When You’ve Already Got a Major, But You Love Books (Seton Hill English)
When committee work is fun… making memes to support the English program.
There is a thing in literature, theme X.
I’m very happy that several students in my “World Drama” class chose to write about The Merchant of Venice in their latest paper. Almost as many also write about Nine. And several chose to write about both. The assignment asked students to make an intertextual argument — that is, I asked them to write an argument that draws on two different literary works. I got a lot of Paragraph 1:…
PrimeStage’s 1984: “It was very true to the book,” says Peter.
Five of us went to see PrimeStage’s 1984. Very well done! I wish I could have included this play in my “World Drama” class, or that I had thought to assign the novel in my “Memes and Fake News” class. When it comes to dystopian literature, the boy is better read than I was at his age. Peter’s verdict: “It was very true to the book.”
Winners Chosen in Annual Shakespeare Monologue and Scene Contest
Michael Henninger took this wonderful photo of Carolyn and the boy she tied with, CAPA’s Logan Schiller. Both had been in the same coaching session with Ken Bolden Saturday morning. (Thank you, Ken!) Pittsburgh Public Theater’s 23rd annual Shakespeare Monologue & Scene Contest that began Feb. 6 with more than 1,000 student participants culminated Monday night, when winners were crowned after the Showcase of Finalists. In the Monologue competition, there…
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World
As my father [Neil Postman] pointed out, a written sentence has a level of verifiability to it: it is true or not true – or, at the very least, we can have a meaningful discussion over its truth. (This was pre-truthiness, pre-“alternative facts”.) But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more…
Lie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth Era
I’m trying to remember what it was like, a few months ago when I was thinking about picking “fake news” as the topic for a media course, when I was briefly worried I wouldn’t be able to find enough background reading on the issue. I’m no longer worried about that. (I am, however, a lot more worried about fake news.) The problem with our “post-truth” politics is that a large…