Author Archives:
Before Coursera, There Were the ‘Great Courses’
Have any of you watched any of the videos produced for The Great Courses series? We’re pretty big fans of these in our house as sources of enrichment and edutainment. My mathematically-inclined son has watched a number of them (along with his dad), including The Joy of Mathematics, Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers, An [...]
Communities of the Wounded: Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War
I’m reviewing Deirdre David’s Olivia Manning: A Woman At War for the June issue of Open Letters Monthly; inevitably, that has me thinking again about Manning’s best-known novels, which I read and wrote about a few years ago. Here, from the Novel Readings archives, is that original post. David’s excellent critical biography has prompted me to look up [...]
“Not Fitted to Stand Alone”: Deborah Weisgall, The World Before Her
I had a deeply and perhaps irrationally ambivalent response to Debora Weisgall’s The World Before Her. I think that on its own terms, it’s quite a good novel. It’s atmospheric, interesting, and thought-provoking, especially about the pressure marriage puts on identity: like so many characters in Middlemarch, Weisgall’s protagonists are struggling in relationships with partners who don’t [...]
The May Marks Meeting: That’s What It’s All About
Today we held one of our department’s most cherished and loathed rituals: the “May Marks Meeting.” It’s called that because one of its key elements is the annual review of students’ marks in aid of awarding our departmental scholarships and prizes, and also because we go over the standing of all of our current graduate [...]
Binge Reading vs. Close Reading
I’ve undertaken to write an essay on Dick Francis this summer, in preparation for which I am reading through all of his 40+ novels. His first, Dead Cert, was published in 1962, and he basically published one a year until his death in 2010 (the last few in partnership with his son Felix, who has now [...]
New Reviews and “Right” Reviewers
Launch day never comes but what I am surprised at what we’ve pulled off, thanks to the talent, perseverance, and generosity of our contributors and the diligence, enthusiasm, and contributions of our editors! Our May issue seems to me to exemplify what we want Open Letters to be. It covers a wide range of material — [...]
The Butterfly Effect: Penelope Lively, How It All Began
I’m a long-time fan of Penelope Lively’s Booker-winning 1987 novel Moon Tiger. In my first year teaching at Dalhousie, it was one of the novels I assigned in a seminar on women and historical writing (IIRC, I also assigned Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic — these details date me as much as the seminar!). I’ve read a number [...]
My First Romance? L. M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
Once upon a time I had never read a “romance novel” — or so the story went. There’s a way in which that was absolutely true: I had never read anything marketed or labeled explicitly as a “romance novel” (a Harlequin, say). As with all literary labels, though, “romance” isn’t really that precise:all around the territory of [...]
Catching Up and Looking Ahead
Friday afternoon I filed the last of my final grades for 2012-13. Compared to the arduous work to be done at the end of last term, wrapping up this term hasn’t been as difficult, but it also hasn’t been quite as interesting. My last post dwelt on the perplexities of ‘coercive pedagogy.’ Marking exams last [...]
This Week In My Classes: Coercive Pedagogy
Monday was my last day of class meetings, and now I’ve moved into the exams-and-essays phase of the term. I have mixed feelings about both final exams and final essays, but for different reasons. Final essays can be triumphant culminations of a term’s work, the products of significant reflection and practice. But they can also [...]
Recent Comments