students

Mini-Course Assignment for Advanced Students

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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.

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Engaging with the Ideas of Others: Using Reporting Language

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What is “reporting language,” and why do I need it?

One of the most important modes of speaking and writing is referencing and responding to the ideas and views of others. Doing so situates your own writing within a larger conversation, which helps your interlocutor (whomever you’re communicating with) to understand why your discourse matters, and also gives him/her a frame of reference to interpret your meaning.

It’s essential to always clearly identify when you are restating the ideas of others by using reporting language, that is, sentences that explicitly attribute ideas to another source. In the first place, you should always give credit where credit is due. Furthermore, consistent use of reporting language is critical to the clarity of your own discourse; it helps you to distinguish your own position from that of others. Failure to use consistent reporting language can confuse your interlocutor as to what your own argument is. Continue reading →

Homer-ward Bound

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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

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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 →

Echoes of Snow White in Straparola’s “Biancabella and the Snake”

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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 →

Student’s Guide to Communication | First Contact

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There’s a lot of hype about the importance of first impressions. You never get a second chance, etc. etc. To a certain extent, this hype may overemphasize the importance of first impressions. After all, if you don’t reinforce that first encounter with a series of subsequent good impressions, the best first impression will cease to matter. But it’s certainly true that, in some instances, you will only get one shot at making an impression at all. In cases like job interviews or first contact with potential employers or investors, a poor first impression could lead to your being written off entirely. Even in cases where you have the opportunity to recuperate a first impression fail, you may end up having to work really hard to correct that initial judgment. So it’s worthwhile to make sure your first impression is a good one.

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Resources for teaching… Zombies (A Beginner’s Guide)

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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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Fairy Tales and Family Resemblance

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For the last couple of years, I have taught a course called Fables and Tales, a class that most students take to meet a general education requirement in the humanities at San Francisco State University.

Fables, fairy tales, and folklore are not exactly my area of expertise, though I find the topic fascinating. The first time I taught the course I spent nearly a hundred hours prepping  – mostly in background research, exploring sources and looking for creative and interesting readings and assignments – and enjoyed every minute of it. For a comparatist, the intersecting and overlapping nature of folklore is fertile ground. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the more connections I can make between stories, the better able I am to create a climactic arc for my course – to give students the sense that each part of the course is building on the last, that they are moving ever-closer to a goal. As both a scholar and a teacher, my impulse to look for literary connections and convergences kicks into overdrive.

My students, on the other had, tend to be a bit more circumspect, seeing connections between texts less readily than I do. I often open up discussions by asking students to test the limits of the relationships between stories, posing questions like, “Would you call this a Cinderella story?”, “Are Snow-drop (Schneewittchen) and Snow White really the same person?”, “Is Biancabella more similar to Snow White or Cinderella?”, etc. While they sometimes make interesting and unexpected connections between stories, a sizable chunk of them will tell me they don’t see any connections at all. They’re particularly skeptical of more abstract connections, where the details of the story are adapted to emphasize particular thematic concerns, such as the interpretation of Bluebeard as a serial adulterer.

As they have challenged me on my own comparative impulse, I’ve thought more deeply about the relationships between texts, and my own agency as a scholar in asserting and depicting those relationships. I’ve also explored ways to clarify and support the relationships I identify for my students. As I searched for a framework to make these relationships more compelling, I remembered my study of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances, which seemed in many ways uniquely suitable.

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Student’s Guide to Communication | E-mail Basics

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A while back, I published a post on best practices for e-mail communication with instructors and advisors; that post was primarily aimed at grad students, and though it would be useful for all students, it focused on the finer points of maintaining a collegial and professional tone in e-mail. Recently, I’ve been reminded that many students (even grad students) could benefit from some nuts-and-bolts advice for communicating effectively via e-mail, so I thought I’d tackle some of the most common issues I encounter in e-mail correspondence with my students in a series of posts. 

To start things off, here are the four fundamental things you need to do when e-mailing your professors.

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