In Fall 2020, I taught a course in Modern World Literature. Designing my curriculum around four novels by women of color, I was frustrated to find that although these are celebrated works of literature, teaching resources for them were less readily available than I would have expected. I decided to publish the reading questions and assignment prompts I developed to serve as a resource for other instructors.
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_Dreaming in Cuban_ by Cristina Garcia | Study Questions and Assignment Prompts
Last semester, I taught a course in Modern World Literature. Designing my curriculum around four novels by women of color, I was frustrated to find that although these are celebrated works of literature, teaching resources for them were less readily available than I would have expected. I decided to publish the reading questions and assignment prompts I developed to serve as a resource for other instructors.
Continue reading_Americanah_ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Study Questions and Assignment Prompts
Last semester, I taught a course in Modern World Literature. Designing my curriculum around four novels by women of color, I was frustrated to find that although these are celebrated works of literature, teaching resources for them were less readily available than I would have expected. I decided to publish the reading questions and assignment prompts I developed to serve as a resource for other instructors.
Continue reading_Breath, Eyes, Memory_ by Edwidge Danticat | Study Questions and Assignment Prompts
Last semester, I taught a course in Modern World Literature. Designing my curriculum around four novels by women of color, I was frustrated to find that although these are celebrated works of literature, teaching resources for them were less readily available than I would have expected. I decided to publish the reading questions and assignment prompts I developed to serve as a resource for other instructors.
Continue readingMini-Course Assignment for Advanced Students
The following is an assignment that I’ve used as a final project in my graduate-level Intro to Literary Criticism courses. I think it could be a useful template for upper-division undergraduates as well, since it not only prepares students for later teaching experiences, but also provides a new angle for students to research and explore a topic.
I generally give my grad students the choice between the mini-course assignment below and writing a traditional research paper for their final project; I’ve been surprised to find that an overwhelming majority of my students choose this option.
Homer-ward Bound
The history and culture of ancient Greece, a.k.a. Hellas, is rich and varied, and totally worth studying for its own sake and for the major influence it had on Western culture that continues to be felt in societies throughout the world today.
But if you’re short on time, here’s the key things you absolutely need to know about hellenic history and culture before you read the Homeric epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – to get what Homer is talking about. Continue reading
Snow in Cameroon: An African take on the story of Snow White
If you’ve read some of my other blog posts on fairy tales in general, and Snow White in particular, you’ll know that I’ve invested some time into researching variants of classic fairy tales for my course on Fables and Tales. I start each unit asking my students to revisit something that’s likely familiar – a classic fairy tale with a prominent place in American culture – but to bring a new critical and analytical perspective to it. I then further complicate our discussions by introducing students to different variations on the story — sometimes older origins, sometimes new adaptations, and often parallel tales from another culture or geographic region. For Snow White, for example, I knew I wanted compare multiple film versions (the Disney classic, with the updated adaptations in Snow White and the Huntsman and Blancanieves), alongside the foundational Grimm fairy tale, and a tangential but intersecting story by Straparola called “Biancabella and the Snake.” But the most interesting intersection I discovered came entirely by serendipity. I read numerous books of folktales from various countries looking for materials, and quite by accident I came across a story in a collection of African tales that strongly evoked the story of Snow White, but confounded my ability to map the narrative logic of one onto the other. Continue reading
Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves and the Sordid Subtext of Snow White
When it comes to Pablo Berger’s 2012 cinematic interpretation of the classic fairy tale, the Snow White story has never been creepier.
Except…no. It turns out, it’s always been that creepy. And that is precisely Berger’s point.
Echoes of Snow White in Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake”
The Norton volume of fairy tales, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, edited by Jack Zipes, includes two tales under the thematic heading “Virtuous Queens.” They are two variants of a story sometimes referred to as “The Girl without Hands,” or “The Armless Maiden” – a tale of a girl who is attacked and disfigured, but whose worth is proven by her body’s mystical ability to cause precious objects to appear. The two versions collected here, however, are united not only by parallel plot structures, but also by the appellation of our maimed but magical heroine: Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake” and Jean de Mailly’s “Blanche Belle” both feature a maiden who takes her name from her fair features; in de Mailly’s tale, she is explicitly noted to have been named for her very white skin.
At the time I encountered this volume, I was prepping a class on Fables and Tales, and had been on the lookout for variants of the classic tale of Snow White, so the names of these stories caught my eye. Continue reading
Resources for teaching… Zombies (A Beginner’s Guide)
In my course on Fables and Tales, a large lecture class that most students take to meet a general education requirement in the humanities at San Francisco State University, I include a unit on horror tropes in folklore (and their interpretation in literature, film, and other cultural production). It’s an introductory survey course, so I try to give students a smorgasbord of materials – a little taste of a lot of different things – and we only have time to scratch the surface of these tales of terror. But I have the chance to give students a brief introduction to the folkloric roots of vampires and zombies, and some examples of how we have adapted those ancient figures to reflect our own cultural concerns.
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