Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Quiz 10

We discussed in class today how Harriet Jacobs presents a set of discrete incidents in her text rather than a seamless narrative. For Friday, finish the book then ask yourself which one incident from chapters 30-41 stands out to you as most important or evocative. Explain why in ~500 words.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Mark Twain, Literary Critic


A link to a piece in yesterday's New York Times about the marginal notations Twain would make in the books he read. To know he read so widely and commented so pointedly may make Pudd'nhead Wilson seem all the more interesting a text.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Audiobooks for Jacobs, Stowe, etc.

David Hellberg (section 001) lets us know about a website, LibriVox, that provides free audio versions of several of the books on the syllabus. Both Stowe and Jacobs are available, e.g.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Monday's class CANCELED

I am called out of town on Monday, 4/12. Class will not meet. Instead we will discuss chapters 27-35 of Uncle Tom's Cabin on Wednesday and the remainder of the novel on Friday. Enjoy your day off (from English 303, anyway)!

Week 11 Lectures


DOWNLOAD 4-9-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 4-7-10 lecture.

(There is no lecture to download for 4-5-10 since the heat forced us outside. Elements of that lecture are incorporated into the 4-7 and 4-9 lectures.)

Monday, April 5, 2010

Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture


The University of Virginia hosts an excellent site devoted to Uncle Tom's Cabin and its cultural contexts. In addition to information about its publication history and Stowe's life, it indexes a large number of images, many of them illustrations of the various editions of the novel published from 1851 (when it was first serialized) onward. Those of you who like to analyze visual culture might see the potential for a paper #3 here--how do the images in one edition compare to another, e.g., and/or how do they compare to what Stowe herself authors in the text?

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Quiz 8 (Take-home; due Monday, 4-5)


For Monday, read Uncle Tom's Cabin, chs. 1-8 + Stowe's preface. As you do, keep in mind that Benito Cereno was published only three years later and, of course, that it is also about slavery. Do the comparisons end there. Identify one interesting commonality or difference between the two texts and discuss it in ~500 words.

Week 10 lectures


DOWNLOAD 4-2-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-31-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-29-10 lecture.

Dickinson, Demonized!

Abby Morgan (section 002) contributes this interpretation of "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun." It's a very original analysis--and a surprisingly plausible one, if one takes the "demon" to represent some force to which Dickinson feels drawn even though her society and religion forbids it. In any event, it suggests once again how extraordinarily flexible, hence meaningful, this amazing poem is.

"Sedgwick, Hawthorne, and Me"

A belated post, but as I say, I'm catching up. . . .

Rosalind Whitley (section 001) produced these in conjunction with the paper #1 assignment.





What does a woman have to do to get noticed at an English department function?

Week 9 lectures


DOWNLOAD 3-26-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-24-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-22-10 lecture.

Walt, Wordled


Recently I stumbled across a site named wordle, which allows you to create "word clouds" from any piece of text you copy and paste into its generator. A word cloud measures the frequency of individual words and then arranges them into a picture in which the words that occur most often appear largest.

What's above is the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," wordled. Big surprise as to which word is the largest!

Updating the blog. . . .

As you may have noticed, I've fallen behind on blog updates. I'll catch up this weekend. Stay tuned. . . .