I ended up submitting the blog post I’d planned for here to the local paper, so you can read that version here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2018/10/26/after-200-years-frankenstein-still-matters-opinion/1779830002/ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of my favorite books to teach. Last fall I taught a course on the novel, and it’s a mainstay on my syllabi from the British survey to Romanticism to
It has been almost a year since I last posted on this blog, and it had been almost a year before that post, too. Excuses abound (a first child, a new job, a new house in a new city), but I’m recommitting to posting here more regularly. I am partly inspired by Dan Cohen’s essay from
Like many teachers, I often use adaptations in my literature classes: paintings of Tennyson’s poems help students identify the visual details he builds into them; Playboy‘s publication of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” makes the poem’s sexuality graphically clear; David Lean’s Oliver Twist, with Alec Guinness’s prosthetic nose, transfers the text’s anti-Semitism into a different medium;