Looking Back During the last week of “TheoryCamp,” we revisited one of the “posts” we left behind last week—postcolonialism—and moved on to “Differences” before wrapping up with “Life” itself (no topic, it seems, is too encompassing for our fearless authors of The Theory Toolbox). Let’s begin with “Difference.” The key question of this first chapter […]
Author Archive | Prof VZ
Theory Module 3
Looking Back Welcome back! Last week represented our most in-depth and extended engagement with theory as we tackled chapters on “Culture,” “Ideology,” History,” “Space/Time,” and “Posts.” Let’s begin with “Culture.” Nealon and Giroux write a lot about the importance of cultural context–about how meaning is in many ways a negotiation among various contexts, cultural and otherwise. […]
Theory Module 2
Welcome back to the weekly wrap-up. As always, please feel free to comment on these weekly posts, especially if you are less likely to contribute to our conversations in class. Looking Back So here we are “doing” English. We’re learning about concepts and methodologies rather intensively during these early weeks, and we’ve even begun applying […]
Theory Module 1
During the first four weeks of the semester, we will be covering some crucial and complex theoretical concepts. In order to document what we cover and discuss in class, I will offer a brief overview of what we covered during the previous week and pose some general questions that you should keep in mind as […]
Concept Map Quiz
I have collected–in the form of a word cloud–the various approaches and theoretical concepts that we discussed in our TheoryCamp modules. It’s stunning to capture visually the diversity of ideas that we’ve engaged. Now, it’s time to put these ideas to work–first, in our reading of Tropic of Orange, and, later, in our own individual […]