Welcome to the 76th edition of English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities at large.
In honor of Father’s Day coming up, I contributed a brief piece about Walter Lee Younger of A Raisin in the Sun to an interesting round up of “The Good (and Bad) Fathers of Fiction” hosted by
of The Hollow, a newsletter about education, parenting, and a lot more. She also writes for a few other publications. This recent piece for The Front Porch Republic, “Hand-Cranked Ice Cream Against Despair,” is a good example of her wise approach to living well. I think I’ve always known somewhere deep down in my soul that homemade ice cream would be one of the best weapons in our arsenal against the devil.Enjoy this week’s edition!
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
100 Years of Kafka
Franz Kafka died on June 3rd, 1924. For The Guardian, Claire Armitstead surveys the pervasive influence Franz Kafka has held over culture this past century.
A century after Franz Kafka’s death, international fascination with him shows no sign of abating, with an edition of the Czech author’s diaries just out in the UK, a new TV serialisation of his life from Germany, and the distinguished Polish director Agnieszka Holland hard at work in Prague on a biopic. The word kafkaesque, meanwhile, is everywhere. On TikTok, the hashtags #kafka and #kafkaesque are attached to thousands of posts with many millions of views. An ad hoc survey of mainstream UK news outlets over the last two years, in print and online, reveals that the adjective was used 570 times. Not as frequently as Orwellian (980), but very few 20th-century writers have their own adjective. Those who do – Orwell or Samuel Beckett, for instance – evoke something about the human condition that chimes far beyond the circles who have actually read their work.
Much of the piece attempts to explain what “Kafkaesque” really means. Has its meaning diluted? Or has our culture grown closer and closer the the strange worlds and ironies that Kafka imagined in his fiction?
“What’s kafkaesque,” wrote Kafka biographer Frederick Karl, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour begins to fall to pieces. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance.”
And for the NYT, Amanda Hess investigates why Kafka holds such sway over Gen Z in “The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka.” (Gift Link)
And his “Letters to Milena” — written over the course of three years, to a married woman he rarely saw in person — has become a rich TikTok text. Kafka fans hold his passionate words in playful contrast to the lazy and pathetic text messages they have received from men. The correspondence offers commentary on the slippery nature of disembodied relationships, too. As Kafka wrote to Jesenská in 1922, “Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost.”
And yet his work also challenges the idea that Gen Z’s misery is attributable solely to the smartphone. Presenting his books before the eye of its camera suggests a deeper explanation. The hundred-year gap between Kafka’s experience and our own functions as its own commentary on the fundamental dehumanization of modern life, and of the degradations of work under capitalism. Even as Mouka {a Kafka-influenced TikTok star] celebrates Kafka, even as she crafts an identity around him, she is performing a job, laboring at a second shift that never ends.
If Kafka’s adoption by the TikTokers is freaking you out, don’t worry. He’s still one of the greats. As
put it in a recent post, he’s “…perhaps the greatest fiction writer of the twentieth century. What else is there to say?”Harold Bloom and Silicon Valley
Speaking of
, here are his thoughts on the potential influence of critic Harold Bloom could have within Silicon Valley. Bloom, who died in 2019, was certainly a crank, but he was never afraid of making the case for the humanities to the general public.So Bloom reached out to the common reader. He concentrated on readers uncorrupted by theoretical prejudices. Ironically, today, it is those readers who are enabling the humanities to thrive online, in places like Interintellect and Substack (including this one and my own, The Common Reader). Whatever the arguments on campus, readers carry on reading. And they are finding, discussing, and writing about the great works using the technologies Bloom thought would be most detrimental to the continuance of literary culture.
With the acceleration of AI, I predict that they will continue and become more significant. AI will never be able to read Anna Karenina for you. ChatGPT-4 is a wonderful reading companion. I recently used it to help me untangle parts of Ulysses. But the benefit of reading Ulysses will always be just that,—the irreplaceable, ineluctable, solitary act of reading.
So the first way in which I see Bloom’s spirit buzzing beside the ears of those creating these technologies is that his work will become more and more relevant in the coming years. Bloom’s book The Western Canon is a blueprint for what to read in an age when other tasks require less of your attention and when AI cannot do the reading for you, but can help you do the reading.
Buechner
Here are two recent tributes to Frederick Buechner from the Buechner Review. Both show how his gentle command of language and spiritual insight could be powerfully open up new worlds to his readers:
From
: “Tales of Loss; Stories of Light”I first read Buechner when I was seventeen years old and recently diagnosed with a lifelong mental illness. My world contracted severely. My dreams crumbled around me along with the simple faith I had held since childhood. I could not contain my bewilderment and horror. But there was a phalanx of religious voices urging me to a passive acceptance of God’s inscrutable will. I felt my grief was a rebellious excess, but I knew clearly that if speaking what I felt meant a rejection of faith, then I was facing the loss of faith altogether. Reading The Sacred Journey (1982) allowed me to grasp that an outraged sorrow could be integral to faith. Buechner taught me that in articulating the stark, ravaged truth of our sorrow, we are ushered into the presence of the beauty that confronts our devastation.
