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Apr. 25th, 2008 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogmagogApparently Harrison Ford wishes to experience deforestation up close and personal. XD
As for what's up with me, not much...I got distressingly little done on my paper this morning, so I get to spend the rest of the evening working on revision. Then of course tomorrow I get to go to an all-day orientation session for new Gen Ed Lit instructors (since I'll be teaching that in the fall). I'm looking forward to teaching it, but I'm not looking forward to losing my entire Saturday, or the way that the booklist and the anthologies mostly define literature as "anything after 1850, with maybe a Shakespeare play thrown in"...I mean, I love my Victorian lit, but seriously, they couldn't include ONE Canterbury Tale in the anthologies, or have at least ONE of the great classical epics (the Iliad, Odyssey or Aeneid) on the new teacher booklist? Also only one of the possible anthologies has a Shakespeare play that's not Hamlet, and since 99% of students will have had Hamlet in high school - that and Romeo and Juliet are the old standards - I'd really rather not teach it.
In fact, I generally have problems with the way single stories or poems or plays get categorized as "defining" and so THAT'S ALL ANYONE EVER TEACHES. Seriously, is Hamlet so much better than Othello or Titus Andronicus? (It's certainly much less interesting.) Is "The Yellow Wallpaper" so amazingly world-changing that no one can teach any other short stories by 19th-century women? Is "A Rose for Emily" the only story Faulkner ever wrote? (Don't get me wrong, the necrophilia is awesome, but he did write other stories, and it might be nice to have those taught sometimes.) It happens to even the best work: I had the Odyssey four times in my first four years of undergrad, and while I love it by the fourth time around I didn't even reread it, because I remembered it so well and was so tired of it.
(Note that this isn't really a railing against the idea of a literary canon per se; I'd be fine with the canon as it stands if they just taught a larger variety within it.)
As for what's up with me, not much...I got distressingly little done on my paper this morning, so I get to spend the rest of the evening working on revision. Then of course tomorrow I get to go to an all-day orientation session for new Gen Ed Lit instructors (since I'll be teaching that in the fall). I'm looking forward to teaching it, but I'm not looking forward to losing my entire Saturday, or the way that the booklist and the anthologies mostly define literature as "anything after 1850, with maybe a Shakespeare play thrown in"...I mean, I love my Victorian lit, but seriously, they couldn't include ONE Canterbury Tale in the anthologies, or have at least ONE of the great classical epics (the Iliad, Odyssey or Aeneid) on the new teacher booklist? Also only one of the possible anthologies has a Shakespeare play that's not Hamlet, and since 99% of students will have had Hamlet in high school - that and Romeo and Juliet are the old standards - I'd really rather not teach it.
In fact, I generally have problems with the way single stories or poems or plays get categorized as "defining" and so THAT'S ALL ANYONE EVER TEACHES. Seriously, is Hamlet so much better than Othello or Titus Andronicus? (It's certainly much less interesting.) Is "The Yellow Wallpaper" so amazingly world-changing that no one can teach any other short stories by 19th-century women? Is "A Rose for Emily" the only story Faulkner ever wrote? (Don't get me wrong, the necrophilia is awesome, but he did write other stories, and it might be nice to have those taught sometimes.) It happens to even the best work: I had the Odyssey four times in my first four years of undergrad, and while I love it by the fourth time around I didn't even reread it, because I remembered it so well and was so tired of it.
(Note that this isn't really a railing against the idea of a literary canon per se; I'd be fine with the canon as it stands if they just taught a larger variety within it.)
