Mark W. Roche

Cultural and Religious Reversals in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino

Abstract Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is one of the most fascinating religious films of recent decades. Its portrayal of confession is highly ambiguous and multi-layered, as it both mocks confession and recognizes the enduring importance of its moral core. Equally complex is the film’s imitation and reversal of the Christ story. The religious dimension is interwoven with a complex portrayal and evaluation of multicultural America that does not shy away from unveiling elements of moral ugliness in American history and the American spirit, even as it provides a redemptive image of American potential. The film reflects on the shallowness of a modern culture devoid of tradition and higher meaning without succumbing to an idealization of pre-modern culture. The film is also Eastwood’s deepest and most effective criticism of the relentless logic of violence and so reverses a common conception of Eastwood’s world-view.

Areas of Expertise, Proleptic Interpretation, Penultimate Drafts: Three Ideas for the Graduate Seminar in Literature

With few institutional forums for the study of teaching literature, most young teachers intuit the essentials of good teaching from exemplary models or develop their own methodologies through either trial-and-error or informed dialogue with their colleagues. I would like to contribute to such a dialogue by sharing three practices that I have found particularly effective: first, asking the students to adopt several areas of expertise for the course of a seminar; second, thinking through with the students a particular interpretation of a given work and then attempting to undermine or show the limits of the given interpretation; third, inviting students to submit, two weeks before the due date, penultimate drafts of their seminar papers which are then promptly returned full of questions, comments, and suggestions.