Bookshelf of the month: September
A note from the editors: Today we have a special treat: a BSOTM from the interim head of the Department of English at PNW. He’s a busy guy these days, so he jumps right to the point.
Right so this is the “in” box and the recently-read, and doubles as a spot to put hats where our cats can’t get to them.
Whistling Vivaldi and Mindset are from my work with Mary Murphy of IU Bloomington and the College Transition Collaborative. These are the books we used in a reading group this summer for faculty and advisers in our first-year experience courses, which are designed to help students acclimate to the university and to set them up for success. I have been talking about these books to people a lot. Probably too much. But I have basically been thinking that they show a whole new way of thinking about what it is we are doing in college—everything from how we write our syllabus, to how we design a curriculum, to how we design classrooms, and on and on. If students seem to lack intellectual curiosity, how much do we penalize them for it? If they are hesitant to, say, job shadow in Chicago, or apply for a national fellowship, or to a prestigious graduate school—what do we think is the problem? Lack of ambition? Not smart enough? These books supply other explanations, as well as practical suggestions about what we can do. Talk to me more and I’ll have a lot more to say. Or hear it from the expert—Mary Murphy, when she visits our campus for a second time on September 28.
Then suddenly it’s Shakespeare territory. Specifically Ayanna Thompson territory—she, currently head of the Shakespeare Association of America, led a brilliant roundtable on teaching and on being a female scholar of color, followed by an also-brilliant reading of an off-the-hook Berlin production of Othello. Her Passing Strange book is awaiting the right moment, but her book on Shakespeare teaching (written with Laura Turchi) is accompanying me wherever I go, which is why is isn’t on the shelf. Is it possible to get to the end of a class such that “the students are exhausted and the instructor is elated”? And by exhausted we mean because of all the productive intellectual effort. I’ve been thinking about that one a lot—watch out Making of the Modern Woman students! Note from the editors: this is a junior-senior seminar offered for PNW English majors this semester.
There are various items here related to my own writing—the book I’m working on is called “What Rosalind Likes,” and Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a big part of the book (the main character in that play is named Rosalind). Dimly visible to the left is Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations, about cross-dressing and gender bending in Shakespeare and the early modern English stage. I was rereading it before a seminar for secondary school teachers I led over the summer. An amazing piece of scholarly writing and basically what I’m trying to achieve even if only distantly in the extreme. The Hayot book I always keep near for this purpose too—the best book on academic writing I have ever read. Note from the editors: we concur about Hayot, which we regularly teach in the introductory course for our MA students at PNW.
I have to skip a bit to make Just Mercy make sense here—it goes with Evicted in what I guess I could call my social justice reading. I’m halfway through Just Mercy and find it very good, but not perhaps as overwhelming as Evicted, scenes and characters from which were echoing in me today, a solid year after reading it. Mercy documents work to save from death those victimized by the U.S. justice system. But Evicted pulls back the curtain from an enormous scene of corruption and complicity—the way U.S. housing policy and lack of economic protections for the poor lock millions in a cycle of unstable housing, debt, and homelessness. Evicted orchestrates an enormous body of research including many many hours of interviews and field work, and it orchestrates it masterfully into what was for me truly new knowledge, extremely well-supported, and accessible to non-experts like me. But you don’t have to pick between these two—read them both now if you haven’t.
OK: what’s left: some more teaching books either from conferences I attended or people I heard speak. A book about finicky grammar and prosody that I am reviewing; a book by another friend I am looking forward to reading—on satire and Spenser—and a book by a scholar that I think I might have accidentally offended a bit at a recent conference. Topic looks good—deliberately archaic language—making your writing sound older than it is. I like it.
And Hamlet is there because we staged it here at PNW last spring—still hoping to put together some footage we shot in the corridors of the Hammond campus. For future Medium release? And over there on the right is a rolled-up timeline of Shakespeare’s plays and histories that I picked up at the Globe last summer. Waiting to get that posted on my bulletin board when it’s affixed to the wall of my office. And last of all—the brim of my summer hat. Still in use for this week at least!
