Literature

Christmas came a few weeks early yesterday for 136 first graders from the Frederick Douglass School in North Philadelphia. A small convoy of yellow buses ferried them from their public school at 22d and Norris Streets to the green hills of Cabrini College's campus in Radnor. It was their debarkation point for a special morning that transported their imaginations all the way to the North Pole via The Polar Express to celebrate the holidays through the magic of children's literature.

Nicholas J. Ragni, a retired dentist with a deep interest in the arts and literature who enjoyed helping aspiring young actors, died Monday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. His family declined to disclose his age. Dr. Ragni - known to friends as "Nicky" - had practiced dentistry for more than 40 years, from offices in Philadelphia, Medford and Minotola, Atlantic County, and always took great care with his patients, a family member said. "If he did a cap on you, you'd never know it was a cap by looking at it," said his sister, Anna H. Ragni.

"Dull texts that make reading a chore instead of a joy" is how former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett has described the reading programs in our elementary schools in his final report on the state of education in America. We're vindicated at last! For years, classroom teachers and reading specialists have decried the rigidity and inflexibility of reading programs. Phonics followed by inane stories with controlled vocabularies has been the norm. Even today, when classroom readers include selections from literature those excerpts are rewritten in order to control the vocabulary.

The discussion in the classroom was as heated as the late summer air outside. Lavida Clark and Andre Newton, both juniors at West Chester Henderson High School, were having a disagreement about the motives of characters in Family, a novel by J. California Cooper. When one of the characters in the book escapes from his plantation slave master - who is also his father - he heads north and passes for white. "That's wrong," Clark said. "I wouldn't change what I am for anything.

As state Rep. William W. Rieger sees it, his April 26 Democratic primary opponent, Benjamin Ramos, is trying to make a mountain out of a, well, dunghill. "It was a misprint, but now they are trying to make a big stink about it," Rieger said this week, explaining how an earthy Spanish term for excrement mistakenly wound up in a piece of political literature he distributed in his district, the 179th, which includes Hunting Park and parts of Logan, Feltonville and Olney. "They're screaming and hollering about it, but it was just a mistake.

John T. Kelly, 71, an English literature teacher at West Chester University from 1968 to 2000, died of a brain tumor Aug. 11 at St. Joseph's Villa, a nursing home in Overland Park, Kan. Born in Yukon, Okla., he graduated from high school there in 1955. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from St. Louis University in 1959 and a doctorate in medieval literature in 1968 from the University of Oklahoma. His niece Katy FitzGerald said Mr. Kelly spent his teaching career at West Chester, during which, for nine summers, he took students to Oxford, England, where he taught such classics as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.

Kenzaburo Oe, the 59-year-old Japanese novelist and essayist whose leftist political activities and existential fictions have led some Western critics to see him as the Jean-Paul Sartre of Japan, is the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday. Although Japanese literature is considered one of the world's most sophisticated and diverse, Oe (OH-eh) is only the second Japanese writer to win the literature prize in the award's 94-year history.

Nearly every time I teach a college freshman literature course, I include a play by Shakespeare. When we get to it, almost always one or two forthright students will remark that they consider the study of Shakespeare a waste of time. Plus, they say he's "boring" and "hard to understand," along with most other classical literature. My students - largely science, business or engineering majors - much prefer the likes of Stephen King and Anne Rice, or other luminaries from the best- seller list.

The relationship between C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham was a love story that teaches us how, in the complex of emotions we call "love," the paradox of extreme joy and extreme suffering coexist. That's both a 20th-century awareness and one you can find throughout the ages. Clive Staples Lewis, a world-renowned author and Oxford don, is beloved for his children's literature. He had been wounded in World War I, had become a Christian in 1931, and was a member of the Inklings, a literary group that met regularly at an Oxford pub called The Eagle and Child.

In Jennifer Augustine's first-grade class, 24 children sit in a semicircle and read with their teacher from Lois Ehlert's Growing Vegetable Soup. "It was the best soup ever . . . and we can grow it again next year," they conclude. This is only the beginning of their reading lesson. Augustine selects students to line up in "ABC order," holding vegetables made from construction paper. They huddle together, then arrange themselves - correctly - as broccoli, corn, green beans and potatoes.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to Tomas Transtromer of Sweden, whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet of recent decades. Characterized by powerful imagery, Transtromer's poems are often built around his own experiences and infused with his love of music and nature. His later poems are darker, probing existential questions of life, death, and disease.

ARNOLD MARKLEY was a Southern gentleman of enormous erudition. His day job as professor of English at Penn State's Brandywine campus, in Delaware County, was only the beginning of his story, even though he was a teacher with a daunting curriculum. It included freshman composition, introductory courses in British literature, classical mythology and literary theory, as well as more specialized courses in Shakespeare, British Romantic and Victorian literature. And, oh yes, Gothic fiction.

Arnold Markley, 47, of West Philadelphia, a professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University Brandywine campus, died of complications of leukemia Friday, June 3, at home. Dr. Markley grew up in Georgia and North Carolina. He graduated from Fayetteville Academy, where he was student body president, and earned a bachelor's degree from Guilford College in North Carolina. He then studied Greek and Latin at the University of South Carolina and at the University of Pennsylvania before earning a master's degree in English and a doctorate in 19th-century British romantic and Victorian literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Toward the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , the young raft-riding narrator says, "If I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more. " He didn't know the half of the troubles this book, first published in 1884, was going to cause. While hailed as the greatest of American novels, Huck Finn now makes headlines because of attempts to ban its use in schools for, among other things, its frequent use of the unsettling word nigger.

Some are calling it a surprise, but others are saying it's long overdue. Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist, journalist, essayist, politician, and teacher, was announced Thursday as the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in literature. His wide-ranging work includes monumental, experimental fiction and popular books, "dictator novels" ( The Feast of the Goat ), satire, and humor ( Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter ). Vargas Llosa, 74, is a distinguished visiting professor at Princeton University this year.

"Books should offend you," a professor told my literature class 30 years ago, when I started college. "They should make you squirm and sweat. They should keep you up at night. " He paused for effect. "Have a nice a day," he concluded. Everybody laughed, of course. But the joke was on us. Americans want to feel good, and they want the same for their kids. So we try to protect them from books that hurt. Look no further than J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which remains one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools and libraries.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design. Set in 1962 Los Angeles and starring Colin Firth as an English literature professor (he's English and he teaches literature), this meticulously crafted film has been adapted from the Christopher Isherwood novel by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford. Ford gets a strong and melancholy performance out of Firth, who wears his charm like a burden, because everything in his character's life has become meaningless since the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode, in flashback)

John T. Kelly, 71, an English literature teacher at West Chester University from 1968 to 2000, died of a brain tumor Aug. 11 at St. Joseph's Villa, a nursing home in Overland Park, Kan. Born in Yukon, Okla., he graduated from high school there in 1955. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from St. Louis University in 1959 and a doctorate in medieval literature in 1968 from the University of Oklahoma. His niece Katy FitzGerald said Mr. Kelly spent his teaching career at West Chester, during which, for nine summers, he took students to Oxford, England, where he taught such classics as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.

Forget Hellboy. Forget Pan's Labyrinth. Forget directing The Hobbit, which is why Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro finds himself in New Zealand these days. For the moment, del Toro's all about a plague of blood-feeders taking over New York - and the novel he's written about them, a man vs. vampire page-turner called The Strain. "There was a little book I read as a kid," del Toro says, on the phone from the Kiwi capitol, Wellington, by way of explaining his fascination with vampires.