A helpful snippet to remind students baffled by Eliot: it's ok (preferred, and suspect otherwise) to not have "the answer" in your back pocket to his poems. Ambiguity is to modernism as ambivalence is to pomo.
(And Eagleton's Marxist leanings chew up/spit out the erudite in Eliot beautifully ?.)

Fictional writing in ENG 102 this week. And so I dig out the perfect first paragraph, ever. Steinbeck needs more classroom time these days. (And I don't mean any of that mice, men, or red ponies stuff.)

"What does 'the personal is political' even mean?" Answer: this entire book, mantra embodied. Seriously. A perennial re-read to remind us how vital & necessary raw poetry can be. Whenever lit reading/critiquing starts to feel too detached, Rich reignites! (Let's be honest: true of all her work!)

Fierce and beautiful. The piece itself lies at the borderlands of form, multilingual and multi-genred. In no way derivative, it sits in fine company w Adrienne Rich's What is Found There. A staple in any feminist library, long neglected Chicanas' voices. It is theory-narrative-prose-poetry.

One of my favorite semantic headaches, ever. To discuss: to be vs to seem (modernism and romanticism meet). Themes: indignity of death, what of ruling over "lite" domain (title!), shades of Dickinson. Pair w "The Snow Man."

"The House of Asterion" - another, yet unique, trad story retold from the monster's POV. Steeped in defensive language (contrast w conclusion) and self-justification, A's alternate narrative is terrifying. And also human. Distorted redemption/Christian refs. #intertextuality #perceptionasreality

Revisiting ol Terry for SP 17. He opens with attempts at defining "literature" (which naturally don't take). I love this beauty:

Teaching this tonight. Students always get into it, which is good; but sometimes, it feels as though we are fetishizing mental illness. The risk is far outweighed by its strengths. Gilman tells her truth through fiction, and skeptics of lit falter on this one :).

From Beckett's defense of Joyce (Finnegans Wake): "form is content, content is form." And: "[Joyce's] writing is not *about* something, *it is that something itself.*"
As a content junkie myself -- let this be the new ALP prayer. ?

LIT 220: post-Reconstruction (1877-), the debate for newly enfranchised humans. How does this change once he law says it's "so"? Discuss with DuBois and rebuttal, 1903.

Always an issue when describing "Modernism" -- defined foremost here itself as a "problem," "unmoored [from 20c studies]," and "an art for boundless now" (1-2).

Closing confessional by Jekyll. Stevenson dispels binaries even as he evokes them (and relies on our Faustian devil/angel shoulder accessories). Interesting conversation on "agency" (paired w Cronenberg's The Fly). Monsters are beyond borders, thus freedom. But then what are *their* limits?