In mid July of this year, we, as a collective human society, will have one more book to read by the novelist Harper Lee. Written before her famous To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchmen is a ‘sequel
In mid July of this year, we, as a collective human society, will have one more book to read by the novelist Harper Lee. Written before her famous To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchmen is a ‘sequel’ to the former, set twenty years later. While the publication of this book has brought with it a renewed interest in her writing, it has also inspired a bit of scepticism about the legality, even morality, in publishing it (considered problematic given Lee’s presumed health issues). Within the former category, a recent article in the New York Times caught my attention, particularly in how the author, Laura Tavares, makes use of To Kill a Mockingbird in a way that elevates it above the restrictions of mere aesthetic media.
As a contribution to the New York Times’ “The Learning Network Blog,” under the category of ‘Text to Text,’ a cross-textual discussion that links similar textual entities via shared interests, Tavare’s article associates Chapter 15 in Lee’s novel with an article on the recent Equal Justice Initiative’s report on Lynching in America: “History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names.”
Her intention, as described at the beginning, is to elucidate for instructors (who might be reading the article for the sake of using it in their classrooms) how such a novel might ‘speak’ to ‘real life:’
To encourage students to make these important connections, we’ve chosen to pair an excerpt from Chapter 15 of the novel with The Times’s article on the Equal Justice Initia