October 16, 2019
April 16, 2020
Audio excerpted from a series of recorded conversations with Mimi Rowntree during the COVID-19 event of Spring 2020. The full discussion is stored at PH Praxis (our current joint digital project) as data for a research project on the effect of the coronavirus on pedagogical narratives and as part of a larger archive documenting posthumanist pedagogy.
Continue readingThe Semester Story was a three-day, multimodal activity (in preparation for the Final Exam) that I first created/deployed in a non-survey, non-major American Literature course (17 students) in Spring 2018. Its curation started with two writing process research studies (re)calibrated via posthumanism and has become just one concrete strategy/assignment in my toolbox that not only helps me more ethically and responsibly observe and assess the classroom as a whole but also offers students the chance to research and assess their own learning and growth–the story of their semester–using data they’ve been creating and curating for months. The Semester Story played a huge role in my dissertation and is, to my mind, a practical distillation of what teaching elsewhere can be. The below recording was my first time presenting on this assignment (March 2020) outside of my defense and offers a (very) brief introduction to the concept of it, particularly the two composition studies articles it started from.
“Enduring Silence: The Impossible Sound of Stolen and Sacred Names in Fantasy Fiction”
I've been digging back through old work and came across this recording that I forgot I had. I LOVE the two books it's analyzing (Tigana is one of my top favorites of all time) and I miss working with straight up fantasy. Maybe I need to get back to that a bit now that the dissertation is done. This was back when I was but a young Ph.D. candidate and had just passed my comps the semester before. I'm pretty sure I murder half of the names and place names and words from the authors' invented languages. It sounds like I know exactly what I'm pronouncing but that just wasn't the case and I feel terrible for whatever injustice I did to these authors' imagine worlds.
In Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, a conquering sorcerer strips the country of Tigana of its name in retribution for its Prince killing his son. In Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar, Phèdre searches for and then holds within her the vast complexity of God’s name, needed to save her oldest friend. One name stolen, the other sacred, both are lost throughout the majority of these texts to a silence that defines characters and drives plot. Even at their climaxes, when these silences break and these names are once again heard, both texts strain under the impossibility of representing an unrepresentable sound: all the stories, the tragedies, the meanings these singular names have come to hold.
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Sarah A. Shelton, Ph.D. 