Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

Explores Elizabeth Daryush’s “Children of wealth in your warm nursery” as of a narrator visiting us to warn us about our possible ill-fate, if we don’t “escape..” The game for the reader is to decide if she’s to be trusted, or not.

Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing” as a poem about re-cooperating from the infliction of a triggering, caustic word upon one’s mental composition, using efficacy, experience in knowing composure and competency, as a rebutting counter.

Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing” as a poem about re-cooperating from the infliction of a triggering, caustic word upon one’s mental composition, using efficacy, experience in knowing composure and competency, as a rebutting counter.

Explores how Phyllis Webb’s “To Those Who Have Also Considered Suicide” is a poem which mischievously induces the reader to become one of the “friends” who undergo the “initiation” of suicide. The reader is encouraged to let go any grievance, however, in consideration of the poet’s successful demonstration of the initiation as involving genuine…[Read more]

Explores a clip of “Blade Runner” as if it were an artifice for suggesting means by which we might find meaning, purpose, in our own world. Decker as extension of ourselves, experimenting, failing… but ultimately succeeding, to discover purpose that is palpable to many of us, in a world we find actively seeking to degrade the possibility of it.

Explores the ability of the narrator to be honest with the difficulties — not displace, repress, elide/evade concerns — they had in their mother-child relationship, in several works of literature, including Cocteau’s “Les Enfants Terribles,” Alice Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women.” and Andrea Ashworth’s “Once in a House on Fire.”

Explores how “Ode to a Grecian Urn” reads as a discovery of the discovery for the poet of the importance of an object, not primarily as something he might master, but something he submits to. Story of the withdrawal of status, and re-projection of “art,” status, onto an object, after brief experience of the effects of being abandoned its authority.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how Elizabeth Gaskell uses her textual creation, “Cranford,” to insert a male “bomb” into specifically delineated memories of her pre-adult life, thereby effecting displaced matricide.

Analysis of how Jo creates her own femininity, apart from her mother’s, through effectively earning the trust and interest of increasingly impressive paternal imagos.

How and why do we read? And what is the relationship between academic reading and the reading we do for pleasure? This course is divided into two parts. The first part, on critical reading, surveys some of the most influential critical approaches in recent decades, including structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism,…[Read more]