Oscar Wilde: Harbinger of Matrimony's Decline

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.”       (Matthew 7:15)

Jesus’ words ring especially true of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, for this memorable play is most definitely a wolf masquerading in sheep’s clothing. The mood of the work is light, witty, satirical, even playful, yet it engages in the most deliberate and determined subversion of traditional mores and values of the Victorian age and our own. It is no wonder that George Bernard Shaw penned a scathing review denigrating Wilde’s work as “real degeneracy.”

Clickers for AP MC Practice

I tested out the Clickers technology with my AP English IV class today. The results were a huge improvement over my previous approach to AP MC practice questions.

Living Hamlet

My sweet, auburn-haired, four-year-old niece, Emma Catherine Grace Thompson, was sexually abused and beaten to death two summers ago. You probably read about this tragic story in the Houston Chronicle or saw a report about it on one of the local television news networks at the time of its occurrence and again this past summer when Emma’s mother, Abigail Young, was tried and convicted of reckless and serious bodily injury to a child by omission. A jury found her boyfriend, Lucas Coe, guilty of super aggravated sexual assault of a child just last week. Needless to say, it has been a cathartic and emotionally draining experience for my whole family. We found precious little comfort in the convictions of the perpetrators of this heinous crime; it was truly a pyrrhic victory at best, for what could gratify the heart other than the return of that adorable child in the flesh? And for that, we must impatiently wait until the Day of Judgment.

 

For the most part, I have successfully contained the seething rage lurking in the dark corridors of my heart, but Shakespeare summoned it forth these last few weeks when I revisited Hamlet with my AP English IV class at St. Thomas. The bard’s tale of the brooding, philosophical hero hell bent on revenge profoundly moved me, stirring something long dormant in one of the subterranean rooms of my soul. I can truly say with a greater degree of certainty than ever before that I not only understand Hamlet’s maniacal desire for vengeance, but I absolutely empathize with him. I observed firsthand the deleterious effects that a calm, collected, and unyielding rage can wreak upon the human psyche. Frankly, it’s enough to terrorize the soul because it is to stare into the abyss. Those famous soliloquies were no longer merely poetical speeches but ineffable ponderings of a kindred soul whose heart and mind were so similar to my own. There was a very real temptation among many of the men of my family to act upon our baser instincts for revenge, like Hamlet, rather than letting the justice system mete out the appropriate punishment for those ignominious offenders.

Fight Club: Neo-Neanderthals Are a Scourge

One of my AP classes selected Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club as a contemporary novel to read and to discuss following the AP Exam. Most of the students were already familiar with the story from the cult classic film of the same name starring Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. The novel and film both explore the psychological and existential struggle for self-definition that modern men experience in a suffocating world of hyper-commercialism, ultra-conformity, and uber-femininity. Unfortunately, while the concerns of the narrator and his split personality (Tyler Durden) about male identity and contemporary American society are all too real, the alternative that he (narrator-Durden) proposes is not an improvement, but a regression to man’s primordial sado-masochistic impulses.

On the AP Program

Students across the country began taking their AP exams this morning. This got me thinking about the value of these exams. Earning a score of three or better on an AP test offers three general advantages. First, it is a highly sought after credential for college applications. The lower-tier schools are eager to gain students who have performed well on these tests to pad their marketing brochures and to increase the intellectual diversity and firepower of their student body.  Meanwhile, the elite schools admit only the finest students who have demonstrated excellence not only on standardized tests and extracurriculars but also in college-level courses such as the AP program. In short, it is a prerequisite for admission to the top-tier schools. No matter what the name recognition or status of a school may be, these institutions crave students who exhibit diligence and maturity in a class on par with many introductory level courses in a college. Success in the AP program, then, augurs well for students making them very attractive candidates for admission to the school of their choice.

VoiceThread: Substitute Teacher's Dream

 

I love the VoiceThread software. Basically, you can remotely deliver a lecture to students via a VoiceThread. It’s as easy as uploading some PowerPoint slides to the site and then recording oral notes through a microphone. Presto! You have an automated class, so that substitute teacher can sit back and rest on his or her laurels.

This is the best way to keep students on track if you have to miss a few days of work for sickness, family issues, or some other personal concern. I have included the VoiceThread for tomorrow's AP English class. I am lecturing on the last third of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

On Courage

"He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke" (McCarthy 5).

