In 290 tomorrow, I'm going to try something a bit new--students will have read the Ryan introduction to gender studies, which has three distinct portions (not divided as such, but useful): an overview, a closer look at the patriarchal construction/rejection/suppression of the feminine, and a section on homosexual panic and compulsory heterosexuality, all the while …
The Rover, Day One
It's time for Behn! I love this play, and I really enjoy teaching it--I just hope that the limited time we have is enough, and that the disruptions of midterm can be overcome. Tomorrow, students will have read acts 1 and 2 of the play, so I'd like to give them a little bio and …
The Country Wife?
Our last discussion in Theater History was taking up the role of the thematics of theatricality in The Country Wife; I wanted to organize our thinking on the theatricality of court culture, the generic features and cultural significance of comedy during the period, and the purpose served by "the playhouse" in Wycherley's drama. I started …
Achebe and the Center
In my tutorial today on the postcolonial novel and theory, we'll discuss The Empire Writes Back and the chapter on "Re-Placing the Text," in conjunction with the first part of Achebe's Things Fall Apart and, if we have time, Yeats' "The Second Coming": William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the …
Bishop, “Insomnia,” and Psychoanalysis
Today in EN290, we discussed Bishop's poem "Insomnia" from a psychoanalytic perspective. I started the class by turning to some important themes in Bishop's biography, themes which find expression quite often in her work--loss, alienation, dislocation, and so on. This allowed us to differentiate formalist from psychoanalytic methodology, while also giving us a starting place …
Tying up Derrida, Moving on Lacan
Critical theory meets on Tuesday to finish discussing Derrida and to begin thinking about psychoanalysis--largely, Freud and Lacan, but including our crazy friends Deleuze and Guattari. I'm hoping to be able to move fairly quickly through the excerpts we've got, but I anticipate having to spend more time than less with poststructuralism. I've got a …
Spring 2011… At long last!
So, as you can clearly tell, I "took a break" from this teaching blog. Deliberately, you ask? Well, not quite... Though I'd like to think it was a conscious decision. I'm going to restart it, though, because I'm teaching several new courses this term and I want to have a place where I can keep …
Web 2.0 in “Building Textual Interpretation”
This course was set up as an introduction to graduate study at Marymount, and given the diversity of our student body, it seemed useful to incorporate a web component as well. I teach in both the Humanities and the Literature graduate programs, and my students were about equally divided between the two--a few more in …
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Collaborative Research Tools in the Methodologies Course
ASECS 2010 San Antonio, TX Web 2.0 Roundtable Proposal: Over the past few years, I've been experimenting in the classroom with a variety of web 2.0 technologies: IBM's ManyEyes, wikis, blogs, and, most recently, Omeka archives and Zotero groups. Some technologies I use to produce single-authored lecture and discussion tools, like ManyEyes, and others, I …
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“Things without Head, or Tail, or Form, or Grace”
2010 ASECS Albuquerque, TX “'Things without Head, or Tail, or Form, or Grace': The Hypercorporeality of Farce on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage” An increasingly—and problematically—popular form on the stage during the early eighteenth century, farce thrives on the actions of bodies that, in their very embodiment, problematize the imagined integrity of the human. Instead of …
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Tonya Howe 