy, were blown off course for 10 more years, encountering all manner of monsters, temptations and obstacles as punishment for eating the sun god’s cattle.

John Gibert, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor of classics, notes that The Odyssey "is infinitely adaptable."

It’s a thrilling story, though, one that’s been told and retold for almost 3,000 years—since the Greek poet Homer (who may or may not have existed) crafted his enduring epic The Odyssey. Friday, Christopher Nolan’s film version of the story opens in theaters, and in explaining to New York Times reporter Melena Ryzik why he tackled such a monumental tale, Nolan commented that “it is the ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”

Millennia later, The Odyssey still fascinates, thrills and even outrages—students still are assigned to read it, and artists still plumb its 12,100 lines for insights into myth and loyalty and what it means to be human.

Perhaps that’s why we’re still reading it and, in the spirit of its origins, telling it, says John Gibert, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of classics and scholar of Greek poetry. It’s a story about gods and giants, but it’s also a story about a man trying to return safely to his home and (modest) kingdom.

“The Odyssey is infinitely adaptable,” Gibert says. “It gives storytellers who want to retell it so many options, and no two (retellings) are alike because creatives are always finding different things in the stories that they want to run with.”

‘Tell me about a complicated man’

In her acclaimed 2017 translation of The Odyssey, classist Emily Wilson opens with, “Tell me about a complicated man,” which Nolan has cited in interviews as an inspiration for his $250 million epic.

Wilson’s translation continues:

“Tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.”

And The Odyssey is a very old story, composed approximately 2,800 years ago and a companion to Homer’s The Iliad.

“Each one of them fills a translation 500 or 600 pages long,” Gibert explains. “So, they're really big works, but The Iliad only tells a slice of the 10th year of the Trojan War—slightly over 50 days, but really with a focus on about three or four days. It's very concentrated, and it's set in a wartime society where the values of warriors are uppermost.

“The Iliad is a kind of proto-tragedy in that it focuses on serious characters engaged in serious actions with large ramifications for the nation. But it is, at the end of the day, a fairly narrow slice of life.”

The Odyssey, on the other hand, follows Odysseus and his crew for 10 years, from a Troy in ruins to the land of the Lotus Eaters to the treacherous passage between Scylla and Charybdis and finally home to Ithaca. They encounter—and often anger—gods and monsters and a witch who turns men to swine, and in the end, only Odysseus makes it home.

Movie poster for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (Courtesy: Universal Pictures)

From a storytelling perspective, The Odyssey is rich with action and memorable characters and can be read on one level as a rip-roaring adventure. This may stem, in part, from its origins in oral tradition, Gibert says, with storytellers performing it live and adapting it as they went.

“If you look for complete consistency in their storytelling, you will not find it because they’re composing live every time,” Gibert says. “They’ve got a vision of the overall story, but in the details it’s going to differ every single time. So, a lot of Homeric scholars are thinking, ‘A-ha, this is why there's some unevenness in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

“This is also why they have those traditional epithets like ‘swift-footed Achilles’ and ‘circumspect Penelope,’ because deploying a phrase like that buys some time for the performer to think about where he's going next.”

This is also why, in both The Iliad and The Odyssey, there’s description of common things like preparing a meal, taking a bath or performing a ritual sacrifice, Gibert says: “(Performers) had a whole stock of motifs, and they could do that stuff almost on autopilot while they're thinking about shaping the larger storytelling purpose for the occasion that they're currently telling in.”

The oral traditions from which The Odyssey grew also belie the image of a genius who sits with a quill choosing one word at a time until the perfect epic poem spans the papers in front of him—“more or less what Virgil did in Rome centuries later,” Gibert says. “Homer is just something completely different.”

A folktale hero

The Odyssey, then, shares DNA with the sort of tall tales that evolve in their telling. It also presents, in Odysseus, a man who is both hero and human, who is complex and fallible and, in some ways, relatable.

“He is a folktale hero of the man against the sea, the man who has adventures against giants and things like that, so he's a traveling hero and this kind of hero naturally is a magnet for more stories of the same kind,” Gibert says. “You can attach any story to Odysseus, really, because it's plausible that he's the sort of guy that would happen to, and so there’s no limit. He’s a husband returning from war to his wife, and he’s also favored by a goddess who’s smoothing the path for him most of the time.”

And while The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, is also expands the way that other characters’ stories are told, particularly women’s stories. While women only briefly appear in The Iliad and in small, circumscribed roles, Gibert says, in The Odyssey they’re more varied and complex.

“Of course, their roles are circumscribed, too (in The Odyssey), but there’s just more variety,” Gibert says. “Some of them are monsters; some of them are temptresses, goddesses or figures like the Sirens who can lure sailors to their deaths by singing a seductive song. And then some of them are family members and household members, so you’ve got your mothers, your daughters; you’ve got enslaved people”

In fact, Gibert adds, it is the plight of women and enslaved people with which some of his students have found connection and resonance. He recalls a student reading Book 22 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, execute 12 enslaved women who had been assaulted or coerced by Penelope’s suitors, “and she just said, ‘You know what, this is where I quit.’ And she got up and left the classroom,” Gibert recalls.

“That was early in my teaching career and, incidentally, years before Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad (2005), which is more or less built on this scene. It was eye opening for me, and my eyes have stayed open. So, I try to work with (those emotional responses) in the classroom and tell students about how many ways we can think about this text.”

During the fourth semester of the Department of Classics’ Greek program, students read Homer in ancient Greek, developing new lenses through which they can approach both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Gibert says.

And while The Iliad is often regarded as the more profound work, The Odyssey “is going to give you just a much broader palette to paint with,” Gibert says, “with adventure, domesticity, warfare—Odysseus is the one who sealed the deal with the Trojan horse—adventures at sea, shipwrecks, giants. It’s great material for special effects if you're thinking in cinematic terms, but also just in storytelling terms it’s a story that’s still exciting to tell.”

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With Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey opening in theaters Friday, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� classics scholar John Gibert considers why Homer’s epic is a tale that endures .

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Top photo: Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

‘Every novel is an experience’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:51 +0000

‘Every novel is an experience’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Clay Bonnyman Evans

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.

In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.

“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”

What was it like to read the book?

Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?

In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,” Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”

“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.

Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.

Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.

“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”

Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.

“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.

Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels. Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.

And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.

“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels.

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Top photo: Bhautik Patel/Unsplash

Happiness in literature isn’t entirely a matter of chance

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:19:24 +0000

Happiness in literature isn’t entirely a matter of chance Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/15/2026 - 12:19

Alexandra Phelps

Which is why readers and storytellers continue turning to Jane Austen, says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Nicole Mansfield Wright, considering why this enduring proto-feminist writer still holds a place in the classroom

Last week, The Other Bennet Sister debuted on BritBox, allowing U.S. viewers to enjoy the latest reworking of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice—this time telling the story of the often-overlooked Bennet sister Mary.

The series, based on the novel by Janice Hadlow, first debuted in the United Kingdom on the BBC and arrives in what would have been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday year (her birthday was Dec. 16). Known for her ability to capture the beauty of the ordinary lives of everyday people, Austen wrote novels that remain relevant centuries later. In the opening lines of Mansfield Park she declares, "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery," revealing that as a writer, she strived to depict joy and community within the lives she created in her novels.

Yet even in developing happy and uplifting plotlines, Austen didn’t refrain from commenting on the social pressures and shortcomings of her society. Two and a half centuries later, the strength of this proto-feminist icon still remains in classrooms as students discover through Austen how gender, choice, relationships and power interact with one another.

Year after year, says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Nicole Mansfield Wright, students are surprised by Jane Austen, connecting to her writing in ways they didn’t think they could.