My AP students and I just started our study of the final work of the year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I feel this cathartic novel is the perfect conclusion to a high school experience at an all-boys school. First, it brings their literary education full circle as they started high school with a modern survival story (Yann Martel’s Life of Pi) and they end with one. Second, the novel offers a powerful meditation on courage in the face of despair. Third, McCarthy’s muscular prose offers a deeply masculine understanding of love rooted in a father-son relationship. Fourth, the story’s minimalism, symbolism, and setting all serve to remind us of the essentials of life in an increasingly dark world.

Postmodern Wisdom?

The title of this post sounds preposterous, right? I mean how could postmodernism-- a term I usually utter with a mix of dread, derision, or befuddlement-- have anything to offer someone of an orthodox Christian persuasion? Well, after wading through J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I have come to the realization that perhaps postmodernism isn’t all bad after all.

Postmodernism: Epistemic Tribal Warfare

My AP English class is currently making its way through J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a postcolonial allegory set in a frontier post of a nameless Empire. The protagonist, an aged representative of the Empire known only as the Magistrate, finds his comfortable world turned upside down when the Empire sends Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau (the rough equivalent of the CIA in this imaginary world) to determine whether or not the rumors about a barbarian uprising in the frontier lands are true. Colonel Joll quickly rounds up random barbarians and aboriginals and tortures them until they deliver up the “truth” that the Empire demands: the barbarians are preparing for war. Consequently, the Empire prepares a preemptive offensive campaign against the phantom barbarian threat. From this point on, the Magistrate struggles with feelings of alienation from his cultural narrative. The ripple effect upon the Magistrate is immense leading him to a hyper-examination of every aspect of his life including his sexuality, his perception of time and history, his interpretive mode of thinking, his obsession with dream analysis, and a general existential crisis of his individual and collective selfhood.

Reflection on "The Godfather"

My AP students have been clamoring to watch movies after the AP exam in May. They argue that it is a time-honored tradition, a veritable sacred cow, which must be preserved and protected at all costs. For a high school experience without movies after the AP is, of course, not a high school experience at all. I didn’t quite cave to these silly rumblings, but I gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

On Bunburying

“Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.”

Bunburying is a neologism coined by Oscar Wilde in his satirical play, The Importance of Being Earnest. The word functions as both a noun and verb and denotes an alias or the act of using an alias to carry on a clandestine double life. Wilde uses the term to symbolize the chameleon-like nature of modern man who wears different masks according to the various occasions of life. In the play, Algernon and Jack create imaginary personas (Bunbury and Ernest respectively) so they may live as they wish in various social spheres and physical settings. Wilde is not only interested in satirizing late Victorian society’s hypocrisies and absurdities, but in promoting a new relativistic and aesthetic notion of earnestness. The playwright seeks to unveil man to himself as a Nietzschean figure who constructs his own subjective reality, in contrast to one who fulfills a role in an objective order. Personally, I think the tortured artist is just trying to validate his own moral failings as a Bunburyist who abandoned his wife and two children for the life of a pederast. At any rate, this Bunburying business is a very real temptation for modern man.

On the Good, the True, and the Beautiful

"Indeed, searching for a beauty that is foreign to or separate from the human search for truth and goodness would become (as unfortunately happens) mere asceticism and, especially for the very young, a path leading to ephemeral values and to banal and superficial appearances, even a flight into an artificial paradise that masks inner emptiness." - Pope Benedict XVI

In AP English IV today, we had a heated discussion of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism. The flamboyant dandy deliberately sought to divorce beauty from morality and truth with dire consequences for modern sensibilities. I struggled in vain to articulate the connection between the true, the good, and the beautiful to my students. So frustrating! The Holy Father, as usual, displays a laser-like focus in the passage above that cuts to the heart of the matter. These three attributes of God truly are mutually enriching and reinforcing. The renowned philosopher Joseph Pieper eloquently describes this interconnectedness “Beauty is the glow of the true and the good that flows out of every ordered state of being.”

Teaching Austen and Bronte to Young Men

You would think teaching Austen and Brontë at an all-boys Catholic high school in the South would be mission impossible, right? Think again. These boys eat it up. Some are quite candid in their praise of the fiction, while others try to conceal their secret delight. There are, of course, a few supercilious students who bombastically scoff at these writers and smugly refer to their stories as trite period pieces unworthy of their serious attention. However, I think even these students are really just afraid to admit to themselves that they like the novels because to do so, they falsely believe, would render them -- poof -- effeminate on the spot. I stand before you (figuratively, of course) as living, breathing evidence that you can be a hot-blooded heterosexual male and treasure these women’s words.