Böcker av Alvin Kernan

Soon after James Stuart became King of England in 1603, William Shakespeare became the royal playwright. In this book the author looks at the court performances of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, examining them in their settings at the royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court.

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today’s more promising times? In this boisterously inventive book Alvin Kernan sends various descendants of the original Joad family on a postmodern journey out of California and into the excesses of American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The experiences of today’s Joads are as hilarious as they are discomfiting: they encounter in Kernan’s America a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray.In ten satiric episodes, Kernan visits virtually every important American institution—the family, education, religion, art, the military, law courts, sex, science and medicine, politics, and not least television and its advertisements. Unsparing with his barbs, he reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. Kernan’s modern-day Joads find themselves in a distorted world where a surplus of democracy not only fails to free its inhabitants but also makes them vulnerable to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous exploiters. Echoing the voices of such other provocative wits as Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe, Kernan will make you laugh at the absurdity of American culture and—in all likelihood—at yourself.

Explores literature's "crisis of confidence" and relates the death of literature to a variety of agents - among them television, computer technology, legal issues of copyright and plagiarism, faculty politics and literary criticism itself - and looks at how to bring about a renewal of interest.

In this memoir, Alvin Kernan recalls his life as a student, professor, provost and dean during his career in higher education. He recounts experiences at Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale and Princeton against a background of what it was like to work and teach in times of turbulent change.