making things, helping people make things better
What do you want your students to see upon logging into your course? You need to think about this, and carefully. Do you want them to know what the readings and assignments are per the syllabus? Consider using a modules list for your home page. Do you want students to have clear access to, say, …
Next week my upper-division writing intensive literature class on women writers before Austen is going to the UK for an extended Spring Break field trip. We'll be spending the first few days in London, with a day trip to Strawberry Hill (I know, I know... I just couldn't help myself!); then we're off to Chawton; …
Continue reading "Major Women Writers: London, Chawton, Bath"
I've been teaching a MA-level critical theory course for a couple of years now, and while I think it's effective on some levels as-is, I would like to offer a more curated, in-depth approach. Currently, the course is organized loosely chronologically, using the 2nd edition of the Rivkin & Ryan anthology--what I used in graduate …
This is the proposal for my 2012 ASECS talk; I'll post the full (and very different) piece soon! The process of creating sound public knowledge shares a great deal with the knowledge-making procedures in the arts and humanities. These procedures include interpretation, judgment, imagination, and expression…. In this respect, then, the humanities scholars are natural …
From March 3rd through the 9th, I was lucky enough to have been invited to give a series of lectures on modern American drama at the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Gabès in Tunisia. The experience was definitely a novel one for me, as I had never had the opportunity to travel outside of western …
Teaching critical theory last night, I was pleasantly surprised by a passage in Richard Lanham's 1983 Analyzing Prose, excerpted in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's anthology Literary Theory as "Tacit Persuasion Patterns." Somehow it jumped out in a new way this term, and it sparked an interesting discussion of how student blogs can work to …
Continue reading "Electronic Texts and Tacit Persuasion Patterns"
To open discussion today, I want to start with a quote from Brooks' "The Formalist Critics" that seems to offer an excellent transition into a useful consideration of rhetorical analysis: Literature is not inimical to ideas. It thrives upon ideas but does not present ideas patly and neatly. It involves them with the "recalcitrant stuff …
This March at ASECS, I'm presenting my work on the development of a collaborative digital assignment for graduate students (which could also work for advanced undergraduates) organized around the creation of items in an Omeka collection. The idea is to work together to define and populate a subcollection of materials housed in our small special …
Continue reading "Working Assignment: Digital Gomatos Collection"
I just received the MLA edition on teaching contemporary theory to undergraduates I ordered in preparation for my courses this term, and on a quick browse, it looks less useful than I thought it would be--that is, more theoretical. Which is not bad, but telling.... Why do we assume that if a text like this …