Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books? […]
What We Gain from a Good Bookstore “It’s a place whose real boundaries and character are much more than its physical dimensions.” “You may have heard that we’re experiencing a renaissance of the independent bookstore, but the situation is far from rosy,” writes Max Norman in this piece about how independent bookstores enhance communities. Category:
I Needed to Know if My Favorite Books Were Products of Cultural Appropriation We hear the term cultural appropriation often in publishing circles, but what exactly does it mean? Filipino American writer Cindy Fazzi wanted to evaluate whether the novels she grew up loving were examples of cultural appropriation that gave her inaccurate or inadequate
When Aldous Huxley Opened the Doors of Perception An excerpt from the book American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be
