Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash

Bruce Fleming

Taylor&Francis

What really goes on behind the wall that surrounds the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis? What are all those midshipmen, future officers in the U.S. Naval and Marine Corps and leaders of our society, thinking as they stand in neat ranks at the parades beloved by tourists? What are their professors actually educating them to do. In Annapolis Autumn, Bruce Fleming, professor of English for nearly two decades at the academy and a prizewinning author, captures the sights, sounds, colors, and conversations of this tradition-steeped institution. In other classes, the cadets learn how to assemble guns, control armored vehicles, man battleships, and kill other human beings. Nothing is ever less than "outstanding, sir!" In English class, however, Fleming introduces his students to nuance and subtext, to the gay poets of World War I, and to the idea that not every piece of literature is designed to be "motivational." Sharing stories from his twenty years at the academy, Fleming explores questions about teaching, the labels "liberal" and "conservative," and the ultimate purpose of higher education—issues made all the more gripping at a time when many of his students will graduate from the classroom to the battlefield.

Annapolis Autumn: Life, Death, And Literature At The U.S. Naval Academy

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

The New Press

Saving Madame Bovary: Being Happy With What We Have

Frederic C. Beil, Publisher

Tired of being surrounded by stuff? Tired of same old same old? Convinced that adventure always lies somewhere else? So was Gustave Flaubert heroine Emma Bovary from the 1857 novel Madame Bovary, and she killed herself. Fortunately, we don't have to. Nor do we have to be miserable, like poor Emma, who dreams of high life with the beautiful people, yet whom Fate has condemned to an ordinary life with an ordinary husband and an ordinary child in an ordinary town. But what makes her think the aristocracy is made of people any happier than she is? For them, that is their ordinary. We want what we don t have.
 Bruce Fleming notes the problem: For most of us most of the time, life seems lackluster, a roller-coaster ride of helpless longing, rarely culminating in an instant of triumph. If we do manage to get what we're longing for, we are left with the next-morning headache of What do we do now? We want to be the exception to the norm, never the norm. But the quest for the exceptional is doomed to failure. The exotic, by definition, is rare, and it's hard to get. Worse, even if we get it, it's no longer exotic. It's our everyday. And then we have to move on to something else.
 We all have to deal with the everyday. Saving Madame Bovary, shows us how to appreciate the ordinary which turns out not to be so ordinary after all. And that is good, because at the end of the day, the ordinary is all we have. We need to be ready to welcome it when it comes, and embrace it.

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Books by Bruce Fleming