Creative writing, literary studies, and global thinkers

There has been growing interest in how to make tertiary education more global and international not only in context but, also, in approach and methodology. One area of the education sector that has come under specific focus is the higher education sector curriculum and its design. This paper addresses the process of ‘internationalising’ the curriculum through the specific example of designing a new literary unit for undergraduate students, mainly literary studies and creative writing students. The literary unit entitled: Imagining the Americas: Contemporary American Literature and Culture, has the added complexity of being a unit about national fiction. This paper explores the practical problems and obstacles encountered in setting up this unit while using a framework of internationalisation. The case study examines the practicalities in implementing strategies that reflect the overall objective of creating global thinkers within a tertiary environment.

Literary Studies : The Author Cat - Clemens's Life in Fiction

A review of The Author Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction by Forrest G. Robinson (Fordham UP, 2007). Even at its most basic, guilt forms a counterweight to the hesitancy and unpleasantness of authorship, forcing writers back to the desk when they have come to despise their work. Guilt as task-master is familiar to most, even those to whom more elevated feelings, such as inspiration, make occasional visits. It seems that guilt is effective because writing is so seldom an organic or natural activity - rather, good writing emerges out of unhappy pressures that eventually overwhelm the writer's evasive strategies, from visits to the fridge door to the most sophisticated forms they take, such as when the author creates a narrative persona that claims to have owned up...

The adventures of Odysseus, literary studies.

The adventures of Odysseus.--Herodotus' portrait of Xerxes.--Euripides' tragedy of Hecuba.--The adventures of Aeneas.--Les faits de Pantagruel and La vie de Gargantua.--The giant symbolism in Rabelais's Gargantua.--Racine's Remarques sur l'Odyssée d'Homère.--Contemporary French plays from ancient sources: Anouilh's Antigone; Sartre's Les mouches.--Cocteau's Le machine infernale and Sophocles' Oedipus rex.