Accomack County Public Schools announced Tuesday that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” will immediately returned to school library shelves. The books were temporarily suspended on November 29, after a complaint was filed….The Accomack County School Board voted on Tuesday to permanently reinstate the two novels. “These novels are treasures of American…
Practicing empathy through drama and poetry and art and games and face-to-face conversations and human acts of all kinds matters. This article covers the specific social benefits that come from reading literary fiction. Film critic Roger Ebert called movies the most powerful empathy machines, but someone with the right knowledge base can say pretty much…
Whem my kids started reading the books on their own, I fell behind. I finally just finished reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I’m glad there were just 3 Hallows, and rather wished there were about that many Horcruxes. Shortly after I arrived at SHU a student compared me to Lupin, so I’ve followed…
Every time I teach a college literature class, I have to budget time in the syllabus to help my students unlearn the way they learned to read in high school. Atwood does a great job explaining the role a reader plays in constructing the meanings they find in a literary text. It’s all the fault…
As a child, I obsessed over many Richard Scarry books. I liked What Do People Do All Day best, but I also remember this one fondly — The Best Word Book Ever. As a parent, I don’t think I owned a copy of this one — we just checked it out of the library every…
I begin a class on “Bartleby the Scrivener”: “Maybe I should do what Bartleby does. Maybe instead of teaching this class, I should protest an impersonal environment, and calmly decline to do what society expects of me. But I don’t have the guts to do that. Okay, who’d like to start the discussion?”
Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the good wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles, and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children…
Kinetic Theatre‘s production was full of great twists that honor the source material while also smashing the fourth wall. (Carolyn has worked with all three cast members in PICT’s Great Expectations and/or Oliver Twist.) Similar:Post-publication review as an efficient alternative to pre-publication peer reviewAndrew Gelman of “Statistical Modeling, …AcademiaLetter to the editor: Why our English department deserves…
We spent Sunday afternoon at the Sadecky’s Puppets studio/workshop in Tarentum, Pa. Carolyn recorded an audio track for a musical adaptation of “Heidi,” to be synced with performances of live puppeteers touring across 9 states during the coming school year. Mr. Sadecky, who has been performing with his puppets since the early 80s, was charming…
Recently on Facebook I made some of my friends go “hmm” when I corrected a meme that suggested the medieval church burned Copernicus at the stake for teaching that the sun is the center of the solar system. (“Contrary to popular belief, the Church accepted Copernicus’ heliocentric theory before a wave of Protestant opposition led…
Seton Hill is revamping its freshman writing program, previously implemented as a pair of courses, “Basic Composition” and “Seminar in Thinking and Writing” (STW), and now called “Composition and Culture” (which students can take in one semester or stretch over two). The new design includes more focus on reading, and also seeks to erase what…
Michael Dirda offers a thoughtful assessment of Poe’s career. My initial puzzlement about Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was hardly surprising. His fiction can seem too rhetorical, too thickly textured, too literary for most young people. Still, Basil Rathbone’s recording did persuade me to give the writer another try—sometime. The opportunity finally arose in high school…
This year, for the first time in decades, graduating seniors won’t have a yearbook to buy. Hopkins and colleges around the state and country are phasing out yearbooks in an age when students who already document their experiences themselves — and can access their memories — on social media are less interested in shelling out…
I’m definitely seeing students in my freshman writing class and intro lit classes struggling with complex texts. I have more freedom to address the problem in my lit classes, where the focus is on reading. In the freshman writing class, where the goal is to produce a 10-page research paper by the end of term,…
Borges reinvented Don Quixote as a playful novel, full of surprises and unexpected anticipations of the way we read today. Across genres and over decades, his varied meditations opened new paths for readers. The following conversation took place during January 2016 between Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College,…
Fair use is a concept baked into US copyright law, and it’s a defense to copyright infringement if certain elements are met. The US Copyright Office says the defense is decided on a case-by-case basis. “The distinction between what is fair use and what is infringement in a particular case will not always be clear…
By a set of strange coincidences, complicated by the history of Europe’s uneven adaptation of the Gregorian calendar, April 23 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. In June I’ll be playing the villain in the Cabaret Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha (which incorporates…
I read “The Name of the Rose” during the summer between high school and college, because my high school drama coach (who had been my freshman English teacher) recommended it. I’m sure I’d get a lot more out of it if I read it again now. I assigned “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”…
Much of what Krystal writes about the novel also applies to drama, but the difference is that theatre presupposes a community. The writing, editing, manufacture, sale, and criticism of books is, of course, a communal endeavor, but the novel as an artifact can be experienced in isolation. Fiction, speaking very generally, is about the individual…
We went through a Lloyd Alexander phase at my house a few years ago; I read through the whole Prydain series and a few of his stand-alone works. I did enjoy Disney’s The Black Cauldron, which is technically impressive, and ambitious in its storytelling, but made a muddle of two of the five Prydain books.…