There’s an event at ACERT on using Wikipedia in the classroom that’s relevant to our class in various ways. The presenters, Iris Finkel and Chanitra Bishop, are wonderful librarians (we’ll meet Iris in a couple of weeks in our library sessions), and the theme of democratic writing/reading spaces where authors are readers and vice versa, will sound very familiar.
Here’s a patchy site that has collected a great little trove of useful materials on Delano for our annotation project.
For a more robust search, check out America’s Historical Newspapers, a searchable collection of newspapers from Delano’s era accessible via Hunter’s library. Here’s a look at what I quickly slurped up in 5 mins of searching; I’m sure you can find more:
You might be interested to read two recent reflections on the relevance of Benito Cereno to the present political moment. The author, Greg Grandlin, focuses on the the rise of extremist right-wing politics via the Tea Party (and now, of course, Trumpism) and the utter dehumanizing and delegitimizing of President Obama in one piece and, in the other, aligns the sunny liberalism of Amasa Delano with a strand of American imperialism no less troubling than that of the much better-known Ahab.
The English department offers a wide range of prizes each year for the best work in X or Y categories. The list of prizes is here and the deadline is fast approaching: 2/29.
I can’t encourage you enough to submit work. Of course many of the prizes are competitive, but there are always categories that are undersubscribed, and you all have good or great work in your drawers that should get recognition. So do it!
I’ll also mention that ACERT is starting a new prize for the best example of student “digital writing.” All of our projects would qualify, so when the call for applications goes out next week, I fully expect you all to apply!! Stay tuned…
I’ve started to jot down some of the 4am ideas I’ve had about cool final projects for y’all (and some that you’ve spontaneously generated, whether you realized it or not, during class). I’m keeping them on a Google Doc that’s embedded on a page on the top menu of this blog.
So take a look and feel free to add to it as well. It’s very early still, but it never hurts to think about what you might do, especially while a given topic is fresh.
Recent article in Jacobin relates story of Spanish worker who, well, prefers not:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/frase-joaquin-garcia-work-leisure-jobs-spinoza-strike-quitting/
This opinion piece from the NY Times relates obliquely to our discussion of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” this and last week. The author, an English professor from Brown, passionately defends the value of literature over and against the “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), arguing that the latter are primarily “informational,” whereas the humanities concern themselves with questions of value.
Interestingly, Weinstein opposes novels to STEM modes of inquiry in ways that are closely analogous to the way Benjamin opposes traditional storytelling to the news. In that way, it’s the novel that’s the cultural form that’s under threat and, thus, reveals an unexpected beauty/value, just as oral storytelling did for Benjamin in 1936.
Since we’ve been spending a bit of time with the man, why not go whole hog and check out his blog? It’s got a great collection of bits of the long history of the a-book and might be fodder for a final project, for those who are so inclined.
You might enjoy an early 2000s Bartleby hypertext edition that I’ve rediscovered via the Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine. It starts with Bartleby’s blank wall and goes from there: cute, no?
Pretty cool version of Bartleby edited by a Slate writer, Andrew Kahn, last year. It’s richly illustrated and contains a wide range of notes that provide historical context and a sense of some of the diversity of critical opinions on the text over the years since its publication. And there’s even an audiobook version on the site for good measure.
As such, it also points towards our second collaborative project together, in which we’ll be doing something similar (though with much lower production values!) with Benito Cereno, so as you check it out, think about what Kahn did to make this work. Or not.
