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Below I have posted a description of my summer course Reading and Critical Thinking: Reading New York for the second session of Columbia's Summer Programs for High School Students. This Reading and Critical Thinking course investigates representations of New York City in poetry, prose, and fiction. We will consider everyday life at street level, navigating news and transport, beginning with Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” in which the speaker learns of the death of the jazz musician Billie Holliday. O’Hara published this poem in Lunch Poems (1964), a collection of verse he composed while working at the Museum of Modern Art. We will explore the language of Manhattan at midcentury from E. B. White’s Here is New York (1949) to representations in film and television from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Mad Men. We will create Google Tours of Sylvia Plath’s New York in her novel The Bell Jar (1963), interpreting the geographical and social climate of the city. The course concludes with Plath’s influence on contemporary poets, including Columbia professor Dorothea Lasky. Students in this class will complete short, informal writing, blog postings, digital projects, and presentations, becoming more innovative thinkers able to articulate complex critical ideas.
The Sylvia Plath Map of Northampton that I created has reached 1,667 views! You can access the map below.
Studies in the Novel has included my course website for Global Digital Modernisms in its Teaching Tools for Digital Humanities and the Novel. See here for further details.
My posting, "Navigating Modernism's Visual History," is available on the Teaching Women's Writing in English: A New MLA Options in Teaching Volume in Development site.
Here is the beginning: My “Writing New York” course this term at the New York Institute of Technology invites students to develop greater facility with visual and digital tools as they construct arguments analyzing the role of New York in poetry, prose, and fiction from predominately the first half of the twentieth century. The students began navigating modernism’s visual history early in the term. While reading Elizabeth Losh, et al.’s Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, the students practiced constructing visual arguments while exploring the relationship between the design of a little magazine published in New York and its contents in our “Visual Literacy and the Modernist Journals Project” assignment. (The digital tasks described here took place during the second half of an eighty-minute class period.) When we read Edith Wharton’s “New Year’s Day” from Old New York (1924), the students interpreted the role of the city in the characters’ interactions in an assigned section of the reading, investigating the significance of their locations using Google Maps. In “Locating Old New York,” the students had unexpected observations, including the number of fires that the novella’s Fifth Avenue Hotel experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This assignment also enabled the students to gain greater familiarity with “New Year’s Day” in preparation for their essays analyzing the role of humanity amidst the machinery of the city in E. B. White’s “Here is New York” (1949), Wharton’s story, or in both texts. You can read the rest of the posting here. ICLT 300: "Global Literature and Digital Culture." Fall 2016.
NYIT Old Westbury Campus, MW 11:10am-12:55pm. In this core literature seminar, we will analyze poetry, prose, and fiction addressing formerly colonized regions. Writers we will read include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Medhbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Jean Rhys, Una Marson, Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Sarojini Naidu, Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Louise Erdrich, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Our readings will be from Africa, Asia, India, Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Americas. We will discuss such topics as identity, language, gender, war, the city, poetic form, and film. Students will write essays, contribute to a class blog, and design digital projects. We will also discuss current digital projects with scholars, including Angel David Nieves, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamilton College, Project Director of Apartheid Heritages: A Spatial History of South Africa’s Townships and Soweto Historical GIS Project, Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University, who oversees the Minimal Computing project, and Roopika Risam, Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University, who is developing a Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness. |