Steve Ersinghaus

We’ve headed into the Victorian Period in BL. We’ll be dealing with Mill and E.Browning. Links are key here. One of the fun things about teaching this side of literature study is identifying and talking about linked notions, things that appear to be constant among a set of writings and watching how ideas develop in [...]

Carianne Mack has supplied me with documentation on a show she will be involved in soon that organizes it’s art around the sublime. This is very nice because in BL we’re currently involved in Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats. What would the sublime have to do with the idea of the spritual and the physical, as [...]

I’ve nearly completed my British Literature I finals and have been looking at journals and revisions of earlier writing by students. I think the final, a series of short answer questions, pin-pointed pretty well what I want students to know at the end (after lots of writing and reading), given the expectations and requirements of [...]

It would seem that in the contemporary state of the States there can be a “legal reality,” where legislation may nullify certain other realities, such as the existence of negligence. Laws protecting against frivolity, for example, typically aren’t proposed for a class of people, but may be proposed for an industry class. Does such action [...]

Lear says: “Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.”
That’s how the fool teaches.
Kent senses that the fool may not be so much a fool. Then the fool says
No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if
I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t:
and ladies too, they will not [...]

From Shakespeare’s King Lear. Coming back to it, I remember how damned good it is. Here Gloucester addresses the air about Edmund, tricked into thinking his son is after his money and place:
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet [...]

This semester I’m really leaning on specific articulations of where and how students meet course outcomes in evaluation and systematically expressing where a student needs to concentrate their pickups after an evaluation occurs. I will be doing a great deal of contact and in that contact specifying where a students needs to focus their energy.
For [...]

Since we have Chaucer on the brain these days, I am continually reminded of the conceptual links that should happen when a student of the literature (he or she could be anyone) struggles with the wife of Bath. The wife addresses not just the question of marriage in her own circumstance but also its in [...]

From the Ordinance of Laborers, 1349
The king to the sheriff of Kent, greeting. Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters, and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some rather willing [...]

I’ve added a link to a respelled and audience friendly Cantebury Tales for those who’d like to read sidebyside on the British Literature side-bar page.

I’ve added a new sidebar area for links to available texts on the Internet. The first page is a little rough at the moment and needs formatting but for the Brit lit students some of the links could be quite interesting.

Perhaps you all have seen the proliferation of monster/alien shows on television, a noticable trend away from the superhero amidst us, to the alien amidst us, which is not unique but going through revival. From Buffy and Smallville to the 4400 and Alien Invasion. The idea of the monster and the alien are related in [...]

Mark Anastasio begins work on an exam question in his response to this post. He writes:
The warning is that Camelot, like these other great Empires, will fall.
The opening of Beowulf lays out a historical map that takes a much less foreboding tone. It states the achievements of past rulers and gives the listener [...]

One of the significant issues we’re going after in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the importance of context, not just for the reader but also for the poet. An Arthurian romance in the Middle English style and mode comes with all kinds of significant ideas: why Arthur, why Gawain, and why that structure [...]

In the recent issue of Time magazine, Richard Corliss clumsily frames Bob Dylan as classic and mythical hero.
But it was his gift for synthesizing that sent him into the depths of the forest and allowed him to bring it all back home in teeming poetry set to ancient lays.