Literature
The foundation of many literature courses is the argument. We are supposed to teach students how to construct arguments about texts. In this posting, I argue that aphorisms can leap over while fulfilling the aims of argumentative prose.
How might one compose an aphorism about Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find"? Here is my attempt, including a quotation:
"'We've had an ACCIDENT!' the children screamed in a frenzy of delight." The American road trip reveals a cultural landscape in which revolutions are rendered mundane.
Could such an assignment converge with close reading, analysis, and explication? For Nietzsche, aphorisms were part of a careful system of philosophical rumination. Could meta-literary aphorisms be taught as a replacement for essays? There is certainly a discursive demand for aphorisms, for they must never (re)present the last word, but rather should always remain open to elaboration, description, and conversation. Can aphorisms precede a working knowledge of the structure of argumentative logic? I am not sure, but I am interested in this question.
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Literature
On aphorisms and arguments
The foundation of many literature courses is the argument. We are supposed to teach students how to construct arguments about texts. In this posting, I argue that aphorisms can leap over while fulfilling the aims of argumentative prose.
How might one compose an aphorism about Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find"? Here is my attempt, including a quotation:
"'We've had an ACCIDENT!' the children screamed in a frenzy of delight." The American road trip reveals a cultural landscape in which revolutions are rendered mundane.
Could such an assignment converge with close reading, analysis, and explication? For Nietzsche, aphorisms were part of a careful system of philosophical rumination. Could meta-literary aphorisms be taught as a replacement for essays? There is certainly a discursive demand for aphorisms, for they must never (re)present the last word, but rather should always remain open to elaboration, description, and conversation. Can aphorisms precede a working knowledge of the structure of argumentative logic? I am not sure, but I am interested in this question.
- The Author Is Dead; Office Work Remains
I am fresh from my wonderful, stimulating panel on David Foster Wallace at this year's American Comparative Literature Association conference in Providence, Rhode Island. I am now sitting in the Providence airport waiting for my flight to Dulles to...
- Thinking Space In "childcare"
Next year in a first-year seminar called "Thinking Space," I will likely assign the fiction piece that appeared in last week's New Yorker, Lorrie Moore's "Childcare." "Childcare" takes place in a more or less contemporary moment, and is told from...
- Posts Instead Of Papers
When I consider using blogs to teaching literature/writing, I am not simply talking about transposing the forms (and formalities) of syllabi, essays, rubrics, etc. onto an electronic medium. No, I am talking about rethinking what it means to write?what...
- From Literature To Collaboration And Beyond
How can literature be taught as a collaborative subject? I mean this question in several ways: 1. How can students and instructors collaborate in the literature classroom? (For instance, collaborative in-class writing assignments.) 2. How can students...
- On The Possibility Of Literature Blogs
In a discussion on teaching "Introduction to Literature" courses at UC Davis, two colleagues and I speculated about the possibility of using blogs for the entire writing content of the course. Could this be done? Here is how it might look: Each student...