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Category Archives: Jan 2014

ENGL 515 – Week 1

So many moments from Shakespeare in Love to choose from, and the scene watched in class was a good way to start off our discussion of how we see Shakespeare and the Renaissance today. The scene includes the nervous backstage happenings moments before the first-ever staging of Romeo and Juliet and the stuttering tailor-turned Prologue marvelously gets up to speed with the audience. Proof against the notion that these are literary text, like the ones written and edited by the University Wits, but rather utterances collected and put on stage for a wide variety of Londoners to enjoy. Compared with the stifling seriousness of an earlier scene, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform Two Gentlemen of Verona for Elizabeth’s court, the playhouses were the purpose behind most of these memorable moments in early modern drama. And while big-moneyed patrons were not to be sneezed at, the plays gained their international appeal by being for everyone, especially the illiterate. Most of the Oxford edition scholars (Gabriel Egan, Carole Levin and Peter Thomas) agree that it took a society like late-16th century England to produce these plays. Someone as attuned to all the intricate details of life in the theatre and in such a city like London could turn what seemed like a half-baked movie pitch (let’s have Julia Roberts as the actress who played Juliet) into one of Tom Stoppard’s finest contribution to filmmaking – still not sure what to make of his adaptation of Anna Karenina, but that is another story.

Turns out that I picked a winner with my article presentation, Jonathan Gil Harris was described as a “hot commodity” among literary criticism, and the last book of his to come out was published here in Vancouver! It would be great if he has plans to return to UBC, especially as the Digital Literacy Centre is looking for someone to speak at our conference. While his study of “things” and the lives objects have may go off in many unexpected ways – who wouldn’t want to know about the smells associated with Blackfriar Theatre productions of Macbeth? – Harris seems to represent the purpose of multimodality: more than just the one way of seeing things. I jotted down in my notebook that he might be a post-thing theorist, and it would be really cool if there is a connection to string or chaos in his research. One thing he is not, it seems, is a New Historicist and it looks like the sun is setting on this critical movement. Harris even has the final word on Greenblatt’s brand of criticism: New Historicists cannot agree how the Civil Wars started, just as Marxists cannot agree how they ended. Our instructor gave another way of describing NH’s way: “funky anecdote from obscure literary source matched up with highest canonical text” like some hermit’s diary linked up with Edgar’s lines from King Lear. For my presentation (and the DLC conference) I will be finding out lots more on JGH, but it seems like he has taken historicism a step further: take a tidbit from anywhere in complexity theory and explore its connection to what we already know about the plays.

LLED 602 – Week 1

Set design for Blackbird Theatre’s
Uncle Vanya

Today’s class began with introductions and outline reviewing, as well as a two-part discussion on the ways in which graduate schools could or must change. To better understand what each of us are getting ourselves into, we read as much of the one of these two articles: Nicolas (2008)’s optimistic Researcher for Tomorrow and the seemingly more pessimistic Taylor (2009) End of University as We Know It. Both express ways in which graduate schooling has to keep up with present-day demands for research and job opportunities. The key phrase comes from the mechanical engineer Nicolas, who advises in a workmanlike way, to have graduates who know where to dig, rather than digging the same holes as their mentors. Sounds very much like Tapscott and Williams (2007) were investigating in the book Wikinomics‘ chapter on Goldcorp.

Having been introduced to the methods and readings that in weeks to come, I took the thoughtful lessons about becoming a professional language and literacy educator and went to see a show with my dad, Blackbird Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya. In an eerie way that has started with my master program, everything I come into contact with outside of the classroom has some relation to what I am studying. Here it becomes obvious with Anton Chekhov’s caricature of a professor past his prime: Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov. Ageing and aching from gout, he returns to his wife’s country estate to wreck havoc on the remaining inhabitants (his wife, Vanya’s sister, having passes away and the professor remarried to a much younger woman) who he partly ruined by leeching off them during his studies and long process towards retirement. Of the many people he has upset along the way, Serebtyakov’s worst habit is his disregard for the lowly farmhand, Ilya Ilych Telegin, the only character who took an active interest in what the retired professor has to say. I have seen that look, the confused “who is this person?” brush-off that seems to be a bad habit of surrounding oneself with ideas rather than other people.

LLED 565D – Week 1

I will re-post my second week reflection, wrongly place on the discussion thread for last week, later tonight. Here I want to answer the questions asked about the the survey. Firstly, there is that law, closely related to Murphy’s, where anything that can go wrong will, and it is especially true of digital technology used in front of other people. How many classes have been stalled by a YouTube video not loading or a device taking forever to buffer, and these are the tools that have worked perfectly fine just moments before being brought into the classroom? It almost seems like it has to be a trial by fire (either that or the technology has a mind of its own) to get digital literacy into young children’s education.

All of this to say that in taking the Survey Monkey questionnaire in class, we should almost expect technical difficulties. This was a very familiar experience for me, having lots of electronic fits and starts in my on-line Master of Educational Technology program. The calming and upbeat answer is that kids don’t get so worked up over computers, smartphones or whatevers not working. In fact, most of them seem capable of working around these glitches, rather than my determined, digital immigrant way of repeatedly doing the same thing until something works – how many times will I need to repost before I get it right? Otherwise, the survey gave me and my team (Danielle and Hedy) plenty to discuss while we tapped away on our screens, waiting to submit our collective results.

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