Nicole Mansfield Wright, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, has seen Austen’s power firsthand. As a scholar of late 18th- and early 19th-century British literature, she notices that students often presume Austen’s writing will be prim, proper and unrelatable to their own lives. Year after year, though, students are surprised by Austen, she says, connecting to her writing in ways they didn’t think they could.

On a broader level, Austen resonates with people even though our political structures are different from hers, says Wright, who received international coverage for an op-ed she wrote on Austen's political relevance today, “Alt-Right Jane Austen.” On a personal level, Wright explains that Austen “resonates because she’s both relatable and profound. She speaks to situations we recognize, like having a sister whom you’re really close with or not being able to suss out what a crush thinks about you. These are really relatable situations, but she takes them seriously. She’s not just sensationalizing it.”

When teaching Austen, Wright encourages students to look through various lenses at the elements that make her novels so complex. Although Austen published just four novels while she was alive—two more were published posthumously—her limited body of work still captures the dynamics that exist within a wide range of social classes and experiences. These experiences are what allow students to connect to her work. “She’s into exploring our everyday experiences and helping us think through: ‘What kind of person do I want to be in the world?’” Wright remarks.

In Wright’s course “Developments in the Novel,” she includes Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In one scene, Elinor Dashwood, the eldest Dashwood sister, has a conversation with Colonel Brandon, a suitor of Elinor’s sister Marianne. Brandon mentions the sadness and loss when young people sacrifice their own ideas and originality for conformity, observing, “One is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” Wright uses moments like this to help students understand the importance of advocating for their own ideas.

Recalling a phrase from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which she encountered when she was a college student herself, Wright says, “One thing I really find important to my pedagogical strategy is that I don't think about education as ‘banking knowledge.’ I’m not dispensing information and then students store it in a bank and don’t question it. It’s about giving students a toolkit to decide how they’re going to operate out in the world. To be informed so that when they come across these ideas especially in this world of misinformation, they can be knowledgeable and they can come to the table with their own ideas.”

Publishing anonymously

Although today Austen’s novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey—are widely read, she didn’t publish under her name during her lifetime. Wright explains that female authors were often viewed as scandalous. “If you published a novel as a female author, you had to seemingly disavow your authorship. During her lifetime, Jane Austen’s name was not emblazoned on the covers of her books; one novel was attributed to ‘A Lady,’ for example.” During Austen’s life, the literary canon was overwhelmingly male, and women who wrote instead of keeping to the domestic sphere were often seen as morally suspect.

Austen’s legacy exists partially because of the way she centers and distributes power to female protagonists, says Nicole Mansfield Wright. (Photo: actress Ella Bruccoleri as Mary Bennet in The Other Bennet Sister. BBC/Bad Wolf)

Today, that canon has expanded to include a broader range of writers and stories, and there are ongoing discussions about what works deserve recognition. “There’s this idea of scarcity; that there’s only a set amount of attention. If we give this attention to new authors, is it taking away from honoring the authors who have stood the test of time?” Wright asks. “I would retort something along the lines of ‘Why do we have to choose?’” Literature, she argues, continues to offer new ideas and important insights, especially for students who are learning how to engage with the world around them.

Despite Austen’s limited catalogue, Wright resists naming just one novel as important to read. Instead, she approaches them “in an apothecary way. There are different Austens I can prescribe based on what malady you have.” For students and those reading for pleasure, there are different novels that can speak to universal feelings, she says. “If you’re worried about not getting started in life right and it seems like everyone is moving ahead of you, [pick up] Persuasion. If you’re an awkward person and you feel like you’re an outlier from others and that you’re not valued, [read] Mansfield Park. If you just want a good laugh, [choose] Pride and Prejudice. There are definite advantages to choosing each; it’s hard to choose just one.”

Austen’s legacy exists partially because of the way she centers and distributes power to female protagonists, Wright says, adding that Austen’s novels importantly “sustain a dialectic—a debate—rather than settling it,” and allow characters to exist beyond categories such as good or bad. Wright explains that more broadly, “novels remind us that our individual choices cumulatively can operate for or against justice. They make us feel less helpless. I have had situations where I think back to what this character would do in this situation.”

For students and readers navigating their own uncertainties and decisions, Austen’s novels offer an enduring possibility—a way to see themselves in characters who, despite being written centuries ago, were also questioning their belonging, identity, and power.

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Top photo: A scene of the five Bennet sisters from The Other Bennet Sister (Photo: BBC/Bad Wolf)

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare

Kylie Clarke — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:32:57 +0000

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare Kylie Clarke Wed, 11/26/2025 - 14:32

Alexandra Phelps

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later

Act One: Setting the scene

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The legacy and legend of William Shakespeare has expanded well beyond the open-air theaters of Renaissance London. Embedded in classrooms, films and novels, his plays and poetry have become universally known and loved. Before he inspired generations of artists, however, he was inspired by the art around him. Adapting the stories and dramas he observed and experienced, his storytelling has entertained viewers and readers for four centuries.

However, his dramas are mostly what we have left of him.

“The wealth of beautiful and deep feeling poetry and drama that Shakespeare left, contrasted with the poverty of documents that give us a sense of who he is as a person, is very intriguing” explains Dianne Mitchell, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of English and Renaissance literature scholar. This poverty has led scholars and writers, including bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, to imagine what the lives of Shakespeare and his family may have been like.

In her 2020 novel Hamnet, a film adaptation of which will be released in theaters today (Nov. 26), O’Farrell weaves a plot following Shakespeare and his wife – referred to in the novel and film as Agnes – and their children, twins Judith and Hamnet and their older sister Susanna, creating a domestic view of their lives in Stratford. Based on the sparse information about Shakespeare available through legal documents, O’Farrell spins a fictional tale of loss, love and the family of one of the world’s most influential playwrights.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. Image provided by Focus Features

Meet the Shakespeare scholars

Scene One: Finding a love

Enter Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt, & Amanda Giguere

At ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, Shakespeare’s work is integral both in English classrooms and on stages. Scholars of literature and theater, as well as organizers of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), found a love for Shakespeare’s work which now guides their professional careers.

Katherine Eggert

Katherine Eggert, a professor of English and vice chancellor and senior vice provost for academic planning and assessment, remembers, “I was going to study Victorian literature in graduate school, but then I took a class from Stephen Greenblatt, who is one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare scholars, and I knew that I could not leave the Renaissance behind.”

Eggert, drawing on her work on Renaissance epistemology – understanding how it is possible we know things and not others – and Renaissance history, explains, “We know a great deal about Shakespeare’s dealings in property, his legal involvements, we know whether he paid his taxes. We know the kinds of records that get kept in life. We do not have his diaries; we do not have his private remarks about what he thought about any given subject. What we do have is his literary work.”

Dianne Mitchell

For Dianne Mitchell, literary work and poetry of the Renaissance in particular spoke to her. “I had some great teachers when I was an undergraduate who really brought the 16th and 17th century literary world to life, especially poetry. I hadn’t realized how sensual and how deep the poetry felt.” Mitchell, among the other classes she teaches, developed an upper-level English course that is cross-listed with women and gender studies called Sex in Shakespeare’s Time. She reflects that students are “often surprised how up front both real women and imaginary women can be about what it is that they can and don’t desire.”

Kevin Rich

The stage is another way people find new ways to look at texts and themselves. For Kevin Rich, associate professor of theater and director of the Applied Shakespeare graduate certificate, theater offered him a place to conquer his fear of speaking. He remembers, “I was at a summer camp junior year of high school and they said do something that scares you, and I said acting scares me. I always wanted to be a teacher and once I found acting, I knew what I wanted to teach.”

