One thing about the setup of university literature courses has always bothered me: we spend the majority of our time discussing texts together, and — in the best classes — students develop a rapport with each other. Students learn from each other and develop their skills in verbalizing their interpretations. Then at the end of
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