Spring 2010
Teaching
- English 2217: Honors World Literature II
- English 3540: Survey of British Literature II
Cultures of the Book: from the Triple-Deckers to Kindles (department description)This class will examine the period from the late eighteenth-century to present, with particular focus on the cultures in which literary texts were written and the changing technologies we use to read. How has reading changed in the last 200 years? How will it continue to change? Our readings will be supplemented by visits to Special Collections in RBD Library to learn more about the physical properties of the texts we read. Readings are very likely to include Austen's Mansfield Park, selections from Blake, Gissing's New Grub Street, texts from the Stanford Strand Project, and Stoppard's Arcadia. T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, and other Anglophone writers may also appear (as complicated as their connection to "Britishness" is!). Students will also reading John Feather's A History of British Publishing for context into "print culture"
Requirements: Weekly short writing responses, in-class presentation, midterm and final exams.
Presentations
"Sanditon's Journey: The Fate of Austen's Final Fragment in Context" British Women Writers Conference. College Station, TX April 8-11, 2010.
"When a good end is hard to find: backmatter, indices, and novel endings"
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Albuquerque, NM. March 18-21, 2010.
Summer 2010
Seminar Participant, Project Narrative Summer Institute. The Ohio State University. June 28-July 9, 2010.
Fall 2010
Teaching
- English 2230: British Literature I (two sections)
- English 7170: Graduate Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies
"A Laughing Matter: 1773 in Snapshot"
April De Angelis’s 2002 play A Laughing Matter draws from a wide swath of eighteenth-century culture to paint a comedic picture of the backstage antics leading up to the production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer. Using the playtext as a starting (and ending) point, this course will look at the work of “characters” such as Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, Woffington, Hannah More, Cumberland, and Boswell, as well as those whom De Angelis left out, including Hester Thrale and the looming Richard Brinsley Sheridan, as well as writers publishing in that year (Wheatley, Barbauld, etc.)