“We trust… that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured.” Thus says Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
Read more →We’ve all heard it: “I don’t feel like I belong here”—the clarion call of English graduate students and the hyper-obsession of meta-conversations within Literature departments at the highest level. What is this obsession, and who really does belong in graduate programs or the academy, if not those who are there already? This problem has...
Read more →For every single 3-credit course I teach each semester I spend approximately 2,350 minutes in front of the classroom. Like most of you, before I even step foot in the classroom or meet a single student, I sit down with an assortment of desk copies—anthologies, novels and the like—and try to decide on the...
Read more →Today’s post represents the ripening of an idea I pondered in the first post I ever made to this blog, way back in September. (Sigh… how young I was back then…) I had been pondering the concept of “emotive reading” as a way into understanding literature—and lucky for me, I got assigned to teach...
Read more →In a recent edition of English Studies in Canada, Margery Fee writes that “we often talk about the importance of good writing without explaining what it is or how we know what it is… our knowledge of what makes good writing is tacit.” I’ve found this rings true for me on both sides of...
Read more →At the end of each semester, I tell students that any class worth its salt should give them something they didn’t have before they began it. Since I ask them to think about and name a few of those “somethings,” I figured I would ponder and write about a few of my own! I...
Read more →The traditional literature class does much to perpetuate the image of a hermetic system. The student, in almost every instance an outsider to that system, is to read a text whose value has already been established within the system, whether by a traditional canonically-centered ideology or by the myriad political or historical ideologies that...
Read more →Hi. This is Kelli T. Jasper, secretary of the NGSC, checking in with an only slightly self-indulgent reflection on the vicissitudes of teaching literature. My regards to all of you out there who, like me, are still figuring it out! -K It’s Monday, and the end of September. The euphoria and excitement of starting...
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