My American Literature Association 2010 Abstract

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Mike

Utopian and Dystopia on Foot: Shoes in Turn of the 20th Century American Fiction
J. Michael Duvall, Assistant Professor, College of Charleston

A famous scene from Theodore Dresier’s Sister Carrie (1900) has the shoes in a department store angling to replace Carrie’s perfectly functional, but less novel pair, while elsewhere in the narrative, beaten souls tread the city streets in “soppy[, …] shred[ded]” shoes.  William Dean Howells, for his part, forms a miniature jeremaid in A Traveller from Altruria (1892), around the “saturday night shoe,” with a farmer decrying the factory-produced disposable shoes his daughters so fervently desire.  And then there’s Dorothy’s famous silver slippers (ruby in the film) in L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz (1900), which critics have convincingly arrayed in an allegory of contemporary currency standard debates.

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Your Reactions to Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Mike

[Forgive, readers, the embarrassing out-of-dateness of this blog]

English 349ers:

In advance of Priscilla Wald’s visit to our class on Thursday (3/25), I would like you to write your reactions to Douglass and Lincoln in the comment window below. Write as little or as much as you would like; write directly in the window or cut and paste from a word processor. Be sure to sign your entry, though, so that you can get credit.

If you can do this by Tuesday night, Professor Wald will have a chance to read your thoughts in advance. That would be fantastic. But as long as you can submit them before class on Thursday (12:30), you’ll be fine. Continue reading →

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Twain on the Role of the Humorist

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Mike

Mark Twain, in defense of the role of the humorist, from a letter to the President of Yale University in 1888, which institution was about to grant him an honorary master of arts degree (in 1901, they gave him an honorary doctorate, I believe):

A friendly word was needed in our defense [“the guild of American ‘funny men'”], and you have said it, and it is sufficient. It could not become us — we being in some ways, and at intervals, modest, like other folk — to remind the world that ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it — the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties. We might with propriety say these things, and so hint that in some degree our calling is entitled to respect, but since you have rehabilitated us it is not necessary. I offer my best thanks to the corporation of Yale university for the high honor which they have conferred upon me, and am very sorry that my circumstances deny me the privilege of saying my thanks by word of mouth at the dinner tomorrow night. With great respect, I am truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS.
– letter to President Timothy Dwight, Yale University, June 26, 1888. Reprinted in Hartford Daily Courant, June 29, 1888, p. 5.

<http://www.twainquotes.com/Degrees.html>

I think I shall be quoting this again very soon.

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Marginalia

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Mike

Just met with a student who has never tried writing marginalia.  We had a good 20-minute conversation about what writing marginalia as you read (I forgot about the use of it in re-reading…drat) does for you.  We looked at the years of accreted marginalia in my copies of “Song of Myself” and James’s essay, “The Art of Fiction.”

The reason it even came up, marginalia, is that my student–a very good student–had noticed another student’s extensive side commentary and underlining and noticed this precisely because he, himself has never tried it.

It made me remember — marginalia writing is “natural” to me now, but there was a time when it was new to me, too.  I’m guessing that we ought to be “teaching” this in literature classes, maybe by just occasionally making a pitch for it?  I think I used to do that but I have fallen away from it.  I’m going to try to get back to it.

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Wiki assignments

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Mike

I’d like to start collecting these. Here’s one from Brian Croxall at Emory U: Wiki Class Notes.

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Zotero — Firefox plugin for researching, compiling bibliographies, annotating sources, and more

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Mike

I spoke with Bing Pan and Jim Duran about this at the CofC Spring FTI, and I said i would send a link to Jim through a one-off email, but then I thought “I have a blog; I’ll just post it there and share it as many times as needed.” So, here it is: http://www.zotero.org/.  I recommend playing the film.

I have only just started using Zotero, but I have friends who swear by it, and I intend to start using it, as Tyra Banks might say, fiercely, as I get an article project up and running in the next two weeks.

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Teaching with blogs…

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Mike

For my FTI buddies, I thought I would collect a few links on teaching with blogs and post them here.  The list could probably be better organized and there are probably better collections of links and information already out there, but this could be a start.  (You’ll probably be very interested to see Marissa Ferrara’s blog assignment and evaluation rubric.)

How to use blogs / how not to use blogs in the classroom (all links open in a new window)

Using Blogs in a College Classroom: What’s Authenticity Got To Do With It?

ABSTRACT: Have you ever tried using a blog as part of a course, in the hopes of fostering dynamic interaction between you and your students, only to have it fall short of expectations? This article suggests that while course blogs may rarely live up to the expectations of the type of blogging that goes on outside of the classroom, course blogs may represent a hybrid form of blogging that draws on the best of both worlds.

Marissa Ferrara’s Blogging Assignment & Blogging Evaluation Rubric (These are google docs — email me and I can “share” them with you)

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I’ll add more later?

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(Routinized) habits of reflection

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Mike

I am intensely reflective, reflecting all the time on all kinds of stuff that am I occupied with in good and bad senses.  So it’s not like I lack the capacity for reflection and recursion; I have that capacity in spades.  What I need are more routinized habits of reflection.  I need to sit down at particularly appropriate times and deliberately to think about things that are holding my attention–my classes, my scholarship (an article I can’t seem to get moving on), my service obligations (a committee I chair that I haven’t called a meeting of in a while), my family relationships, and so on, into a ever-expanding and increasingly cosmic concentric circles.

Maybe that’s forcing it into a tight little box, to schedule reflection time on matters of ultimate concerns, my family, my place in the universe.   Maybe. But for sure, I could more deliberately schedule reflective time for thinking through most less-cosmic but still significant concerns.

This is on my mind because for about a year (with a serious and long fall off the wagon about a month in) I have been trying to adopt Continue reading →

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