Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an…
The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town…
We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us — with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests — via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork. What motivates such postings by that increasingly…
Mr Crystal, a professor of linguistics at Reading University for 20 years, said Yoda – a Jedi master in the Star Wars films – was a good way to get children interested in how preferences in English word order changed from the Anglo-Saxon era to that of Middle English. —Finlo Rohrer —Yoda ‘speaks like Anglo-Saxon’ (BBC)…
Now, I’m really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn’t made this move. It’s a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason…
Some interviewers have been known to call job seekers at home and pose as telemarketers to gauge how those candidates react. Are they rude? Do they yell? Or are they polite but insistent that they don’t want to purchase anything? How a candidate deals with an annoying telemarketing call tells the company something about how…
Two tales of gender, politics, weblogs, and cybercultureJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Both tales are pretty sad. One is the story of Alexandra Polier, falsely accused of having an affair with Sen. John Kerry. According to Matt Drudge: “In an off-the-record conversation with a dozen reporters earlier this week General Wesley Clark plainly stated: ‘Kerry will implode…
Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, “We won’t be reading any novels…
Crisfield, a crabbing hub on the southwestern tip of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Smith Island are separated by just a dozen miles of choppy water known as Tangier Sound. But Smith Island has a distinct identity. An archipelago of fiercely independent villages, it is so isolated that many residents still converse in an Elizabethan-era dialect…
In 1990 women around the world gave birth to 3.3 children on average, the report says. By 2002, the average had dropped to 2.6 children – slightly above the level needed to assure replacement of the population. The bureau’s projections show the level of fertility for the world as a whole descending below replacement level…
Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States largely credited with ushering in an era of conservative politics and pursuing a foreign policy that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, died Saturday at his home in California after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer‘sdisease. He was 93. […] Born into poverty in 1911,…
Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’? —Michael Mateas —Feds can’t tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto) I’d heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a…
Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3 Â (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A few weeks ago, I was comparing PDA’s with Josh Sasmor (a Seton Hill math professor), when Josh noticed that one of the four tiny screws on the lower body of my Tungsten T3 was missing. I forgot to bring the charger home one…
”Students felt more empowered,” said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement. The study also found that…
I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it’s a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students’ homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos…
There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work – is it any good? – is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might…
In a comedy of errors, Dasch proceeded to call the New York office of the FBI to explain that he was a German citizen who had arrived in the U.S. the previous morning, that he had a statement to make about the nation’s security, and that he wanted to meet with J. Edgar Hoover. The…
But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the…
—American Drama and Theater from the Beginnings through 1960 A detailed bibliography, by Udo Hebel. This isn’t a mechanically generated collection of web pages that turn up after keyword searches for “american drama” — this is a hand-edited list that reflects some actual editorial work. It deserves PageRank karma, so it gets my link. Similar:They…
Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez’s comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art — “sprites” in programming jargon — along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game…