Later, he saw a six-person production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It on a basketball court in New York City’s lower east side and “it was magical. It was awesome. Kids who were coming to play basketball saw that a play was happening and sat on their basketballs and watched it,” he recalls.

Heidi Schmidt

For Heidi Schmidt, a director and teacher with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, it was the connections she made rather than the setting of a theater that drew her in. “I really liked theater people. When I started hanging around theater people there was this relief that I could just be more of myself than I was in the rest of my life.” Now involved in every aspect of the theater, she works alongside Rich and Amanda Giguere, CSF director of outreach, to develop the CSF school program.

Amanda Giguere

Amanda Giguere found theater at a young age at a Shakespeare camp: “It planted the seed and now this is my life’s work.” When she was choosing a graduate school, “I applied to one school, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, sight unseen … because of its connection to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Twenty-one years later, I’m still here.” Her book, Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators, allows teachers all over the country to use CSF’s teaching and practices in their classrooms.

In the five years since its publication and adaptation to film, the novel has grown a wider audience interested in imagining who Shakespeare could have been. Although scholars often try – to varying degrees of success – to explain Shakespeare the person, it is often novelists and playwrights like Shakespeare who bring him most to life. Through his plays, Shakespeare has touched audiences by interpreting the world he experienced through his writing.

Many University of Colorado Boulder Shakespeare scholars and Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) drama researchers are excited for the film adaptation of Hamnet. This film offers another insight into what Shakespeare could have been, beyond the dramas he created.

Act Two: Teaching Shakespeare

Enter ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt and Amanda Giguere

“Shakespeare’s plays can be a way to think through questions that students themselves are asking, and we don’t only need Shakespeare to help us answer these questions. But it’s funny how much he is wondering about some of the same issues many of my students are wondering about or exploring some of the same problems that beset them,” says Mitchell.

Part of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his ability to reach people at any age. Kevin Rich, an associate professor of Theatre at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, remembers seeing “a 4-year-old perform a Cleopatra monologue (from Antony and Cleopatra). You would think that’s too hard, but at that age, they’re not afraid of words yet – all words are new. This language was not intimidating and she killed it. She was so brave and let the words be as big as they were. That’s when I realized no age is too young to be introduced to these plays, and you’ll always learn more as you get older.”

Eggert emphasizes the importance of reading the text aloud in English courses: “I do ask students to read in class. I think it’s really important to hear Shakespeare and to hear the language coming out of your mouth and not just as a professional. When you read Renaissance literature – not just Shakespeare – and literature of any kind aloud, you understand it in your ear, even if you don’t understand every word on the page.”

Act Three: Favorite plays

Everybody reads Shakespeare differently, allowing for individuals to connect with his works in different ways.

Schmidt, for example, recalls a time at a camp where she was directing Measure for Measure. The play is about a duke who lets the affairs of state slide and instead of handling them, claims he’s going on sabbatical. However, he doesn’t and sticks around in disguise, observing as people get manipulated by his deputy.

“I said, ‘OK, let’s just agree as a group that tricking someone into having sex with someone they don’t want to is bad. Period, the end,’” Schmidt says. “The youngest kid in the class, 13, puts her hand in the air and shouts, ‘Consent is sexy!’ It was one of my proudest teaching moments.”

Giguere recognizes the power in drawing connections between historical events and the situations Shakespeare portrays in his stories.” Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt is about the tyrants in Shakespeare’s plays. I’m on the section on Richard III, and I’m thinking about how it shows what happens when hate is allowed to grow and fester. It’s crazy that Richard III became king, that’s sort of baffling.”

Rich sees great power in how Shakespeare can capture human conditions in social and emotional situations, recalling, “I’ve had an inmate say to me, ‘Shakespeare had to have done time,’ because he cannot have written the prison scene in Richard II without having spent time in a cell himself. I’ve had veterans say he had to have been in war, because he cannot have possibly written about war like he does without having experienced it. So, maybe that’s true or maybe he was just that empathetic, that able to imagine perspectives other than his own.”

Mitchell reflects, “I’ve started teaching one of Shakespeare’s late plays — by which I mean a play that he wrote at the end of his dramatic career — both at the undergraduate and graduate level. It’s a play called Cymbeline. One of the reasons [I like teaching it] is that students have no expectations about the play and its characters when they come into my class. I like teaching it because you really see a Shakespeare at the end of his career who is so confident in his dramatic abilities that he starts breaking all the rules. It’s really fun to watch him discard habits that he practices in some of his more canonical plays.”

Eggert finds that familiarity can generate new insights. She says, “The play I most like to teach, that’s Hamlet. It’s infinitely rich and even if students have already read it before, there is so much to discover on the second, third and 20th reading.” Whether a student is completely new to a play or reading it again, there are so many meaningful ways for them to interact with the text.

Act Four: Hamnet as a novel and a stage play

Giguere and Schmidt both saw the first stage adaptation of Hamnet at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Prior to seeing it, Giguere read the novel and was pleased that even though the novel takes a lot of liberties with who Shakespeare’s wife was, they are “beautiful liberties.”

O’Farrell’s novel, despite being about Shakespeare, leans more deeply into the lives of Agnes and his children than other novelists and scholars have. Often villainized in history, Agnes in the novel is shown in a new light. There is much speculation about the circumstances around her and William Shakespeare’s marriage, Eggert disputes some scholars’ insinuations that since she was older than he and was pregnant, she trapped him in a marriage that he didn’t want. This has led to a fictional narrative in which the two lived separate lives, and Shakespeare moved to London to escape her.

Eggert emphasizes that there is no evidence that supports this theory. In fact, she says, “just a few months ago, a scholar made a good case that a letter found in an old book that had been owned by an acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, used as part of the binding of this book, was written to Shakespeare’s wife, and the letter was to her in London. While this letter doesn’t indicate the entirety of their relationship dynamic, it displays that their lives weren’t as separate as some scholars would want them to be.”

Mitchell describes the importance of centering a story around women, especially beside a character as large as Shakespeare. Instead of imagining Agnes’ life as small in comparison to Shakespeare’s, “One of the things that I liked about the novel was that it’s not about Shakespeare and his rise to fame and success, but rather about the domestic life of the intelligent and deep-feeling woman he married. We don’t have diaries or letters, so fiction is doing the work (of defining) that (Agnes) wasn’t some small person who wasn’t cared for and who was just kind of caught up in the Shakespeare industry. She has her own important life.”

Mitchell explains that the villainization of Agnes’ character could possibly stem from a thoughtful act William Shakespeare and his wife did. Many scholars use the fact that the couple didn’t get married in the local parish church to diminish her character since this act was violating the religious conventions at the time. However, at the time they got married, Shakespeare’s father, John – a cruel character in the novel – was being pursued for his debts. Instead of getting married in the church, where people would have seen him and tried to collect, William and Agnes married elsewhere as a kindness to William’s father.

Act Five: Hamnet as a film

There are many films that have captured, or attempted to capture, the plays and fictionalized life of Shakespeare. Movies such as Shakespeare in Love offer viewers a way to enter his life, even if it’s heavily fictionalized. Films are often one of the most important tools used by professors, including Eggert. Films about Shakespeare or his plays allow viewers to better understand the content, through observing the choices actors and directors make.

“I show clips from films and theater adaptations; there are resources through the [University of Colorado Boulder’s] libraries where you can see how if something is performed slightly differently, it emphasizes an entirely different meaning to the text,” Eggert says.

Although there are fictionalized elements, the stage adaptation of Hamnet was another way for viewers to understand Shakespeare and England at the time. The stage adaptation included people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, something Schmidt notes was a larger part of Shakespeare’s London than people often consider.

