"lumbering our minds with literature..."

"Somewhere between prayer and revolution....:"

"This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House







Wednesday, June 23, 2010

School is in session!

I just met with my dissertation committee and they signed off on my prospectus! I am excited to start writing! I still have some minor revisions to make before I submit my prospectus to the graduate chair, but hopefully those will be done this week.

I am also excited about teaching English 290 (US lit, origins to 1865) for the first time this summer! The Puritans are proving to be a tough sell. Today I thought I would hook them by showing a clip from True Blood and talking about what we find entertaining today before talking about how Rowlandson's captivity narrative was one of the most popular texts of the seventeenth century. There is a lot of blood and fascination with social others in both sources! It was an epic popular culture fail. It was nice to see the resident athlete and cynic unite in their distaste over my television reference, though.

In other news, our car keeps getting rifled through yet none of my CDs are ever stolen. It is almost as if people in Fton don't WANT the Twilight soundtrack! Yep, I might be going overboard in terms of my vampire guilty pleasures!

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