Literary Themes and Connections
I’ve previously discussed on this blog ideas about the ambiguity and open-endedness of interpretation. Today I’m thinking specifically about how making connections across texts is central to the work...
View ArticleAttack the Block
The question took me by surprise. We were about halfway through the semester, and I’d finally figured out the rhythm and patterns of my 10:10- 11:40 Techniques of Fiction class. I’d come in just...
View ArticleIt’s on the Syllabus: Creating Sacred Space
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. –T S Eliot Recently, I planned out my courses for spring. I wrote new syllabi for...
View ArticleFashion and Literature
I’ve written before about linking the material world with literature, because it’s something I’m interested in as a scholar. But it’s also something that, I think, often helps students delineate time...
View ArticleDramatic Punctuation: Some Ideas for Beginning Playwrights
Dramatic writers aim to capture the way that people speak: Therefore, grammatical correctness is not necessarily important in the text of a play or script. What is unacceptable in academic prose is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Melville’s Bartleby: Reading the Character through other Characters
Herman Melville, a few years before the 1953 publication of “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” I’ve been thinking a great deal about how to approach the concept of character in my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chekhov’s Three Sisters: On Production and Interpretation
An image from Sarah Ruhl’s version of Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, co-produced by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2011-2012. © Joan Marcus. One of the issues I mull...
View ArticleBeyond Beginning: Teaching the Contemporary Essay
Most of my LitBits blog posts have been focused on exercises or discussions aimed at motivating or inspiring the beginning writer. I’ve written craft exercises designed to help students mine their...
View ArticleIntellectual Patterns: The Moves We Make to Interpret Literature
I’m always looking for ways to explain to students how reading and writing about literature is relevant to what they’re doing in their other classes—while I might think it’s obvious that reading...
View ArticleThings I Wish Somebody Had Told Me
Yesterday I wrote a course description for next semester. It was due only a week ago, so I’m feeling pretty good about getting it done. I’m thinking about the course today, which I’ve titled “1968” and...
View ArticleTeaching Writing and Analysis in the Literature Classroom
One of the great challenges in teaching a survey course full of non-majors is making sure everyone knows how to write about literature. This past semester, I faced that challenge in my world...
View ArticleGearing Up For Fall
After a brief pause for the summer, LitBits is gearing up for the fall term with an invitation to all literature instructors. If you want to share your thoughts about literature and the classroom, we...
View ArticleStretching the Field of Knowledge
Throughout the last decade-plus of college teaching, I’ve been called upon to do a lot of teaching outside my immediate area of expertise. A great deal of this began when I working off the tenure track...
View ArticlePreparing the British Literature Survey: Or, There’s Never Enough Time
Recently, I got into a conversation on Twitter with a number of other early modernists about survey courses, a discussion that stemmed from another English professor’s frustration with her anthology’s...
View ArticleIt Says Here
The world these days is full of competing stories. I can’t turn on my computer without being inundated by them (unless I don’t look at any social media, but then what’s a computer for? Writing?)....
View Article
