Category: Teaching
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How to Read Jane Austen’s Emma
“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” Jane Austen declared about Emma Woodhouse, the only heroine of her six novels to earn its title. The first novel in English written in a free indirect style, Emma has the lasting eff…
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The Open Book Club
Sign up here. Setting some #2023goals? Want to escape digital distractions into a classic novel or two? Whether you’re an avid reader or you can’t name the last print book you finished, the Open Book Club is here for you. From January to March 2023, you’ll read two short novels — Jane Austen’s Emma (1816)…
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How to Read Paradise Lost in 7 Podcasts
My podcast, Open Book, has the tagline “Read like an English professor.” Launched in 2020, it’s me introducing listeners to whatever I’m reading and teaching. Most of the coverage is classic novels like Northanger Abbey or Don Quixote, or introductions to poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. One season I just read long poems aloud, like…
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How to Read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2
An introduction to the second book of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
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How to Read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1
An introduction to the life of Geoffrey Chaucer and to his five-book romance Troilus and Criseyde.
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Updating my Teaching Philosophy
In preparation for a new term (Fall 2022), I recently updated — that is, thoroughly rewrote — my teaching philosophy. This is the first update in more than a decade; I wrote it when I was a junior faculty at the University of Calgary. Now that I’m starting my 15th year of teaching, my formal…
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How to Read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Book 3
We focus in this episode on the third book and final book of “one of the most important [novels] to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.” Midnight’s Children (1981) consists of three books narrated by Saleem Sinai: the first about…
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How to Read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Book 2
Covering the second of three books in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), in which the narrator Saleem Sinai recounts the history of his life from 1947 to 1965. He learns that his parents are more complex than he knew, his family is his by ado…
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How to Read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Book 1
An interpretive overview of the first Book of Salman Rushdie’s consummate novel of India, Midnight’s Children (1981).
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Reading Keats’ Endymion, Book 4
This is a recording of John Keats’ “Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818),” read by Michael Ullyot. The text is from the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, edited in 2017 by John Barnard.