Remembering Leslie J. Workman (1927 - 2001)

It is May of 1980. I am a still relatively young Assistant Professor at Hope College, and because classes are over and Kalamazoo is only an hour away and I nurse aspirations of becoming a Dantist as well as an Americanist I attend the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. On Sunday, the last day of the Congress, I decide to take breakfast in the dining room of one of the Goldsworth Valley dormitories. This is why I believe-or at least will say for effect-that Fate was stepping in, for in those days I never ate breakfast

Imprinting Mortality: Updike Reading Books

Self-consciousness was eminently John Updike\u27s hallmark theme, the matrix of his sustained confrontation with mortality and the condition of his alliance with Christianity. As with most literate persons, Updike\u27s self-consciousness was stimulated by reading. His extensive oeuvre and recurrent confessional impulse permit reconstruction of much of his reading experience, recording not simply his internalization of formative texts but also his attraction to books as auratic objects for consumption. For students of book history, Updike\u27s story of reading yields a quarry of information, intersecting continually the larger narrative of twentieth-century print culture: his self-defining agon with mortality may in fact be traced to a concomitant chronicle of American publishing history. Building on the story Pigeon Feathers as exemplum, this essay traces the progress of Updike\u27s engagement with books from childhood to early adulthood, focusing on his well-known interest in Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth and contextualizing that interest by reference to such contemporary publishing ventures as Anchor Books and the Harper Torchbooks

Desde la Caballería a la Cristiandad: La Transformación Espiritual De Don Quijote

Este presente trabajo es un análisis literario, histórico y teológico del protagonista de la obra famosa de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Esta tesina presenta el argumento que Alonso Quijano experimenta una transformación espiritual significativa, desde el momento en que pierde el juicio y se reinventa en el caballero andante, don Quijote, hasta el momento en que muere en su lecho, alabando a Dios por su misericordia. Específicamente, asevero que esta transformación parece a la transformación que Jesucristo describió como el vínculo que se establece entre Dios y la persona que vuelve a nacer, o en otras palabras, que nace de nuevo (Juan 3:3, 7). Se reconoce esta transformación cuando un creyente atrapado en las garras de pecado, por la gracia divina, se encuentra capaz de reconocer su pecado, arrepentirse, y deleitarse en la salvación que le otorgó Dios en su misericordia. Este trabajo también sugiere que Cervantes usa lo que sucede a don Quijote para hacer una crítica social y animarles a sus lectores a tener un ojo crítico y discerniente hacia la sociedad, la religión y a sí mismo. El primer capítulo provee una descripción del contexto histórico y religioso de la sociedad española durante los siglos XVI y XVII, así como la historia personal de Cervantes.Los capítulos dos, tres y cuatro analizan la idolatría y el pecado de don Quijote, su conversión, y el propósito de Cervantes respectivamente

Medievalism and the Academy, I

Edited book. Medievalism, the continuing process of creating the middle ages , engenders formal medieval studies from a wide variety of popular interests in the middle ages. This volume accordingly explores the common ground between artistic and popular constructions of the middle ages and the study of the middle ages within the academy. Essays treat the genesis of medieval studies in early modern antiquarianism; the erection of academic medievalism through persistent, indeed perverse, appeals to heroic medieval manliness and attenuated female spirituality; the current jeopardy of the book (a medieval invention) in the face of technological assault; the politics of the nineteenth-century academy (F.W. Furnival and others); the editorial practice of Sidney Lanier; and the cultural canonization of Chaucer. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_books/1015/thumbnail.jp