by Brian Bergen-Aurand The goal for January 2019 is to read these six books, in no particular order: American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new. ~Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013) is a memoir of her life growing up Black in rural Mississippi, the generations that came before her, and the men … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Recently, I made the claim that perhaps we can read Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching through the lens of structural sexism, where the multi-generational female characters–most especially Miranda–are trapped in the domestic sphere not through overt actions taken directly against them by individual actors, but, rather, by a system of social … Continue reading
Foreign Influence 