Thanks to this semester’s conveners for Dream of Ding Village, we discovered the site at University of Wisconsin-Madison dedicated to reading the novel as a Great World Text. (The program brought the novel into 26 high schools across the state.) A number of resources are compiled there, including a 30-minute overview of the text and […]
Read More →Author: Bryan
Camus wrap-up
As promised, I am creating a post here for us to discuss the swimming scene. However, as I was preparing to post this I discovered that during the 2012 class, I must have fallen sick for the session in which we would have finished our discussion of this novel, and so I had created a […]
Read More →Silence = death
While we were talking about Ibsen’s Ghosts today, I mentioned that the play resonated with the 1980s AIDS crisis. I poked around the New York Times archives after class and found a 1982 review that mentions how ubiquitous the play had recently become but doesn’t yet mention AIDS (though it describes Mrs. Alving’s truth-telling as […]
Read More →Defoe round-up
Hi, all. As we continue reading and discussing Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, here are a few links to keep us thinking: An earlier convener’s post, taking up the question of public discourse on the plague. In what ways is communication like the disease? What mileage does Defoe get out of the link between […]
Read More →Severance round-up
Below you’ll find a few links that might be useful as you think toward our discussion of Severance. We’ll have a lot to do in a short amount of time. If you’d like to put some general questions in the queue — the kinds of questions you want to ask about this novel and how […]
Read More →Oedipus round-up: The crossroads
There are so many roads to Oedipus and so many ways we could take out of it to what comes next. Here are a few older posts, or multiple versions of posts, that can take us in a few of those directions. On summarizing the play: what matters? Why? (With a hat tip to Freud […]
Read More →A complex complex
I’d like to throw out two general areas for our consideration as we begin our discussion of Oedipus: First, the question of plague as material fact and as metaphor. To what degree can we think about the representation of plague in these separate ways — i.e., literal and figurative? To what degree are they conflated […]
Read More →Sitting with the big questions
Welcome to Contagion 2021, the ninth iteration of this course and the second actually to be taught during a pandemic. Starting our class remotely today was a bit of a reminder that our lives have been affected in any number of ways we may not yet be collectively aware of — and maybe that’s part […]
Read More →Angel of the Waters
Post originally published May 2008 on ahistoryofnewyork.com New York seems, to me, to differ from other major world cities in the recyclability (is that even a word?) of its symbols — especially its architecture and public art. To get what I mean, consider the Louvre by contrast. You experience it as an art museum, and […]
Read More →20 years of teaching Angels
I don’t think I have contact with any of my students from Harvard in 1999-2000, which was the first time I taught Angels in America, but these were two of my students in an honors seminar I taught during my first semester at NYU in the fall of 2001. It was amazing to run into […]
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