Poetry and Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s ‘What color are the plums on the slot machines in Paradise? Bring answer Tuesday.’ I sent Ginsberg and Corso this goof telegram a few days before they hit Chicago in January 1959 to give a great marathon reading to help raise money and get Big Table […]…
Month: May 2016
Shakespeare Performances 2016
What a wonderful collection of performances from the Shakespeare group today: scenes from Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and The Tempest. What a treat! So well done, with little time for rehearsal and yet so much learned about what it needs to bring Shakespeare to life on the stage. I am sure that you all see…
Tolstoy’s Short Fiction
What a wonderful treat we have had to finish off our Nineteenth Century Literature with these two masterworks, “The Death of Ivan Illych” and “Master and Man”. Both stories present with such wonderful insight the ways in which humans delude themselves into believing in the self they carry around with them all day. Ivan Illych…
David Malouf- Fly Away Peter
This is such a wonderful novel to teach because it deals with such simple matters so deeply and movingly. The scene at the end of the novel where Imogen Harcourt is grieving over Jim Saddler would have to be one of the most amazing moments in Australian literature: It was that intense focus of his…
Best ePortfolios from last semester
Please take a look here at the following sample if you want some inspiration: https://michaelgriffith1.com/2015/11/27/best-eportfolioblogs-spring-2015/
Twentieth Century Oz Lit Poetry and Prose Part 2
This week we finished our exploration of Patrick White’s amazing depiction of contemporary Australian society: its emptiness, but also its powerful potential for renewal in “Down at the Dump” and “Miss Slattery’s Demon Lover”- both in The Burnt Ones (1964). As a prelude to David Malouf‘s visit to us in a fortnight we explored “The Year of the Foxes”,…
The Tempest Part 2
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play about many things; in one way it is as the large as The Globe itself! However, at its heart it is concerned with the power of art, of drama, of poetry, of music as transformative agents in a crazy, greedy world full of conflict and opposition. If Shakespeare’s message could…
George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy
Two nineteenth century masters of creative prose, both these amazing authors focussed on the inner lives of their characters and tried to show what it takes to become more fully human. Their interest was psychological and spiritual. They sought to document what it is that closes the soul up and inhibits the growth of the…
The Tempest Part 1
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is his crowning masterpiece. This play contains so much about the nature and purpose of creation itself; it is a work that embodies so much of what he as an artist hoped to achieve and simultaneously crowns that achievement with a wonderfully humble stepping off the dramatic stage: Now my charms are all…
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Matthew Arnold:Responses to the Condition of England.
All art, at its heart tries to rectify the destructive conditions of existence on this planet. In the words of the Australian poet A.D. Hope: Arguably, the writers and artists of the 19th Century were all, in their own way, attempting to maintain “the frame and order of the world”, trying to resolve the huge…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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