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Recent Posts
- Donald Rumsfeld Tries to Enter Into Heaven
- 16 postcard-length meditations on the Game of Thrones ending
- download Ecotone and/or Spleen (my 2 new poetry chapbooks)
- Cultural biases built into Gmail and FB autocorrect spelling
- On Contradictions in Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”
Recent Comments
- Peter Schmidt on Donald Rumsfeld Tries to Enter Into Heaven
- John Corner on Thoughts on Orsino’s opening speech in Twelfth Night, and on the ending of the play—as occasioned by re-reading the play to attend Pig Iron’s performance in the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, September 2011
- May on What Should I Do With the Dead Turk in the Bedroom? Class, Sex, and Otherness in Downton Abbey
- Elite Edge ME on Word Cloud of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” section 1
- Dan bloom on On Contradictions in Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”
Pages
- About Me
- Akwete Weave poetry chapbook
- Digital Humanities Projects
- Ecotone // poems by Peter Schmidt // wondering through the natural world …
- Engl 009H “Portraits of the Artist” — an introduction to literary and cultural studies for first-year students.
- English 116 American Literature Honors Seminar, Fall 2014: the Literature of the U.S. South
- English 52A (U.S. Fiction, 1900-1950)
- English 52B, U.S. Fiction 1945 to the Present. Swarthmore College, Fall 2017.
- English 53: Modern American Poetry
- English 53R: Advanced Research Topics in U.S. Literature
- English 71B: The Lyric Poem in English (Fall 2013)
- English 71D: The Short Story in the U.S. (Fall 2018)
- Online Essays
- Pocketa Pocketas (pulses & pips of poems)
- Publications
- “Truth so mazed”: Faulkner and U.S. Plantation Fiction
- A review-essay on William Carlos Williams’ _By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959_
- A selection of older print and digital scholarly work
- On Eros Crossing the Color-Line in William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell
- On Optimists’ Sons and Daughters: Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis
- Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
- The “Raftsmen’s Passage,” Huck’s Crisis of Whiteness, and _Huckleberry Finn_ in U.S. Literary History
- Selected Courses
- SPLEEN poetry chapbook: pissed-off poems for a pissant age.
- Very Large Array // a poetry collage project by Peter Schmidt (1990-2000)
- Very Large Array project
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Donald Rumsfeld Tries to Enter Into Heaven
(as retold later by the Devil) … into the known unknown or maybe it’s an unknown unknown Donald comes to the Gates unrepentant. A large book swings open hard to see the pages but it seems they hold long lists … Continue reading
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download Ecotone and/or Spleen (my 2 new poetry chapbooks)
Ecotone // 14 poems by Peter Schmidt, about wandering through the natural world … A downloadable pdf, from Pixel Press / Swarthmore You may also download SPLEEN (political poems protesting + reimagining the fate of society and nature). =====For either or … Continue reading
On Contradictions in Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”
Nathaniel Rich’s issue-long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine receives a title worthy of a play: “Losing Earth: The decade we almost stopped climate change. A tragedy in two acts.” It’s definitely worth an hour or two of … Continue reading
Garbage In / Garbage Out: Why is Facebook Using Its Powerful Resources To Help Teachers Teach Bad Common Core Standards In AP English Classes?
Facebook on its Summit Learning Resources Site for K-12 English & Language Arts teachers is now promoting ready-made lesson plans for teaching Common Core standards. Sounds good, right? But many of the lesson plans are screwed up because so many … Continue reading
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On Canons and “Headcanons” in Cultural Studies
Yes, “headcanons” (one word) is a term. Has been for awhile. Interesting conundrum: while the idea of an agreed-upon “canon” has been treated with increasing skepticism in literary studies (though not by all parties), the concept thrives in popular culture, … Continue reading
Why Judith Butler is Overrated
One of many reasons why Judith Butler is grossly overrated: Here’s a passage from her new book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, followed by 2 brief comments of mine, one a translation of Butler-ese into regular English. Overall, … Continue reading
On Colson Whitehead’s new novel, _The Underground Railroad_
Three chapters of Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, were published as a special print supplement to last Sunday’s New York Times (Aug. 7). What’s so extraordinary about the novel’s vision is not that he makes the “underground railroad” … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Uncategorized
Tagged Afrofuturism, fiction, slavery, underground railroad, whitehead
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Brief comments on Terry Eagleton’s latest book, Culture (2016)
See Culture by Terry Eagleton My rating: 4 of 5 stars Lucid and concise readings of Burke, Swift, Herder, Austen, Marx, Wilde, and T.S. Eliot, among others. The book is less focused and persuasive when Eagleton traces the long and … Continue reading
Freedom and Fate in Game of Thrones, “The Door”
For Game of Thrones fans, please don’t read this until you’ve seen Season 6, Episode 5 (“The Door”). Normally stories about time travel dramatize the power of human agency, our potential ability to know and intervene in past events and … Continue reading
On David Bowie’s Bluebird
Re David Bowie’s “Lazarus,” from his brilliant final album, Blackstar, the New York Times has this to say: “The song is a man in total distress, and then finding a way out, in his imagination, so he could still be … Continue reading