Colorado Shakespeare Festival remains popular

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival program has reached more than 140,000 Colorado students and continues to be an integral part of English courses in college. For this school cycle, Rich has adapted Hamlet into a digestible 30-minute and 45-minute play, depending on the student audience. Giguere and Schmidt’s work allows for teachers to prep their students on the plots, background and characters in the plays. Similarly to Rich’s opinion that anyone can interact with the material, Giguere states, “I don’t think you need to be a professional actor or violence prevention expert to use Shakespeare’s plays to think about patterns of violence. I think the plays unlock a lot about our own world and help us understand what it means to be human and what it means to live in a society.

“There is a lot of research that exists about how London, in particular, is a lot more diverse than we like to think it was – it was not all white. There were a lot of different people coming from all over the world and living in London and making their lives in London. I think [an all-white version of London] is an outdated and disproven illusion of what life looked like,” Schmidt says.

Rich adds that the landscape in theatre for interpreting Shakespeare has moved beyond a binary system of comedy and tragedy. “When I was first starting out as an actor, auditioning for companies, they would ask for two contrasting monologues – one comedic, one tragic. It seems that many have moved away from that because that creates a two dimensional view of his plays, which in reality are more than just two genres of comedies and tragedies. He finds levity in serious moments and he finds gravity in the funny moments.”

The film version of Hamnet continues to break down these binaries and established structures through its storytelling. The mysticism that Rich sees in Shakespeare’s work is what Giguere recognizes in O’Farrell’s novel. Some film viewers may recognize the mysticism of the novel while also seeing the humanity of Shakespeare and his family.

Some 400 years later, Shakespeare can connect with individuals on a number of levels. Hamnet’s release in theaters offers viewers a fictionalized way to see him as a person and one version of the life he could have led. However, the concrete things people know about Shakespeare’s storytelling and genius are found in his works. Giguere emphasizes that people should read “all of them. Truly, every Shakespeare play collides with you in different ways depending on where you are in life or what the world is doing. I say this in a tongue-and-cheek way, read all of them, watch all of them. Because that’s what baffles me about these works, is that sometimes you’ll collide with a play and it just hits you in the right way where, ‘Oh my goodness, this sheds light on this other aspect of my life.’”

They Exit (the movie theater)

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later.

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Image provided by Focus Features

Readers still traveling through the wardrobe to Narnia

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 21:11:45 +0000

Readers still traveling through the wardrobe to Narnia Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/10/2025 - 14:11

"There’s something just so magical in itself about learning to read, or having your parents read to you, and discovering these fantasy worlds through reading,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Deborah Whitehead. (Narnia illustration: Galchi/Deviantart)

Bradley Worrell

Marking its 75th anniversary this autumn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has become a cultural touchstone for fantasy and faith, says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� religious studies Professor Deborah Whitehead

When it was first published in 1950, few could have imagined the lasting impact that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by author C.S. Lewis would have 75 years later—not only on children’s literature, but also on religious thought and popular culture, says Deborah Whitehead, associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose focus includes religion and its intersection with media and popular culture.

The book’s broad appeal today is even more impressive considering that when it debuted the initial response was muted, as fairy tales and fantasy at the time were viewed as indulgent and only appropriate for very young readers. At the same time, fellow Oxford scholar and Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, also one of Lewis' best friends, was famously critical of Lewis’s approach to fantasy, Whitehead says.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Deborah Whitehead, associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies, studies religion and its intersection with media and popular culture.

“Tolkien is the consummate world builder. He creates these entire races with their own kinds of distinctive personalities, characteristics and languages and these very detailed backstories in his books,” she notes. In contrast to the detail Tolkien took to differentiate elves, dwarves and hobbits with their own attributes and personalities, the fauns, centaurs and other creatures inhabiting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were fairly indistinguishable personality-wise, she says.

Additionally, Lewis didn’t attempt to provide the same level of detail about Narnia’s history as is found about Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings books.

“I think one of Tolkien’s criticisms of Lewis’s book is there is no backstory,” Whitehead says. “For Tolkien, I think he was a little perplexed at the less exacting nature with which Lewis built his story.”

Book enjoys wide appeal

Still, Lewis’s looser structure may have been precisely what allowed his story about the magical world of Narnia to be more approachable, especially for young readers, Whitehead says, noting that while it’s possible to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a Christian allegory, the story can be appreciated simply as enjoyable fantasy.

“It’s a great example of how a text can mean different things to different audiences, depending upon how it’s framed,” Whitehead says. “The Narnia books, since their publication, have had this broad-based appeal. There is a way to appreciate them as children’s literature and fantasy literature and to enjoy the characters and the story and not take the Christian theological elements as foreground—even though they are there.

“I think that’s exactly how Lewis intended them to be. He said he intended for the books to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they are older and for the books to provide the ‘seed beds’ for ideas about atonement and faith, which you can see in the figures of Aslan the lion and Lucy, respectively.

“But at the same time, he was not intending for the books to be didactic or only read within a religious context, so they do have that broad appeal,” she adds.

While many Christian readers interpret Narnia as allegory, Lewis himself described it as a “supposal”—a reimagining of what it might look like if Jesus were incarnated in a different world. Whitehead says Aslan, the noble lion, is a clear Christ figure, sacrificing himself for Edmund, one of the four siblings magically transported from World War II Britain to Narnia via a magical wardrobe.

Lewis’s decision to depict Christ as a lion rather than a lamb is significant, Whitehead says, because both are biblical, but the lion conveys majesty, power and triumph in battle—qualities that she says align with Lewis’s vision of Christianity’s victory over the forces of evil, as personified by Aslan’s victory in battle over the evil White Witch.

In the 75 years since it was first published, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has had a lasting effect on children’s literature, religious thought and popular culture. (Image: original book cover by illustrator Pauline Baynes)

Lewis in his time—and ours

Starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis went on to write six additional books in the series, which came to be known as the Chronicles of Narnia. He also wrote several works of Christian apologetics, perhaps most notably Mere Christianity, which resulted from a series of BBC radio addresses he gave to the British public during World War II in defense of Christianity.

“In those addresses, he’s representing Christianity as this shared cultural and moral heritage that was a bulwark against the forces of evil that, to him, were very active in world during World War II in the form of the Nazis,” Whitehead says. “His radio addresses during the war were very popular, and he sort of became the public face of British Christianity as someone who reinterpreted Christianity for a 20th century audience.”

In his day, Lewis was an exemplar of high-church liberal Anglican Christianity and ecumenism, but Whitehead says the image of Lewis has morphed over time. Evangelical Christians came to embrace the British academic and lay Anglican theologian as a defender of the faith in an increasingly secular world, interpreting his works as tools for spiritual formation and cultural resistance. By the 1970s, his works—including the Narnia series and Mere Christianity—became staples in Christian bookstores, in part contributing to their continued popularity, she says.

Gender and race in Narnia

While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been celebrated for its imaginative storytelling and how it conveys biblical concepts in approachable ways, in more recent years it has also faced scrutiny for its portrayals of gender and race.

One of the most vocal critics of Lewis’s work is Philip Pullman, author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, who has described the Narnia books as “monumentally disparaging of women.” Whitehead acknowledges the series is largely male-dominated, with female characters often relegated to secondary roles or portrayed in stereotypical ways.

Separately, in the Narnia book The Horse and His Boy, some scholars have taken issue with the depiction of the evil Calormenes as conquest-driven, dark-skinned savages and culturally “other,” possibly reflecting colonialist ideas. In that book, Aslan destroys Narnia rather than allow the Calormenes to conquer it, Whitehead notes.

