“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Emily Dickinson’s circumlocutory anthem for poetic truth haunted my English course last semester. Using Dickinson’s verse as a frame along with a contemporary reading of Herman Melville’s Bartleby–perhaps best illustrated in this short film by directors Laura Naylor and Kristen Kee–we consistently asked how truth becomes socially constructed […]
by Sean Farnham, Sharon Joyce, Sara Morton, Brianna Rodríguez Flores, and Anonymous WHAT’S A SWA? A Spoken Word Action, or SWA in short, is a decolonial and feminist pedagogical tool adapted from the Spoken Wor(l)d-Art-Performance-As-Activism (SWAPAs) assignments developed by Chicana feminist scholar and educator Chela Sandoval. This assignment combined research, creativity, community-making, and performance and […]
1) Myth: “Good writing is clear!” Who can argue against clear writing? But clarity involves more than an author creating lucid syntactical patterns. Clarity is also a function of the background knowledge and expectations of readers. “Humpty Dumpty was pushed!” shouts the bumper sticker. But if readers haven’t heard that nursery rhyme or know a […]
Stony Brook University’s English Department has quite the knack for weaving itself into Dana Haugh’s life. Dana graduated from the English program in 2010, and it was a conversation with a SBU English Professor that inspired her to return to school for her Masters in Library Science after she became dissatisfied with her career in marketing. […]
Shmoop is a scourge on the verdant landscape of information that is the Internet. Not only is it plagued by misinformation and endless invasive ads, but its misguided attempts at humor are tragically unfunny. This website, along with others of its ilk, have likely done more harm than good to desperate English majors struggling with […]
“The world changed, and I changed, and this was the new way for me to make a difference.” Stony Brook University alum Ross Barkan’s five year career in journalism has resulted in by-lines with some of the most noteworthy news sources, including the New York Times, the Village Voice, and New York Magazine. However, the […]
I would be hard-pressed to think of a scarier time in my adult life than when I decided to quit my job and go back to school. Maybe the first time I watched The Babadook, or one of the many movies about exorcisms: I love horror, but I startle very easily. Still, certainly the scariest non-supernatural […]
There are few moments in a young adult’s life that are more anxiety-inducing than gazing at the post-graduation future and thinking: “What do I do now?” A BA in English or other aspects of the Humanities in particular often carries an extra load of stress thanks to well-meaning-but-still-trite questions like “What can you do […]
The university library is a tragically underutilized resource in academia. There is an unbelievable amount of free (read: FREE!) information and content waiting both in the stacks and on the library website. Yet, many students fail to take advantage. Movies, ebooks, and even a digital trip to the museum are readily available through your web […]
Among the challenges we face in the undergraduate classroom are getting students to work actively with literary texts, to contribute meaningfully and purposefully to class discussions, and to develop the skills necessary to construct arguments and support these arguments with direct textual evidence either verbally or in writing. I’d love to write here that I […]