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Lunchtime Poll

Submitted by krdorsey on November 2, 2006 - 11:45am. |

I always assumed that being an English Graduate Student meant that I was going to sit around (under a tree, or at a coffeeshop, or in a bar) talking to other people about books. Wow, does that not really happen. I don't ever have a sense of what anyone else reads.

But I'm curious. And I'm hoping people might tell me here--especially when I ask the question this way: What is your dream text to teach? This can be a quick answer--just a title, or you can feel free to elaborate. Have you ever taught a dream text? Was it a good experience, or did it backfire? You know, that kind of thing.

To kick things off--Jim Brown is teaching one of my dream texts right now (Microserfs). I can't ever imagine having a class that it would fit into, but I'd love to teach it.

I taught The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks for a class once. It was a dream text, but didn't work out so well in the classroom. My students were disturbed by the novel, but also by the fact that I enjoyed it so much. (I think that it messed with their idea of who I was . . . )

Films? Heathers--got to teach that one once (the title of this post is a nod to that film), and Donnie Darko too. And the documentary Stevie. Those have been my favorites.

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Some Dream Books: American

Submitted by Jim Brown on November 2, 2006 - 2:14pm.

Some Dream Books: American Psycho (or just about anything by Ellis), Everything is Illuminated, Play it as it Lays (or anything by Joan Didion - I want to just teach a Didion class - that's never going to happen), The Sun Also Rises, A Light in the Attic

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Unlikely

Submitted by wdmartin on November 3, 2006 - 10:53am.

It seems unlikely that I'll ever teach classes about the books that I really enjoy reading, since I'm addicted to genre fantasy novels.

A few might make the cut. "Lord of the Rings," okay. C. S. Lewis' Narnia books. Ursula K. LeGuin, sure. Potentially something like Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy.

But if I tried to teach a class featuring books like "Ship of Magic" (Robin Hobb) or "Thraxas in the Elvish Isles" (Martin Scott) or "Rhapsody" (Elizabeth Haydon) or "The Wayfarer Redemption" (Sara Douglass) or "Eldest" (Christopher Paolini) ... I suspect I'd get laughed out of the academy.

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or not unlikely

Submitted by boudreault on October 9, 2007 - 2:38pm.

A few years ago the linguistics department (here at UT) offered the course The Languages of Middle Earth. Of course, it was an introduction to linguistics in which one of our colleagues taught introductory level phonology, morphology and syntax. But I could actually see teaching language and identity with Lord of the Rings.

So why would it be unlikely?

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More and more, I'd like to

Submitted by SarahJett on March 21, 2007 - 12:39pm.

More and more, I'd like to teach a class on Mary, Queen of Scots and the Elizabethan complaint poem. I'm writing my dissertation on the highly overlooked complaint, and right now I'm working on the Mary chapter. Even apart from her connection to the complaint, Mary herself is a fascinating figure, and I keep imagining creative, interactive ways of introducing her life to a class. In fact, I've thought if I teach rhetoric again, I might use the tapestries she embroidered in a unit on visual rhetoric since they're often encoded and always emblematic. I don't think I'll be able to teach a class on the subject for a long time, though, because complaints have been so overlooked that there aren't good annotated editions for students to read. They just don't have the necessary background to study them.

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