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How Much Land Does a Man Need – Summary

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This guy’s Readers Digest version of Tolstoy’s classic story is well delivered.

What is Literature?

My students might be surprised to know that using English literature as a focus of instruction is a relatively new concept. In England and America prior to the 20th century, literature classes were mostly about studying the  Bible or reading Latin and Greek texts. Believe it or not, it was India, under the British empire, that was the first country to have English literature instruction.

Today, most students think that literature is old, stuffy poems and stories found in school literature textbooks. They may never consider the fact that literature can come from the most surprising places, and that even stoned-out headbangers are quite skilled at reciting long English Romantic poems and never missing a beat or a word. See YouTube video.

Over the weekend, I want my seniors to think about what literature is exactly. How do they define it? And how do they think our concept of literature is changing?

Bernice Bobs Her Hair: the Song

The Irish pop group Divine Comedy recorded a song based on “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Here’s a snippet from the song. Give it a listen.

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Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Shelly Duvall talks with Dennis Christopher during the filming of Bernice Bobs Her Hair in Nov. 6, 1975.

The following is from the Vintage book The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The idea for “Bernice bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was nineteen and she fourteen. He instructed her in great detail in the areas of “Conversation,” “Poise,” and “Dress and Personality” as to how she could become a social success. The story that gew out of this letter was written in January 1920, and it was originally a ten-thousand-word story called “Barbara Bobs Her Hair.” After four magazines rejected it, Fitzgerald shortened it to seven thousand words, altered its climax (making it in his words “snappy), and Ober sold it for $500 to The Saturday Evening Post with its new title, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Written in the same month as “The Camel’s Back,” the story was published in the May 1, 1920, issue and was Fitzgerald’s fourth contribution to the magazine. Bernice fits in to the category of what Fitzgerald called the “wonderful kid,” a young woman of about sixteen who is on her way toward free-spiritedness and liberation, the variety of flapper that Bernice has become by the time of the story’s unexpected turn. With her last gesture in the story Bernice signals her independence from the social hypocrisy of her cousin’s world, though ironically it is the precise world into which Fitzgerald had earlier given his sister the rules of entry. Fitzgerald included “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in Flappers and Philosophers.