Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…
I invest a lot of energy asking my college students to unlearn the pattern of summary and personal reflection that was enough to to earn a good grade in high school. I emphasize repeatedly that their high school teachers didn’t do anything wrong by teaching them what they needed to do in order to get…
Very glad to see another of August Wilson’s plays is getting filmed. Sad to read that it won’t be filed in Pittsburgh, where Wilson grew up and where most of his plays take place. “The entire film industry of Southwest Pennsylvania is saddened to not be able to welcome August Wilson’s ‘Piano Lesson’ to Pittsburgh,…
A dedication in the script of a 1603 Ben Jonson play (Sejanus: His Fall) may have been written by Shakespeare, who appeared in that play as an actor. “It’s tantalising. There are so many parallels with Shakespeare’s style that it must surely make even the most hardened sceptic pause and think.” Initially intrigued, he had…
In August, 2002, I was blogging about Educational technology spending that doesn’t benefit students; ebook readers that students don’t like; email as a tool in online course (all free at the time, but now behind the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s paywall) A prof spreading bad papers in order to catch plagiarists Expensive goose tracker leads…
Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…
“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies. Rutger Bregmen writes: “began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?…
“Professing Criticism” proceeds on the basis that, in order to decipher the present and to prepare for the future, one must first turn to the past. “The study of literature—in the premodern sense of any writing that has been preserved or valued—is very old, the oldest kind of organized study in Western history, excepting only…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my…
I recorded this oral interpretation of a delightful Christmas story.
The worst reaction to Shakespeare’s complicated language, it seems to me, is thinking that it should be hard for an audience to understand. This will only cause Shakespeare shrinkage to expand, creating entire productions that are difficult to understand, not just occasional moments, and alienating audiences who have been disappointed too many times. Shakespeare should never be a…
A portrait said to be the only signed and dated image of William Shakespeare created during his lifetime has gone on sale for more than £10m and is being displayed in London. The owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, is offering the piece for sale by private treaty without an auction. It is the work of Robert…
She says she got the email while at a cast party after the final performance of Pippin. Pittsburg’s Prime Stage Theatre reimagines “Frankenstein”