Last week, I explored the benefits of mastery when approaching a text — namely the meanings that are made possible to those who know what to look for. While I mentioned that those who didn’t know what to look for are likely to “miss out,” this week I am interested in the ways in which mastery itself can cause us to neglect. I invite you to consider Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective story, “The...
An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic draws attention to the varied ways in which Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is read. The main suggestion is that knowledge of Alcott’s biography can drastically change a reader’s interpretation of the text. This knowledge about the author’s biography, one of many types of topic mastery I discussed in my post last week, illuminates greater...
A bit of an open secret exists in academia for graduate students. We sometimes experience frustrations with teaching. While most of us view teaching as perhaps the most rewarding thing that we do, we love to complain about our students (it is usually good-natured, I promise). After spending the past year without any teaching responsibilities, my return to the front of a classroom has led me to...