These critiques potentially complicate Lewis’s legacy. While he was progressive on certain social justice issues within the context of liberal Christianity, Whitehead says his work also reflects the bias of his time—particularly in its idealization of British culture and Christianity as the pinnacle of civilization.

Theatrical adaptions and generational nostalgia

Over the years, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been adapted into numerous plays, musicals and films. The book’s association with Christmas, because the White Witch bans the holiday, makes it a seasonal favorite, and the story’s visual richness—with Turkish Delight, talking beavers and epic battles—lends itself well to theatrical production, Whitehead says.

Meanwhile, the 2005 film adaption by Walden Media exemplifies how Lewis’ work has been repackaged for contemporary audiences.

“There was the mass marketing, which was like, ‘Rediscover the magic of these classic children’s books,’ but then there’s marketing specifically to Christian audiences following the model of the niche religious marketing for The Passion of the Christ,” Whitehead says. That marketing for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe positioned the film as a safe, faith-affirming alternative to secular films such as the Harry Potter wizard series, which some Christians criticize for its portrayal of witchcraft, she says.

At the same time, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, at its core, a classic story about good versus evil and about sacrifice and redemption. Those themes are timeless and continue to resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds, Whitehead says, recalling her own emotional response to the book as a child—mourning Aslan’s death at the hand of the White Witch and marveling at the idea of a magical wardrobe that led to another world.

Whitehead says the book’s status as a children’s classic is reinforced by generational transmission. Parents and grandparents pass it down, creating a shared cultural memory that keeps the story alive.

To her knowledge, no other modern Christian thinker and author has had a similar level of success bridging the gap between Christian literature and children’s fantasy literature. It’s a feat made even more impressive given that Lewis did not have children of his own and was not particularly fond of spending time with young children, which he confessed was something of a defect on his part, Whitehead says.

Will Narnia endure?

During his lifetime, C.S. Lewis published more than 30 books, including fiction, non-fiction and academic texts. While there is nothing to suggest that Lewis primarily set out to be a successful children’s book author, Whitehead says she thinks Lewis would be fine with being primarily remembered that way—with the hope that readers would understand the underlying message he was attempting to convey. She adds that Lewis was a big believer in the idea that “good stories” by definition are those that appeal to children as well as adults.

As for whether children will still be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in another 75 years, Whitehead says, “I hope so. I hope we’re all still reading in 75 years and not having Speechify and ChatGTP do everything for us. There’s something just so magical in itself about learning to read, or having your parents read to you, and discovering these fantasy worlds through reading.”

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Marking its 75th anniversary this autumn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has become a cultural touchstone for fantasy and faith, says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� religious studies Professor Deborah Whitehead.

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Top illustration: Aslan the lion in a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Illustration: ChrisStarkiller/Deviantart)

‘My role is to remind you that we are all humans’

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:37:12 +0000

‘My role is to remind you that we are all humans’ Rachel Sauer Tue, 03/11/2025 - 08:37

Collette Mace

In a community discussion March 4, Buffs One Read author Javier Zamora shared his immigration story, emphasizing the importance of representation

El Cadejo is a spirit figure in Central American folklore that takes the shape of a dog and can either help or harm travelers depending on whether their Cadejo is good or bad.

Salvadoran author and poet Javier Zamora sees his Cadejo as an embodiment of his ancestors, protecting and sheltering him through his arduous childhood immigration journey. He credits those who came before him with his survival against the odds.

Zamora shared this and other perspectives March 4 during the CU Buffs One Read author discussion. This academic year, the program chose Zamora’s memoir, Solito, as its Common Read selection.

Javier Zamora (left, with microphone) discussed his memoir, Solito, during a community event March 4 for the Buffs One Read program. (Photo: Collette Mace)

Solito details Zamora’s experience as a child immigrating from El Salvador to the United States, a journey that took him over land and sea, through dense urban settings and desolate deserts. In the memoir, he tells the story of his journey through his 9-year-old self’s eyes—a story that encapsulates the themes of courage that the Buffs One Read program aimed to highlight.

Zamora began the program by answering a few questions about his first book of poems, Unaccompanied, published in 2017. Addressing the book’s tone of urgency, Zamora noted that the purpose of this book was mainly to answer the question, “Why am I here?” Written right before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he said he knew immigration was heavy on the minds of the nation, and he felt it was urgent to tell his story about migration, as well as his parents’ stories.

His family, part of the 2% of Salvadoran immigrants granted refugee status by the U.S. government, didn’t discuss with Zamora why they left El Salvador until he was much older. He recalled learning about his country through the ominous, ever-present headlines about the violence and cartel wars raging there.

The images of Salvadoran migrants were mostly “unaccompanied minors,” something Zamora both identified with and rebelled against, knowing that there was more to the migrants’ stories than what was being shown on the news.

This was partially why Solito had such a heavy change in tone, he said. He wanted to show the journey the way he experienced it as a boy—exploring the confusion, half-truths and even pockets of joy that he experienced on the journey. This was something that he only felt capable of doing after he had been employed at Harvard as a fellow, he said.

“Time is a privilege,” he said, adding that he recognized that the benefits his higher education, and thus employment, gave him the ability to process his childhood trauma enough to write his memoir well and authentically.

He credits therapy with his success in this and remarked that therapy is a lifelong journey from which everyone could benefit. Through his therapy, Zamora said he was able to explore his feelings about the “unaccompanied minor” stereotype associated with Salvadoran migration—imagery that was widely circulated around the United States in the early 2000s of El Salvadoran parents sending their children across the border unaccompanied, which furthered racism and anti-immigration rhetoric by painting Salvadoran parents as irresponsible. He questioned where he fit into that narrative and how to reckon with the overwhelming sense of survivor’s guilt that he still feels to this day.

His way of coping with the questions “Why me? Why did I survive when so many did not?” is through traditional Salvadoran folklore, which he mentions frequently in the memoir in the form of the spirit El Cadejo.

Feeling safe

Zamora also discussed his experience after migrating to the United States, specifically in schools. He said that he experienced bullying even in his predominantly immigrant community and oftentimes used “assimilation as a coping mechanism.” He tried to turn himself into an “American-born Salvadoran” to fit in, he said, by doing things like only speaking English and not having a strong attachment to El Salvador, and didn’t fully embrace his identity as an immigrant until much later in life, after years of therapy.

"Everyone should be allowed to exist as humans. Not just the children and not just the ‘good students,’ but everyone. My role is to remind you that we are all humans."

It wasn’t until late high school that he even considered writing poetry, he said. He recalled how looking up “Salvadoran poets” and seeing that representation was the catalyst for his interest in writing: “All of the sudden,” he said, “writing was something I could do, if I wanted to.”

He said that one of the most important discoveries he made within Salvadoran poetry was the coexistence of Spanish and English on the page, a reflection of how his parents and grandparents spoke, as well as English and academic language. “Representation fuscking matters,” he said.

One theme that Zamora strongly emphasized was the importance of teachers in the American school system, who make young immigrants feel a little bit safer. He mentioned how important it is for teachers to signal to students that they are safe. Even something as simple as speaking to him in Spanish was enough to signal to a young Zamora that his teachers were trustworthy; even if he chose not to talk with them about his trauma and experiences, he knew that he could, and that was what was important, he said.

Especially in a time where immigrants and children of immigrants may feel unsafe in school settings, he added, signaling to students that their teachers are there for them and that they are all on the same team is critical in making sure that children feel supported in the education system.

Explaining what he wanted people to take away from the Buffs One Read discussion, and from Solito as a whole, Zamora said, “Everyone should be allowed to exist as humans. Not just the children and not just the ‘good students,’ but everyone. My role is to remind you that we are all humans.”

