Wednesday
We fly back to the United States today after a wonderfully fulfilling month in Slovenia. While you may not find my list particularly edifying, I record it here for future reference. Suffice it to say that I loved every minute.
–Shakespeare – Classes on Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest
–Post-colonial or Anglophone Literature – Classes on (1) the colonialist mindset (Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine and She, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; (2) the resistance (Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth); (3&4) Nigeria (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus); 5&6) India (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things); (7) South Africa (Nadine Gordimer’s“Once upon a Time”); and (8)Jamaica (Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf).
—Literary Theory – Class on my book Better Living through Literature: The Power of Books to Change Your Life
—Canadian Literature – Class on “Nasty Girls in Margaret Atwood” (with mentions of “Circe/Mud Poems,” Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye, Robber Bride, and Alias Grace)
Medieval Literature – Class on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
—Philosophy Seminar – Sessions on (1) Literature and Life and (2) Michel Foucault’s ideas on parrhasia
—General English Language courses – Two classes on American film, film genre, and films recently viewed at the Ljubljana film festival
—English pedagogy – A class on teaching literature
—American Literature – Class on Emily Dickinson’s gothic poems