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 →Category: Literature
Let us be whisperers
While researching the author of Dream of Ding Village, Yan Lianke, I came across this speech that he delivered to his graduate students at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It addresses the prospect of celebrating the “end” of the COVID-19 pandemic, which feels relevant to our current situation following Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed’s announcement that the […]
Read More →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 →Podcast – Isolation, Connection and everything in between
Hi everyone! We are making our last post of the semester to present our final podcast. We loved the idea of having a final project that involved us having conversations about the texts we read during the semester. We narrowed down on a theme, and tried to explore it (and a little bit extra) as […]
Read More →Roy-cohn-naissance
Angels in America is a period piece. Kushner bridges fact and fiction in a story set in 1980s America. One of the key pillars of that bridge is big gun prosecutor Roy Cohn. He is the only major character in the play explicitly based on a real life person. “Have you no sense of decency?” […]
Read More →