He said he wanted the audience Tuesday to leave the conversation with the knowledge that borders and citizenship are new concepts and that being human is what binds us together: “We need to remember the past as actively as we are trying to erase it.”

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In a community discussion March 4, Buffs One Read author Javier Zamora shared his immigration story, emphasizing the importance of representation.

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How ardently we admire and love 'Pride and Prejudice'

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:16:15 +0000

How ardently we admire and love 'Pride and Prejudice' Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/14/2025 - 10:16

Collette Mace

Are Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy the greatest love story? ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Grace Rexroth weighs in

What is the greatest love story of all time?

This is a question many like to consider, discuss and debate, especially around Valentine’s Day. Whether you’re more of a romantic at heart or a casual softie, you’ve more than likely heard or expressed the opinion that there is no love story quite like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Despite being more than 200 years old, something about this classic novel transcends centuries and social changes to remain a text with which many people connect, whether on the screen, stage or in the pages of the novel.

Grace Rexroth, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� teaching assistant professor of English, notes that Pride and Prejudice has captivated audiences for more than two centuries in part because it appeals to what people—specifically women—have wanted and fantasized about through different eras following its publication.

What makes this love story so memorable and so beloved? Is it truly the greatest love story of all time, or is there something else about it that draws readers in again and again?

According to Grace Rexroth, a teaching assistant professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English who is currently teaching a global women’s literature course focused on writing about love, the historical context in which Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice is crucial to understanding the novel's inner workings.

The Regency Era was a period of intense revolution and change. There still were very strict social norms surrounding marriage and status, which are evident in the novel, but it’s also important to consider that proto-feminist ideals, such as those expressed by Mary Wollstonecraft, were influencing conversations about the position of women in society, Rexroth notes.

Even at the time of publication, Pride and Prejudice was perceived differently between opposing political groups—more conservative thinkers saw it as a story that still rewarded conservative values, such as humility, beauty (always beauty) and a reserved disposition. Other, more progressive readers saw it as standing up to the status quo.

To this day, readers and scholars often debate whether Austen was writing to criticize or praise Regency Era ideas about women’s autonomy. In The Making of Jane Austen, author Devoney Looser observes, “It sounds impossible, but Jane Austen has been and remains a figure at the vanguard of reinforcing tradition and promoting social change.”

Nuance helps it endure

The fact that Pride and Prejudice lends itself to different interpretations is part of the reason why it’s lived such a long life in the spotlight, Rexroth says. It has managed to appeal to what people—specifically women—have wanted and fantasized about through different eras following its publication.

According to Looser, both film and stage adaptations have highlighted different aspects of the text for different reasons. During its first stage adaptations, for instance, the emphasis was often placed on Elizabeth’s character development. In fact, the most tense and climactic scene in these early performances was often her final confrontation with Lady Catherine De Bourgh, when Elizabeth asserts that she’s going to do what’s best for herself instead of cowering under Lady Catherine’s anger at her engagement to her nephew, Mr. Darcy.

Such scenes emphasize Elizabeth’s assertiveness and self-possession in the face of social pressure. Featuring this scene as the climax of the story is quite different from interpretations that focus on the suppressed erotic tension between Elizabeth and Darcy.

This doesn’t mean that adaptations prioritizing the romantic union didn’t soon follow. In 1935, Helen Jerome flipped the narrative on what Pride and Prejudice meant to a modern audience by casting a young, conventionally attractive man to play Mr. Darcy. Looser refers to this change as the beginning of “the rise of sexy Darcy,” a phenomenon that has continued in the nearly 100 years following this first casting choice.

In many ways, the intentional decision to make Mr. Darcy physically desirable on stage coincided with the rising popularity of the “romantic marriage”—a union founded on love and attraction rather than on status and societal expectations. Before this, Mr. Darcy’s being handsome was just a nice perk to Elizabeth, not a clear driving force for her feelings towards him.

Matthew Macfadyen (left) as Mr. Darcy in the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice. Some critics argue that the film over-dramatized the first proposal scene. (Photo: StudioCanal)

From loathing to love

This is not to say there’s no implication of attraction in the original novel, though. There’s something magnetic about Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship from the very beginning, when they profess their distaste for each other as the reigning sentiment between them (though readers can see that Elizabeth really doesn’t seem to mind being insulted by Mr. Darcy until later in the novel). It’s a quintessential “enemies to lovers” narrative, Rexroth says.

In that way, the novel offers a hint of the unruly desires driving many creative decisions in most modern film adaptations—from the famous “wet shirt” scene in the 1995 BBC adaptation with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, to what some critics argue is a highly over-dramatized first proposal scene staged in the rain in the 2005 Keira Knightly version. That sense of tension between Elizabeth and Darcy, unsaid but palpable, is a draw that has reeled in modern audiences to the point of obsession.

Rexroth suggests that part of the novel’s appeal hinges on what can and cannot be expressed in the text: “Because discussions of sex and desire are fairly repressed in the novel, emotional discourse has more free reign, which is often appealing to modern readers who experience a reverse set of tensions in modern life. Modern discourse, while often privileging a more open discussion of sex, often places tension on how and why we express emotion—especially in romantic relationships.”

Modern sexual liberation, especially through the eyes of women, has been an integral part of feminist movements. However, feminism also offers reminders that when the world still is governed by misogynistic ideas about sex—including women as the object and men as more emotionally unattached sexual partners—key aspects of what sex can mean from an anti-misogynist viewpoint are lost.

This, perhaps, is one reason that Pride and Prejudice is so appealing to women battling standards of sexuality centered around patriarchy, and who find themselves longing for something more—a “love ethic,” as author bell hooks called it.

However, is Pride and Prejudice really a perfect example of a "love ethic”? Rexroth also asks her classes to consider the pitfalls of how readers continue to fantasize about Pride and Prejudice, potentially seeing it as a model for modern romantic relationships.

Questions of true autonomy

While Elizabeth exercises her autonomy and free choice by rejecting not one but two men, standing up to Lady Catherine and overall just being a clever and witty heroine, she is still living within a larger society that privileges the status of her husband over her own and sees her value primarily in relation to the ways she circulates on the marriage market.

Jennifer Ehle (in wedding dress) and Colin Firth as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. For many fans, the "perfect ending" with the "perfect man" is part of the story's longstanding appeal. (Photo: BBC)

For that reason, women are never really autonomous, Rexroth says. How can they be, when Elizabeth’s decision to reject a man could potentially ruin her life and the lives of her sisters? Or when her sister Lydia’s decision to run away with Mr. Wickham nearly sends the entire family into ruin? What happens to Elizabeth in a world without Darcy?

This, according to Rexroth, is the danger of looking at Pride and Prejudice uncritically. Though readers and scholars may never know if Austen meant it to be a critical piece about the wider societal implications of the marriage market—although it can be inferred pretty strongly that she did mean it that way, Rexroth says—it does have startling implications towards modern relationships that we tend to find ourselves in.

“Modern discussions of love often focus on the individual, psychological aspects of relationships rather than the larger social networks that structure them,” Rexroth explains. “My students sometimes think that if they just work on themselves, go to the gym and find the right partner, everything will be okay—they’re not always thinking about how our larger social or political context might play a role in their love lives.”

The fantasy of Pride and Prejudice tends to reinforce this idea, she adds. It’s not that the world needs to change—the fantasy is that finding the right man will “change my world.” Such fantasies tend to treat patriarchy as a game women can win if they just play it the right way, Rexroth says. If a woman finds the right man or the right partner, that man will somehow provide the forms of social, economic or political autonomy that might otherwise be lacking in a woman’s life.

Such fantasies sidestep the question of what produces true autonomy—and therefore the capacity to fully participate in a romantic union, she adds.

