Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

For Dr. Bluemel’s Intermodernism course last semester, our second paper required students to examine the role of propaganda during the between war period in England. I chose to compare privileged, white, male writers F. R. Leavis and George Orwell to Virginia Woolf and Mulk Raj Anand. Overall, I like this paper a lot. My attempt at defining what I am calling the “Intermodernist Other” still needed work, but I had already gone over the page limit for this paper by two or three pages.  (PDF)

As a follow up to the my turn leading Dr. Bluemel’s class last spring we were required to do a written evaluation of our work. This is what I wrote up in regards to my turn. I thought it went well overall. Dr. Bluemel pointed out that I should have taken some time at the beginning to do a quick recap of what we had done with Queer Theory so far, which is a very valid point and something I do need to work on. Sometimes I forget that others might not understand a concept or theory as well as I do and may need a refresher. I go out of my way in the assignment header to note that it is alright if Queer Theory is new to people or something that makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps I could have eased those feelings by doing a better job of recapping. (PDF)

Another assignment, a little earlier in the semester, for Dr. Bluemel’s Critical Theory class involved creating a fictional symposium involving some of the theorists we had been studying. I chose Gerald Graff, John Guillory, Janice Radway, and Helen Vendler. While I was not comfortable writing in script form, this was a fun assignment that allowed students to discuss and engage with the theorists we were studying in a very creative way. (PDF)

For the first part of our seminar paper last spring, Dr. Bluemel had students create an introduction for a fictional critical edition of the text of our choice. I chose Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. Overall, I like what I did with this part of the assignment. Some of my disagreements with the theorists I chose are not adequately explored, but for the most part I like what I did. There is one article I wish I did not pick, which was a big mistake on my part: I should have taken the time to find a more suitable article. Some of my prose was very awkward and should have gone through more revision before the final version was finished. I have cleaned it up since then. In the future I need to have peers review my work during the revision process because there are things I seem to always miss.

The second, much more enjoyable, part of our seminar paper was reviewing a critical edition of a text. I decided to use Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories With Contemporary Critical Essays that Bedford published. I really enjoyed writing this part of the paper. The issues involved with the creation of a critical edition of a text and what to include in it are fascinating and something I want to engage with further in the future. (PDF)

For my turn leading the class in Kristin Bluemel’s Critical Theory course last spring my focus was on Queer Theory, which was the topic for that week. Specifically, my article of choice was Jonathan Dollimore’s essay Post/Modern: On The Gay Sensibility, which was in the reader we were using. I created this assignment so students could work in small groups towards a better understanding of Queer Theory. As I note in the assignment, while putting this together I noticed how similar a lot of what Dollimore was saying was to some of our previous readings by other theorists. I put together this assignment based on that. For the most part, students did very well with it and came up with some very interesting choices which I did not even consider. (PDF)