Just got the good news that my paper, “'Things without Head, or Tail, or Form, or Grace': The Hypercorporeality of Farce on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage,” has been accepted for the 2010 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Albuquerque! My work, particularly invested in theater overwhelmingly about the body and its metamorphoses, the theater …
Midterm in Discover
Sadly, I've been less-than-dilligent about posting to this teaching blog--in part because of the chaos of my recent move, but also because this term has been busier in the classroom than most. My students seem to be slowing down a little, which isn't surprising around this time of year; nonetheless, I think each group is …
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
After four long weeks, we're finally through with Conrad in EN/HU501! We spent quite a bit of time with the piece, using it as a tool to more fully explore the nature of literary analysis, close reading, generating good essay topics, brainstorming, and so on. One thing I've done differently in this iteration of the …
Discussing Film Form
I was very impressed with my Discover 101 students today, who seemed really to get into the film analysis portion of our class--we watched the first ten minutes of Night of the Living Dead, and used it as a springboard for discussing some of the basic concepts of film analysis, locating patterns, key elements in …
Petrarch, Interiority, and the Tensions between Earthly and Spiritual
Instead of lecturing on the introduction--part of my larger goals this term to avoid lecture as much as possible, in favor of stimulating discussion that works outwards from the text--I'd like to focus our class time on Petrarch's letter in which he describes the mountainous ascent he undertakes with his brother, as well as some …
Continue reading "Petrarch, Interiority, and the Tensions between Earthly and Spiritual"
Night of the Living Dead
Tomorrow in Anatomy of a Film, I'm planning to show a clip from Night of the Living Dead that should work as a good springboard for a discussion of the key elements of film form, which students should have read. We'll discuss conventions and prior experience; the way we register emotion within the film and …
Building Textual Interpretation
Our first 501 course meets this evening, and I'm eager to get a sense of my student's experience with literature, literary history, literary research, and literary analysis. I've asked everyone to read an essay from Falling into Theory on the history of the discipline, as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and a few other …
Overcoming the First Day Syllabus Blues
I'm determined, this term, to not fall into either the 1.) going-over-the-syllabus-the-first-day cop-out or the 2.) jump-right-in-to-lecture cop-out, both of which so often become standards (usually because we're so busy prepping courses, finishing syllabi, or participating in the pipe-dream of having all the basic course plans for the entire rest of the term in some …
Fall 2009 courses
This fall, I'm teaching three courses: DSC101, EN203, and EN/HU501. DSC 101 is a first-year seminar organized around the analysis of popular horror films, which I'm very eager to get started on. As an introduction to college coursework, the course seeks to make analysis, close reading, and research a little more interesting; as an introduction …
A new term and…a clean desk?
The Fall 2009 term is just about to begin, and I've been madly prepping, trying to get as much done as possible before classes overwhelm me. Unfortunately, I've found myself spending a lot of time experimenting with new technologies, putting together research tutorials for posting to the web, and cleaning out my office, which is …
Tonya Howe 