Lope de Vega's Dog in the Manger, tonight, at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC! Reread the program online if you forget to pick one up or lose yours before turning in the review.
Theater Outing, Lope de Vega
I've secured the tickets for Wednesday, February 11, when we'll be seeing the 7:30 performance of Dog in the Manger, at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC. The Shakespeare Theatre has two venues--we'll be in the Lansburgh theater. Since I'm canceling class in order to go as a group to see the play, I think we …
World Literature, Castiglione
Last week in EN203, we discussed Baldesar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, thinking especially about the deliberate cultivation of public identity as a Renaissance trait. Students seemed a bit less enthused about this text, and they have been getting more difficult in the past weeks. Discussion has been going well, and while it's rare that …
Two Comp Classes
My comp students have been a little lackluster in discussion this past week, despite having seen the magnificent Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925). Last Monday, we went over Project 2, which is a film analysis essay; in discussion, I sought to tie a few prefatory clips from the film to our background reading in order to …
Sentence Imitations for Structure
Today in Composition, we spent some time on one last-minute edit of the first project before it was turned in, and I was interested to note how many typos, dropped and misspelled words were corrected! Hopefully, this kind of attention to detail will improve in later projects; to help ensure that happens, I've asked students …
Early Roman and Medieval Theater
Last class, we discussed David Wiles' essay on theater in early Rome and Medieval Christian Europe, though we paid most attention to the materiality of Medieval performance. Students were generally surprised by the real heterogeneity of performance modes in the Medieval period--from processionals to place-and-scaffold to Church interiors and the halls of private dwellings, the …
Montaigne
Today, we engaged in a rather Montaignian (Montaignesque?) discussion in 203, which I found exceptionally enjoyable. Almost everyone participated, thought I've still got a few hold-outs! We did some small group work first, where I asked students to draw on the introductory/contextual reading guide questions, finding one or two that struck them as most interesting …
Workshopping, Round 1
This morning in comp 102, we held our first workshopping day, and I've got mixed feelings about it. It's hard to read one's own work critically, true--but I still feel that looking at others' work is an important first step. Workshopping helps us acheive the degree of distance necessary to a critical examination of one's …
Petrarch’s Sonnets
Today in 203 we'll get to go over Petrarch's sonnets, which I'm really excited about. We'll consider how to "get into" them--most importantly, by identifying 1.) key images or motifs visible in the text, 2.) how the historical context can focus our attention, and 3.) how to paraphrase dense language and convoluted syntax. This last …
:15 Classes
Each year, I like to have a small-group, short-class meeting with students, ideally at the beginning of the term; today we had ours in Composition 2, and four students met together, with me, for :15 classes. The time allows me to get to know students a bit better, on the individual level, as well as …
Tonya Howe 