So, is Pride and Prejudice the ultimate love story? Ardent fans might argue yes—a “perfect ending” with a “perfect man” is the quintessential love story, and who can blame readers for wanting those things? Happy endings are lovely.

Others, however, might still wish that Mr. Darcy had behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.

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Are Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy the greatest love story? ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Grace Rexroth weighs in.

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Colin Firth (left) and Jennifer Ehle as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice." (Photo: BBC)

Meeting a little princess in the secret garden

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 23:46:38 +0000

Meeting a little princess in the secret garden Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/23/2024 - 16:46

Adamari Ruelas

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Associate Professor Emily Harrington examines the enduring power of stories we read in childhood and what we can learn from them as adults

When many people think of December, their minds are filled with thoughts of snow, warm drinks, family and childhood. This is the time of year when memories of childhood bubble to the surface—burnished by time to seem simpler and happier.

For avid childhood readers, a profound element of those memories is the books they read in their youth, which can continue to play a significant role in their adult lives. Frances Hodgson Burnett, who died 100 years ago this fall, was the author of such books—the kind that young readers devour and still swoon over in adulthood.

“In these books like The Secret Garden, the kids are the ones who are empowered to figure things out for themselves and who are in worlds that are magical or partially magical. That kind of magic attaches itself to the kids,” says Emily Harrington, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of English.

Her most famous works, including A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, continue to be fan favorites for young children and books that many adults consider the beginning of their reading careers.

Remembering Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett is a household name in the world of children’s literature. Her beloved novels are perennially popular with children and have been made into multiple film adaptations. However, says Emily Harrington, an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, who has taught a course on children’s literature, it is important to critically examine even the beloved books of childhood—not allowing memory to obscure what adult readers may recognize as controversial aspects of children’s literature.

Critics and educators have been noted how Hodgson Burnett portrayed characters of color in her novels. For example, in The Secret Garden, the character Mary is unhealthy because she grew up in India. Martha, a sympathetic character, contrasts people of color with "respectable” white people. Modern readers have questioned the effect that could have had on the children reading these stories.

Harrington notes it’s important to teach the novels in a way that doesn’t dismiss their issues: “Both (A Little Princess and The Secret Garden) have some super problematic, racist attitudes. It’s not why they’re remembered but I think it’s important to acknowledge,” Harrington says.

When looking back on novels written in the early 20th century, it isn’t uncommon to discover undertones of racism or sexism.

Some argue that racism was more normalized at the time some books were written, but even in the context of a work’s time, it is important to recognize and consider these issues when they exist in novels written for children, Harrington says. She also notes Burnett’s questionable views about medicine, which are apparent in The Secret Garden, when a wheelchair-bound child is able to walk after a little exposure to fresh air. Burnett believed that nature and God were the solution to most medical issues, which can change the meaning of the Secret Garden as being a magical place outside that fixes all medical ailments.

A lifetime effect

However, even if some of their content makes a modern reader pause, the novels that young readers enjoy can have lasting echoes in their lives as adults. Childhood fans of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and many other novels may continue to visit those worlds in their minds as adults or to wish they could be transported by books in the way they were as children. This includes Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novels, which many readers continue loving into adulthood. A large part of this connection is how the books made young readers feel while reading them, Harrington says.

“In these books like The Secret Garden, the kids are the ones who are empowered to figure things out for themselves and who are in worlds that are magical or partially magical. That kind of magic attaches itself to the kids,” Harrington says.

"All the people who enjoy these books can take the parts that they love and keep them," says Emily Harrington, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of English. (Illustration: by Inga Moore from The Secret Garden)

Due to this escape that children can experience while reading these novels, the stories, characters and places can stay with them into adulthood. It isn’t rare to see someone who is still as deeply infatuated with novels such as A Little Princess or The Secret Garden as an adult because those books have been those escapes for many generations of children. And as parents or grandparents read these novels to children, the cycle continues, and the literary love is passed to new generations.

Even with Hodgson Burnett’s questionable beliefs, as well as aspects of her novels that trouble modern readers, readers still are able to take the best parts of these magical worlds and make them their own, Harrington says. That, in turn, allows the children who read them to make these fictional worlds their own, she adds.

She notes that this is a process that many children experience while reading these novels as a form of escapism: “[As they grow up, children may think] ‘This magical world is mine now, and it’s not going to be racist or anti-trans. I’m gonna imagine myself in it in my own way and reject the parts of the legacy that I don’t want.’

“All the people who enjoy these books can take the parts that they love and keep them, and hopefully had enough alternate influences that counteract the colonialist ideology,” Harrington says, citing common issues with The Secret Garden and A Little Princess.

Best friends forever

For many avid childhood readers, books have been a major part of their lives for as long as they can remember and the characters in them their lifelong friends. Those reading experiences can transfer deeply into their adult lives, especially when correlating reading with comfort, Harrington says.

Further, a study published in the journal Psychological Medicine last year found multiple points of positive correlation between early reading for pleasure with subsequent brain and cognitive development and mental well-being. Also, the most recent Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report finds that while 70% of 6- to 8-year-olds love or like reading books for fun, that number shrinks to just 47% among 12- to 17-year olds.

R. Joseph Rodriguez, a teaching fellow with the National Book Foundation, told NEA Today, “The joy of books has been killed. Suppressed, tested and killed. I hate when students are called ‘struggling readers.’ We need to see them as students who need a revival! I want a revival!”

Educators, researchers, parents, health care professionals and children themselves study and discuss how to support and encourage reading—from alleviating testing pressure to proving time and space for reading, supporting diversity in children’s literature and not dismissing the literature that children actually enjoy as “frivolous.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Associate Professor Emily Harrington examines the enduring power of stories we read in childhood and what we can learn from them as adults.

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Top illustration by Inga Moore, 1944

Loving the art but not the artist

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:45:24 +0000

Loving the art but not the artist Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/21/2024 - 13:45

Adamari Ruelas

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller

The transition from summer to fall—trading warm days for cool evenings—means that things are getting … spookier. Witchier, maybe. For fans of the series, the approach of Halloween means it’s time to rewatch the Harry Potter movies.

This autumn also marks the 25^th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, book three in author J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a boy wizard defeating the forces of evil with help from his friends. Many U.S. readers of a certain age cite Azkaban as the point at which they discovered the magic of Harry Potter.

However, in the years since the series ended, Rowling has gained notoriety for stating strongly anti-trans views. Harry Potter fans have expressed disappointment and feelings of betrayal, and asked the question that has shadowed the arts for centuries, if not millennia: Is it possible to love the art but dislike the artist? Can the two be separated?

Iskra Fileva is a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that, "Even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

“In principle, you can try to focus on the purely aesthetic properties of an artwork. This is the aestheticist attitude,” says Iskra Fileva, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of philosophy who has published on topics of virtue and morality. “But even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

The Impact of Knowing

Fileva offered as an example the work of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro. In a short story called “Wild Swans,” Munro depicts a young girl on a train who is sexually assaulted by an older man sitting beside her, but who pretends to be asleep and does nothing because she is curious about what would happen next.

Munro’s daughter came forward several months after Munro’s death in May to say she’d been abused by her stepfather and that her mother, after initially separating from her stepfather, went back to live with him, saying that she loved him too much.

Fileva points out that in light of these revelations, it is reasonable for readers of “Wild Swans” to reinterpret the story. Whereas initially they may have seen it as a psychologically nuanced portrayal of the train scene, they may, after learning of the daughter’s reports, come to read the story as an attempt at victim-blaming disguised as literature.

