My Somerville Summer: Update
Six weeks into my ‘Summer of Somerville,’ it seems like time to take stock. In my previous post, I identified two main areas I need to focus on: pedagogical strategies (concrete course-planning things...
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Social Revolutions: Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate
I finally finished reading Vera Brittain’s 1936 novel Honourable Estate. I read Part I a few months back and described it as “not particularly artful” but “emotionally quite intense,” and...
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“She is in love with life”: Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir
In my post on Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, I quoted a passage Brittain includes from Holtby’s letters, addressing her decision to write a critical biography of Virginia Woolf: I took my...
View ArticleMy Somerville Summer Continues: Course Planning!
I continue to read both primary and secondary sources in preparation for my fall seminar on “The Somerville Novelists.” Most recently I’ve been going through Holtby’s Women and a Changing Civilization...
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“I believe we are lost”: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is as bleak and compelling a version of the “lost generation” narrative of World War I as I’ve read so far. In fact, Paul Bäumer, the novel’s narrator, comments...
View ArticleThis Week In My Classes: Good, Better, Best!
We’ve almost settled into a routine in my three classes, I think. The one I feel least certain about is my section of Intro. I think we’re doing OK, but I wonder if I made things a bit too intense at...
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South Riding: They like it! They really, really like it!
I’ve just finished rereading South Riding, ready for our final discussion of the novel in the Somerville seminar tomorrow. I was caught up in it both intellectually and emotionally, more than I was...
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This Week In My Classes: Meetings, Deadlines, Poems, Mysteries, and Nymphs
This past week was very busy, which is why I didn’t manage to post this during the week. For one thing, one of the committees that I’m on had to do a series of consultations, which involves both the...
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Margaret Kennedy, The Outlaws on Parnassus
Preparing for reading The Constant Nymph in my Somerville Novelists seminar, I was intrigued to learn that in her Times obituary Margaret Kennedy was accorded little significance as a novelist while...
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This Week In My Classes: Finishing Touches
Today was the last day for my fall term classes, which means the last meeting altogether for two of them. One of them, Introduction to Literature, continues in January, when I will also be adding...
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