And here’s
: “How Frederick Buechner Taught Me to Read Shakespeare”It's ironic, really, that Buechner is the one who opened up for me Shakespeare's profound religious dimension, because in general, he didn't think there was much of it. In A Room Called Remember (1984), he writes, ‘There is very little religion in Shakespeare, but when he is greatest, he is most religious.’[4] As examples, Buechner cites The Tempest, ‘that masque of his old age where all comes right in the end, where like Rembrandt in his last self-portraits Shakespeare smiles up out of his wrinkles and speaks into the night a golden word too absurd to be anything perhaps but true, the laughter of things beyond the tears of things.’[5] The other example he offers is of course King Lear, ‘a fairy tale...turned on its head’, in which,
although everything comes right in the end, everything also does not come right...[as] blinded, old Gloucester sees the truth about his sons but too late to save the day. Cordelia is vindicated in her innocence only to be destroyed more grotesquely because more pointlessly than her sisters in their lustful cunning. And Lear himself emerges from his madness to become truly a king at last, but dies then babbling that his dead darling lives and fumbling with a button at his throat.
Talking Baseball
teaches us how to talk baseball:First, let’s discuss hitting talk. When it comes to hitting talk, the most important thing to remember is the word ank. Ank isn’t really a word. But the big secret, what the SI people won’t tell you, is that you can put any letter in front of ank and it becomes a baseball word that means a hit.
Let’s try it with a few actual letters selected at random. K, E, X. Next, put those letters on ank. Kank. Eank. Xank. Then, put the new word in the blank, right here: Last night, Manny Machado was hitting _____. Oh, also, plural it.
When the Friction is the Point
, director of the Harvard College Writing Center, on how removing friction from the writing process via chatbots can be a shortcut to a dead end:Embracing AI in the classroom is not a simple decision. There are tasks a chatbot can do pretty well that we still want our students to do themselves, for good reasons. For example, the fact that ChatGPT can summarize and analyze an article that I feed it does not mean that I no longer want students in my writing course to read articles or analyze what they read. I don’t assign summary and analysis because I need more summaries or analyses; I assign these projects because I want to help my students think through complex ideas and grapple with them. And I don’t ask my students to write papers because the world needs more student papers; I assign papers because I want my students to go through the process of figuring out what they think. The friction is the point.
A couple lines of thinking about this issue: Some will say, “If a chatbot can successfully complete the assignment, the assignment is too formulaic.” I’m sorry to say this is often true. Writing in many school settings can hijack the students’ thought process in some seriously heinous ways.
’s work in this area is especially valuable.Others will say, “Just because a robot can do it doesn’t mean my students shouldn’t learn the fundamentals.” This is also true, but it’s not that simple. I could name hundreds of examples where knowing how to accomplish a task for myself is inherently valuable even though I may choose to let others do it for me. And while I think everyone should know how to sew a button on a shirt, the skill of writing is so deeply foundational to thought, communication—and life as a whole—that the notion of outsourcing it is insane. The trick is to actually teach the writing and analysis skills, not some mock version of them.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
Teachers, Dave Stuart is the best out there when it comes to understanding how student motivation works. He’s an ETW favorite. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, try starting with this hour-long crash course titled “Why AP Students are Often the Worst Motivated Students in School.”
The Great Southern Summer Reading List—Garden and Gun’s collection of what a large panel of southern writers are planning on reading this summer.
- ’s review of Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s new movie about Flannery O’Connor: “In all of O’Connor’s stories, grace is offered, usually through means much unexpected. As in life, some receive that grace and some refuse. As all true prophets do, O’Connor not only points out what is evil, but also directs us to the light.”
Lawrence of Arabia will be playing in theaters this August, a movie made for the big screen if there ever was one.
From The Collidescope: Novelist
interviews Paul Theroux about his new book Burma Sahib, a novel about a young George Orwell (his real name was Eric Blair) during his time in India.“As usual, Austen shows us the way.”—For Current, Jon Schaff discusses how Jane Austen’s view of education and gender transcends her predecessor Mary Wollstonecraft
“The whole thing is about waking up.”—Malcolm Guite’s lecture on George MacDonald’s fantasy writing for the Wade Center at Wheaton College
From Axios: “AI isn't a daily habit yet for teens, young adults”
From the Financial Times: Take a tour of Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin apartment
“The problem is when you separate any skill out from the act of doing it.”—Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher interview Tom Newkirk about the issues surrounding how reading is taught in the US. Consider this a follow up to Newkirk’s essay “A Personal Response to the ‘Science of Reading.’”
From The Yale Review, for their “Objects of Desire” series, Lydia Davis writes about the “curious disorientation” of total darkness.
The little baseball section made my day😁
Thanks for the shout-out, Drew, and especially for your contribution to our post together!