Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
There are certain moments in a text that could easily be passed by without much thought or attention, but when dwelled over reveal themselves to be surprisingly, teasingly, significant. There is just such a moment in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, copied below and taken from Chapter 14: First, though, a little context: this takes place... Continue Reading →
Context & Plot Byron's fellow Romantic poet William Wordsworth once remarked that poetry was the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and one notices that in this poem the speaker is certainly coming to terms with ‘powerful feelings’.Byron was known to be an especially licentious and promiscuous individual and thus it is no surprise to find... Continue Reading →
Context, Plot and Connections Despite being best known as a novelist, Hardy also had a fruitful poetic career. This particular poem is very typical of his general style as evident in other works: it is bleak, melancholy and pessimistic.What is the poem about? The speaker recalls a memory of when he and his lover stood... Continue Reading →
One of the simplest but most effective questions I ask my students when analysing a text is 'what other words could have been used?' This one question has become a staple of our classroom talk and is now deeply embedded into our discussion and analysis routines. I regularly ask it of them, but much more... Continue Reading →
This poem is from the 1993 collection Book of Matches so titled because each poem is supposed to be read in twenty seconds, the time it takes for a match to burn. This is significant for this particular poem since the collection deals with time passing (hence the match image) as does ‘Mother, any distance’.... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! There are many,... Continue Reading →
Having recently re-read An Inspector Calls, I was struck by just how relevant the play still is, not only in terms of what it says about class and civic responsibility, but also gender, especially in light of the Me Too movement. I thought I would try to capture and distil what I take to be... Continue Reading →
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