This series will compare three fictional accounts of war widely taught in American high schools. It will illuminate how the depiction of war evolved from the romance-tinged realism of The Red Badge of Courage through the unsparing naturalism of All Quiet on the Western Front to the knowing irony of The Things They Carried. How … Continued
This series will compare three fictional accounts of war widely taught in American high schools. It will illuminate how the depiction of war evolved from the romance-tinged realism of The Red Badge of Courage through the unsparing naturalism of All Quiet on the Western Front to the knowing irony of The Things They Carried. How … Continued
Ralph Waldo Emerson died in 1882, but he is still very much with us. When you hear people assert their individualism, perhaps in rejecting help from the government or anyone else, you hear the voice of Emerson. When you hear a self-help guru tell people that if they change their way of thinking, they will … Continued
When Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening appeared in 1899, one reviewer deemed it an unhealthy, “morbid” book. Another maintained that its protagonist Edna Pontellier embraced “the fiend called Passion,” while a third wondered if Chopin were claiming that a married women should be free to “wantonly” severe ties to her husband and live openly as … Continued
This webinar takes teachers step by step through Langston Hughes’ poetry to aid them in teaching the work of this literary giant. It analyzes some popular and lesser known works that demonstrate the breadth of Hughes’ work.
Memphis, Tennessee, 1952: Sam Phillips creates the legendary Sun Studio and records the first ever rock and roll single, “”Rocket 88,”” by Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. Fast-forward one year. “”Crazy Man, Crazy,”” recorded in New York by Bill Haley and his Comets, becomes the first rock and roll song to make the Billboard American … Continued
In this webinar, we’ll consider Orwell’s novel as an example of such political art. How do we understand 1984 as a deliberately crafted work of writing? How can we connect it to Orwell’s previous fifteen years as a prolific and experimental writer? What literary strategies and imaginative techniques underlie the tricky art of engaging politics … Continued
Russian fiction of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period is deeply rooted in trauma and memory, both collective and personal; characters search for ways to transcend, or even to understand, a complex and contended history. Drawing mostly on the texts collected online on World Without Borders Campus (wwb-campus.org), this webinar will present strategies for contextualizing … Continued
Is literature a form of sound recording? If so, how can we listen to it? This webinar presents approaches for bringing the study of sound into the literature and history classroom. We will explore specifically how interpreting sounds in historical literature like slave narratives and colonial travel writing opens up new ways of understanding the … Continued
At first glance, a graphic novel is nothing more than a comic that can stand on a bookshelf; however, graphic novels have a history distinct from, and in fraught relationship to, both comics and novels. While graphic novels grew out of the countercultural underground comics scene of the 1960s and 1970s, the form also gave … Continued