I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today. I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the scandalous poetry of the licentious […]
Tag Archives: teaching
Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 18th Century Novel, Jane Austen, Laughter, Restoration comedy, Romantic Comedy, Sense and Sensibility Comments closed
You Don’t Have to Read between the Lines
Robert Scholes tells us to teach biography and historical context and the poems will become clear.
Why Didn’t Poetry Save Neil from Suicide?
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Antigone, Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Weir, Sophocles, suicide, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Dead Poets Changing Lives
I seem to be returning to my childhood in recent posts, what with all my references to Sewanee, Tennessee. In my last entry I showed literary scholar Robert Scholes blaming Allen Tate, a poet and critic with close ties to Sewanee, for the abysmal state of American literature instruction. To balance Tate out, my launching […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Peter Weir, Sam Pickering Comments closed
