To Strive, To Seek, To Find

Professor Lawrence Moe wrote this review of the Beowulf movie in the Fall of 2007. In honor of my LIT 371 students who are enjoying the epic even now, I reprint his review. Readers, weigh in with your own opinions!

I took my son to see the Beowulf movie released this month. He’s a senior in high school and so a recent survivor of that time-honored, English-class encounter with a prosaic translation of the epic or parts of it, a shared cultural experience often enough acknowledged among American adults, who may add that they remember nothing about the story and didn’t like it either. Thus when Annie Hall of the eponymous 1977 film muses about going back to college, Woody Allen can get a laugh by warning, “Just don’t take any course where they make you read Beowulf.”     read more »

Colorado Pete with a knitting machine, at the Woodmen Sanatorium near Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1923.

Professor Lawrence Moe has published a book making available for the first time the life and work of a virtually unknown figure from Midwestern literary history. “Colorado Pete” is the pen name of a Minnesotan named Arthur Owen Peterson (1896-1932). He was raised in Bagley and attended Carleton College before joining the US Army to serve in France during World War I. And for that he paid a price, as Dr. Moe has written:

“He wasn’t wounded by enemy fire, but he was wounded. Amoebic dysentery was the most clear and immediate problem, but there was something else, perhaps in his present and certainly in his future. From this time forward Arthur’s life would be characterized by a cycle, a grim and terrible cycle: a period of health and energy, followed by a very different period of sickness and suffering. And that second period gradually took over.” read more »