{"id":1460,"date":"2018-05-21T11:25:38","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T15:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2018-05-21T11:25:38","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T15:25:38","slug":"monday-missive-may-28-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2018\/05\/21\/monday-missive-may-28-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Missive – May 28, 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Weddings in Literature<\/b>\u00a0— With the world awash with news of the recent royal wedding, now seems an apropos time to write about the depiction of weddings in literary works.\u00a0 I decided to focus on works that relate directly to courses that we regularly offer in the English Department.<\/p>\n

Weddings figure prominently in several of William Shakespeare’s plays, but my favorite is\u00a0A Midsummer Night’s Dream.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>In this carnivalesque play, Shakespeare evokes the surreal nature of many weddings.\u00a0 As is so often the case in Shakespeare’s comedies, this play features couples who get mixed up, resulting in complicated plot twists.\u00a0 These complications are reflected in one of the most famous lines from the play:\u00a0 “The course of true love never did run smooth.”\u00a0 For me, this line is the perfect response to the snafus that sometimes occur during grand wedding celebrations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In Louisa May Alcott’s\u00a0Little Women,\u00a0<\/i>Meg March has a small and simple wedding:\u00a0 “There was no bridal procession, but a sudden silence fell upon the room as Mr. March and the young couple took their places under the green arch. Mother and sisters gathered close, as if loath to give Meg up. The fatherly voice broke more than once, which only seemed to make the service more beautiful and solemn. The bridegroom’s hand trembled visibly, and no one heard his replies. But Meg looked straight up in her husband’s eyes, and said, ‘I will!’ with such tender trust in her own face and voice that her mother’s heart rejoiced and Aunt March sniffed audibly.”\u00a0 And yet even though the wedding itself is simple, Jo March’s response to it is complicated.\u00a0 For Jo, seeing her older sister get married stirs up contradictory emotions.\u00a0 She wants her sister to be happy, but she resents the way in which her older sister’s marriage will change their family dynamics. \u00a0 As Alcott captures in\u00a0Little Women,\u00a0<\/i>weddings have a way of bringing all kinds of emotions to the surface, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why weddings are such memorable events.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A much more recent book about a wedding is Dorothy West’s\u00a0The Wedding<\/i>, which came out in 1995.\u00a0 One of the writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, West published her first novel,\u00a0The Living Is Easy,<\/i>\u00a0in 1948.\u00a0 After the publication of this novel, she focused on writing short stories and columns for many years.\u00a0 She started writing\u00a0The Wedding\u00a0<\/i>in the 1960s, but she put it aside.\u00a0 It was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who encouraged her to complete it.\u00a0 In\u00a0The Wedding,\u00a0<\/i>West deals with the complications that arise when a mixed-race couple decides to get married.\u00a0 Set in Martha’s Vineyard during the 1950s, this novel shows how racism and other social problems can affect relationships.\u00a0 However, West also shows how relationships can transcend such differences.\u00a0\u00a0 As she states in\u00a0The Wedding,\u00a0<\/i>\u201cBecause if you don’t know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks… But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The weddings in the aforementioned literary works, like the recent royal wedding, are celebrations of romantic relationships, but they are also revealing rituals that tell us a lot about family dynamics, societal values, and cultural traditions.<\/p>\n

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Kudos<\/b>\u00a0\u00a0\u2014\u00a0As you know, I like to use my\u00a0Monday<\/span>\u00a0Missives<\/span>\u00a0to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.\u00a0 Here is the latest news:<\/p>\n
Tony Jackson<\/b>\u00a0recently published an article titled\u00a0\u00a0“Oceania\u2019s Totalitarian Technology: Writing in\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/i>” in\u00a0Criticism.<\/i><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Upcoming Events and Deadlines<\/b>\u00a0\u2014 Here is information about an upcoming event:<\/p>\n
June 1<\/span><\/span><\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 Wiley Cash, the author of\u00a0The Last Ballad\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0A Land More Kind Than Home<\/i>, will give a reading and\u00a0<\/span>lecture on\u00a0June 1, 2018, at 7:30 pm<\/span><\/span>\u00a0at the Levine Museum of the New\u00a0South (200 East 7th Street<\/a>).\u00a0 This event is sponsored by the American\u00a0Studies Program.\u00a0 Registration is\u00a0required.\u00a0 To register, please click on the following link: \u00a0<\/span>https:\/\/goo.gl\/forms\/aNtdRgfTXf8MnsNp2<\/a><\/div>\n


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Quirky Quiz Question<\/b>\u00a0\u2014 \u00a0The marriage of Meg March is a key moment in Louisa May Alcott’s\u00a0Little Women. \u00a0<\/i>Does anybody know the name of Meg’s groom?<\/div>\n
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Last week’s answer: Math<\/strong><\/div>\n
UNC\u00a0Charlotte’s\u00a0commitment\u00a0to\u00a0excellent\u00a0teaching started with Bonnie\u00a0Cone, the founder of our\u00a0university.\u00a0 Does anybody know what subject Bonnie Cone taught?<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weddings in Literature\u00a0— With the world awash with news of the recent royal wedding, now seems an apropos time to write about the depiction of weddings in literary works.\u00a0 I decided to focus on works that relate directly to courses that we regularly offer in the English Department. Weddings figure prominently in several of William […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-missive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1460"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}