Steve Ersinghaus

This project at The Valve sounds like an interesting series to follow. I don’t know Franco Moretti’s work, but I find the subject interesting.
Given events over the last few months at Tunxis, I find myself growing more and more concerned about literary studies or, more to the context, English Departments, the study of literature [...]

It may be that there is a rather large stone on the horizon, a small black thumbs-up against glazing sun-down purple and orange (those southwestern sunsets never leave you). Perhaps there are runes on what may be a monostone, some message that points to secrets, but about what? The quest would be to cross the [...]

Thinking by analogy, I come up with this:
Spock and Bones are seated at a park bench. They are joined by the city planner, a thin, clicking guy who gestures like a puppet hopping on stage.
We’ll have roads, he says. They’ll be 30 feet wide. A yellow line will separate them into [...]

I think we have a nice discussion shaping up up over Josip Novakovich over at Spinning. I’m not quite sure what Mark is actually critiquing though. In these things it’s always nice to be able to judge the examples for oneself. Students who take lit courses, in this special context, need to see these [...]

Professor Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak writes this
Does this mean that the book is so bad that no one can stand to read it?
Is it so bad that people are embarrassed and don’t want to tell me?
The book he’s referring to can be found via this link. I must admit to wanting a copy [...]

The fall semester will see me teaching two lit courses online, one straight on and the other as a hybrid course, where students meet with me once a week and make other time for meeting online in the foums of WebCT Vista. This may be my last online course for a while. I’ve taught online [...]

Drawing from the last post and its active comments, it would seem that the fundamental conflict in Antigone is important. We know what happens: Creon acts, Antigone acts, and bad things happen as a result, with no godly interference, no god to swoop down and pause the action and aide the poor mortals in [...]

One of the interesting qualities of story is the idea of change. Some action is taken or something happens and the result is inexorable. The audience can do nothing to “save” the principle character. All we can do is “read” about Connie’s removal from the home in “Where are you going.” We can’t [...]

For the past couple of weeks in lit we’ve been talking a lot about the notion of order and chaos, taking I guess the Hegelian dialectical approach to clashing notions, an approach that goes pretty well with Antigone, Sophocles’ play. It’s not the end all of course. Nevertheless, the idea that something must be [...]

While away reworking the GLH space and getting lots of help from Jim Revellini, whom I really couldn’t get along without, I notice the reports on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in the Independent. Regardless of the mismatch between content and headline, I come away from the article with more questions than answers. We’ve known the Oxyrhynchus [...]

Interesting class today in Brit Lit. When we get to Tennyson things always start to come together since in Tennyson we see another one of those poets and thinkers who has his feet and head and work slipping into the future. Easy to say now, though; in the present, who knows what the future holds.
Anyway, [...]

I hadn’t caught this newest post over at Jesse Abbot. Professor Abbot is one of the tightest writers I know and he negociates the circles with crisp and luminous fingertips:

In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, Postmodernism accentuated all of the discoveries that Modernism made (in the face of contemporary fears and stressors) [...]

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban has a neat turnaround, as do most of the characters, fulfilling that most earnest story convention. Caliban says

You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

then

Ay, that I will; and I’ll be wise hereafter
And seek for [...]

A new weblog, Daniel Green’s The Reading Experience, has been added to rolls here. Thanks to Spinning. I’m introduced by an interesting post on how we read and why.

In IL (Intro to Lit) today, we went back to basics asking about motive, impulse, life and death, winners and losers, science and the speculative.
Always tough subjects, especially when we’re talking, hypothetically, of course, about “impressions” one makes about people who walk into class late or otherwise break rules or do something that draws [...]