Bits and Baubs
(‘baubs’ as in baubles, I’m so adept at British slang…not).
I taught my first tutorial this week; it can only get better from here. About half the students didn’t show — couldn’t make the time slot — and they all didn’t bring their anthologies, so I rambled about Enlightenment, Romanticism and Jonathan Edwards. Add to the fact that the secretary wrote down the wrong room for my tutorials and it was pretty messy. It’s hard teaching a class that someone else has made up; the tutorials are intended the bridge the gap between the lectures which are largely theoretical and contextual to the period (1760-1830) and classic works of American literature. This is a pretty hefty order for us grad students to fulfil in a 50-minute weekly slot. I didn’t get a chance to talk about the generalities of literature, why reading is important, why literature more specifically is important and how it opens up our imaginative space of identification — all these things I think are crucial to discuss so that students can put the class into a larger framework (perhaps I’ll blog about these sorts of things later). This coming week we’re looking at Edward’s “Personal Narrative” alongside Franklin’s Autobiography. Feel free to read along. The following week (2nd week in October) we’re looking at Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Wieland, which is gothic and pretty fun.
Also I’d like to direct you to a new blog I found via Intellectuelle called Christian Aesthetic. It looks like a place where a few Christian bloggers are thinking and writing about as well as posting their own art. It looks to be a really exciting place of interaction.
Lastly, there were a few women who stepped down from Intellectuelle for various reasons and so the “Elles” have taken up personal appointments. Laura kindly recommended me and I’ve jumped in on the posting there. Make sure to visit regularly for a dose of good thinking about life, literature, the Bible, culture and pretty much anything else you could think of. Oh, and it’s pretty funny too.
September 30th, 2005 at 11:22 am
Congrats Ashley sounds like you have had a busy week between helping to form yound minds and taking on new writing responsabilities. It is all great news! In terms of reading along forgive my ignorance but are you covering exclusively novels or are there some short stories included?
September 30th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Well, Wieland is a novel. Most of the others are novels too, but a lot aren’t that long and can be found online. The last week, Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon is a collection of short stories — the two we’ll be focusing on is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”. I’ll post links in another post.
September 30th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
I really enjoyed checking out Intellectuelle – good for you! The Christian Aesthetic looks interesting as well. Thank for the recommendations!
October 1st, 2005 at 8:09 am
Of course we’re glad to have you at Intellectuelle! I’m glad you like Christian Aesthetic. It was exciting for me to discover.
Hey, I’d like to hear your thoughts about “Does Christianity Squash Women” when you finish reading it?
October 1st, 2005 at 11:47 am
Hannah, I’m reading the book rather slowly with other reading commitments, but I plan to do a book review on it probably at Intellectuelle.
October 1st, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Ashley have you posted over at intellectuelle? I can’t see any of your posts, but I am tired and maybe not looking hard enough!
October 1st, 2005 at 7:48 pm
Hi Sheena, I had a post from about a week ago, here is the link. I’ve closed the comments though to prevent spam!