Archive for the ‘Ovid’ tag
Experiencing “The Waste Land”: A Five-Day Unit for Teachers
A five day course, 90 minutes, for high school and undergraduates, based on a theoretical framework laid out in “What The Waste Land Expresses: An Experiential Approach to T. S. Eliot’s Poem.”
Objectives: To make “The Waste Land” more accessible to first time readers, by preparing students with three traditional sources and three modernist poems, along with discussion of tradition and modernism, in order to give readers a sense of familiarity with key passages in the poem and prepare them for the use of allusion and fragmentation of form. To direct students away from the question, “What does it mean?” towards “What does it express?” thereby focusing on the musicality and expression of emotion. To look for meanings, during the interpretive stage, rather than a singular, unifying meaning.
The Early History of Metafiction
Was there metafiction in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic, an encounter of a real king of Sumeria and a wild man, Enkidu? Well, the first writers were writing about their own experience of being civilized, a rather painful process we must all go through, but it wasn’t necessarily metafiction because it doesn’t highlight its own fictionality.
