When I introduce any Victorian literature to students, I initially ask them to brainstorm words they associate with Victorian, and I write their responses on the blackboard. Overwhelmingly, they see the period and its figures as resoundingly restrained. Though many American college students define the Victorians by their apparently repressed sexuality, troubling gender relations, and […]
Teaching Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities What is a Learning Disability? A learning disability is when a person has extreme difficulty learning in a typical manner. This can be caused by one factor, or many. People who are learning disabled are clinically diagnosed by a professional, be it a pediatrician or a psychologist, and […]
Peer responding can be constructive Writers can become highly motivated to revise when peer readers with some training and practice respond to larger issues in a draft such as content, organization, tone, emphasis, use of evidence or details, etc. But to get productive peer response sessions, that is, responses balanced with both earned praise and […]
A New Republic of Letters in the Digital Age In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853), Melville self-reflexively critiques the life and death of reading. Melville’s titular character Bartleby’s dead letter-reading and life-writing (or not-writing, because, after all, Bartleby “prefers not to”) criticize national ethics of expression and representation. The novella can also […]
I’ve taught several classes on WWI literature and culture, and one challenge has often arisen. Most of the literature we now study that takes up the war, whether it be canonical (Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway) or not (Helen Zenna Smith) was written or published in the decades after the war ended. How can students get […]