Fileva contrasts Munro’s case with cases in which an author may have said or done reprehensible things, but not anything that bears on how their work should be interpreted—as when Italian painter Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, but the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

Fileva points out also that the question of whether the art can be separated from the artist may seem particularly pressing today, because modern audiences know so much more about artists than art consumers in the past may have. If no one knows facts about the author’s life, art consumers would be unable to draw parallels between an artwork and biographical information about the author.

“These are things that, historically, few would have known about—the origin of a novel or any other kind of artwork. Art might have looked a little bit more magical, and there may have been more mystery surrounding the author and in the act of creation,” says Fileva, explaining how the personal lives of artists have begun to seep into the minds of their consumers, something that has recently become common.

"The Crowning of Thorns" by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (ca. 1602-1607). Philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that even though Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

In 1919, poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is autonomous.” And in his essay “The Death of the Author,” literary theorist Roland Barthes criticized and sought to counter “the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person.”

However, early 20th-century movements such as New Criticism, which considered works of art as autonomous, have given way to more nuanced considerations of art in relation to its artist.

“I do think that if you want to understand what work literature does in the world, starting with its historical moment is an important step,” Amy Hungerford, a Yale University professor of English, told author Constance Grady in a 2019 story for Vox. “But I also am fully committed to the idea that every generation of readers remakes artworks’ significance for themselves. When you try to separate works of art from history, whether that’s the moment of creation or the moment of reception, you’re impoverishing the artwork itself to say that they don’t have a relation.”

Too many tweets

The growth of social media has added a new layer to the issues of art and the artists who create it. According to Fileva, social media have made it more difficult to separate the two because of how much more the consumer is able to know, or think they know, about the artist: “Artists are often now expected to have a public persona, to be there, to talk to their fans, to have these parasocial relationships, and that might make it difficult to separate the art from the artist,” she says.

In Fileva’s view, all this creates a second way in which facts about the author seem to bear on the public’s perception of an artwork. While learning about the revelations made by Munro’s daughter may lead some readers to reinterpret “Wild Swans,” other readers and viewers may feel disappointed and “let down” by the author even without reinterpreting the artwork or changing their judgment about the work’s qualities.

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which many U.S. readers of a certain age cite as their entry point into the series.

This is another way in which it may become difficult to separate the art from the artist: The work becomes “tainted” for some audience members because of what they have learned about its creator.

It may have always been the case, Fileva suggests, that people who really loved a work of art, even when they knew nothing about its creator, imagined that they were connected to the artist, but this is truer today than ever. Fans are able to follow their favorite artists on social media and feel that they know the artist as a person, which creates expectations and the possibility for disappointment.

Perhaps inevitably, greater knowledge of the artist as a person affects how consumers interact with his or her art—whether it’s Ye (formerly Kanye) West’s music, Johnny Depp’s films or Alice Munro’s short stories.

So, where does that leave Harry Potter fans who have been disappointed by Rowling’s public statements?

Different books by Rowling illustrate the two different ways in which biographical information about the author may affect readers’ interpretation of the work, Fileva says. Rowling’s book (written under the pen name Robert Galbraith) The Ink Black Heart, featuring a character accused of transphobia, is an example of the first way: Facts about the author’s life may bear directly on the interpretation of the work.

When, by contrast, a transgender person who loved Harry Potter in her youth and loved Rowling feels saddened by statements Rowling made about gender, the reader may experience the book differently without reinterpreting it, Fileva says. Such a reader may think that the book is just as good as it was when she fell in love with it; it’s just that she can no longer enjoy it in the same way.

Some art consumers are more inclined to be what Fileva calls “aestheticists”—Barthes’ account of the death of the author resonates with them. Aestheticists may find it easier to separate the art from the artist in cases in which biographical information about the author is irrelevant to understanding and interpreting the work.

Whether any reader, whatever their sympathies, can separate facts about Munro’s life from the story “White Swans” or Rowling’s public pronouncements on gender from the interpretation of her book The Ink Black Heart, Fileva says, is a different question.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller.

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Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil?

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/23/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

The current election season seems to have an abundance of them, judging by the frequent cries of “Faustian bargain” made by media pundits, candidates in races across the country and members of the opinion class. With the term so commonly used as Election Day approaches—generally as an accusation of having made a deal with the devil or of selling one’s soul—it seems fair to ask: Is this what Goethe meant?

Is claiming that a candidate made a Faustian bargain if they aligned themselves with a certain politician, voted a particular way or made certain stump-speech promises true to what the German author envisioned two centuries ago?

Helmut Müller-Sievers, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor of German, notes that “the Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience.”

“The Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of German in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature. “You're basically saying, so long as I have created advantages for my family, created advantages for my political ideology, created advantages for my short-term goals in life, it will not bother me. I will be able to sleep.”

Müller-Sievers—whose academic focus includes the intersections of literature, science and engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of technology—teaches a course on Johann Goethe’s tragic play Faust, in which he also examines the motif of the Faustian bargain as it appears in literature.

A deal with the devil

According to Müller-Sievers, the mythical idea of the Faustian deal with the devil as we understand it today originated in Germany sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. Likely the first literary treatment is by Christopher Marlowe late in the 1500s.

“But already Marlowe situates the play in Germany,” Müller-Sievers explains. “There seems to be a sense that the Reformation might have emboldened people to make their own relationship with God and the devil, so there’s a little bit of polemics going on there.”

In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is a bitter academic who has been seeking truth and failing in his pursuit. “Nothing gives him satisfaction, and he falls into what we would today call a depression. He is a cynic,” Müller-Sievers says.

Faust meets the devil, who is in the form of a dog that soon transforms into the demon Mephistopheles, and they begin a debate over the price for Faust’s soul. “It's the banter of super clever people who have no values and are too highly educated. That was already a common criticism at the time—intellectuals who want to show their brilliance but have no inner core.”

The two soon agree to a contest: Mephistopheles will win Faust's soul if he is able to entice Faust into wanting to hold on to some experience or aspect of the world that he finds desirable or fulfilling. Faust is convinced at first that he can resist, but soon succumbs.

The story of Faust has inspired artists for centuries, including the etching Faust by Rembrandt van Rijn (left, ca. 1652) and a lithograph of Mephistopholes flying above the skyline (right) by Eugène Delacroix for an 1828 translation of Goethe's Faust.

“We use the term Faustian bargain, and we think there must have been some kind of decision, but it might well be a gradual sliding—small bargains you make along the way, and then can’t go back,” Müller-Sievers says.

“It is basically a question of whether we are able to push aside our moral qualms when we act. At a certain point, will they come and bite us, and make us change? Will our conscience ever rise up and force us to denounce compromises that we've made?”

Müller-Sievers cites the example of German actor Gustaf Gründgens, whose career is portrayed in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Mephisto by Hungarian director István Szabó. “It’s bizarre. He was one of the great actors of his time, and maybe the greatest actor ever to play Mephisto on the stage,” he says.

“But he made a deal with the Nazi regime so he could continue to work in theater.” Gründgens continued playing Mephisto in performance in Germany in the run up to and even during World War II.

Sometimes, as in Gründgens’ case, one makes a deal with a reigning power rather than an individual, Müller-Sievers notes, and sometimes a large percentage of a population makes a deal.

“In the former East Germany, the GDR, you had an oppressive regime, and many people thought, ‘Well, I have to cut a deal with this system to get a job or get ahead,’ and they started snooping on other people,” Müller-Sievers explains.

“There were conscientious objectors, but it was embarrassing that so many people consented to this, and it was embarrassing later when all the documents came out, and you could read all the terms of the bargains people had made.”

Top image: Faust und Mephisto beim Schachspiel (Faust and Mephisto Play Chess), artist unknown

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In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means.

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