In the past, my students have expressed frustration when they encountered Jim’s thick dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, so I thought I’d ease them into that, by producing a podcast that introduces the dialect, in the context of much shorter tales. We are studying Nights with Uncle Remus, which is the second collection of…
My class was doing small group work, focusing on a challenging passage in Emerson’s Nature, when a student called my attention to a fiery red sunset outside the tall 19thC windows. I turned out the lights, and in the glow of their iPads, I could see the looks on the students’ faces as they took…
Literary questions aren’t really worth exploring if there’s an obviously “right” answer, so let’s explore a thorny question. Near the end of Chapter 13, in the third paragraph from the end. Hawthorne tells us of Hester, “At times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl…
This is the section of the book where the relationships between the characters start to take solid shape, and Hawthorne makes these points numerous times. When we aim to interpret a literary work, our task has to go beyond listing our emotional reactions, our gut reactions, to the events of the plot or the setting.…
Hawthorne carefully explains to his reader that these people are different from you and me. Our 21st century values may leave us shocked at the sight of male authority figures punishing Hester this way. Of course, the author wants us to be shocked that the authorities are treating Hester this way. Hawthorne created a bleak…
Why would an upright young citizen of Salem, with a new wife and a proud family tradition behind him, risk the good opinion of his neighbors, all for a romp in the woods with the wicked? If society is rotten to the core, and your minister, your Sunday school teacher, even the spirit of your…
Sometimes we’re tempted to think that people who lived “back in the day” were simpler and less sophisticated than we are, and perhaps because Rip Van Winkle celebrates a simple soul, we might think that the author himself was also simple. Irving, born in New York City in the late 1700s, wrote early biographies of…
Here’s the proposal for an in-house “Teaching and Learning Seminar” I’ll be presenting October 13: There is no scholarship on the academic use of iPads, because people like us — who have just begun teaching and advising and facilitating with iPads — haven’t published it yet. We can, of course, draw on related academic inquiry…
A new federal law requires publishers to provide textbook price information to professors and calls on colleges to identify course textbooks during registration, giving students more time to shop around. Experts call it a step in the right direction, but not a game-changer. At the same time, a robust online marketplace of used books and…
Now available for Windows-based PCs, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby is a downloadable casual game that lets you interact with familiar characters, locations and story lines from the legendary American novel. As Nick Carraway, a young idealist back from the Great War, you must unravel secrets buried behind the decadence of the Roaring ’20s. This…
I’ve been a fan of the faux-historical Boilerplate website for many years, so I was very happy to see this news. J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot banner are tackling the tale of a robot set in the Victorian Age. Paramount has picked up rights to “Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel,” a graphic novel-picture book hybrid…
I’m very happy with yesterday’s update of the Kindle app, which added an inline dictionary. Now I am seriously considering it for assigning class texts. I do wish that the Kindle offered a few more things. The ability to tag or otherwise sort comments, and email just one set of tagged comments (so I could…
The other day I was searching Amazon for a digital edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson, and was pleased to find a digital edition for a few bucks. I know that Project Gutenberg has a decent edition of the original publication of the version her family first published, but the first publication changed her…
Some college campuses will start seeing fewer students coming to class with a pen and paper — and more carrying iPads. At Seton Hill University, in Greensburg, Pa., every fulltime student, no matter what year they are, will be receiving an Apple iPad when they return to campus this fall. The iPad will be used…
Still reading? You’re probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask…
Like all of O’Connor’s work, the meaning of a sentence like that expands over time like a sponge. Mystery and Manners is packed with them. It contains talks about the act of writing, about teaching, about the art of raising peacocks, about the South, and Catholicism. But what I value most when I read these…
Editors of the long-awaited autobiography of Mark Twain said Tuesday they were surprised to discover the unedited manuscript of the forthcoming book contains lashing, in-depth criticism of the website YouTube, the recent BP oil spill, and the ongoing military action in Afghanistan. —The Onion Similar:Asteroid 2012 DA14 brushes by EarthAn asteroid is making the closest…
Tin House Implements New Policy for Fall Reading Period. Unsolicited Submissions must be Accompanied by a Receipt for a Hardcover or Paperback from a Real-Life Bookstore PORTLAND, OREGON (JUNE 30, 2010) In the spirit of discovering new talent as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept…
Results: Books Faster Than Tablets The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability. Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device…
I keep forgetting that I can’t use my iPad to blog with MovableType. The WYSIWYG editor does not work, and I can’t even seem to paste a URL when using the text editor. At any rate, this is a Flash video from USA Today. Similar:Encyclopedia Smithsonian: Star-Spangled Banner and the War of 1812 When he…