by GabrielAdmin | May 23, 2024 | Teaching, Title, Uncategorized
Harriet Parks, a teacher at Woodhouse College in Barnet, wanted her students to write in the voice of one of the characters in The Tempest as a form of imaginative, critical exploration of the play. To spur them on, and give them a sense of what was possible and what could be learnt about the play in the process, she wrote a monologue of her own in the voice of Miranda who has now returned to Italy with her father and Ferdinand. She also wrote an accompanying commentary explaining her choices and asked her students to do the same. Her monologue and commentary, as well as the student work, are a wonderful example of how much the creative-critical has to offer…
by GabrielAdmin | Jul 17, 2023 | Teaching Through Imitation Content
I was a student in Thomas Karshan’s seminar on Ludic Literature at the University of East Anglia in the early months of 2022. We met, once a week, for three hours, sitting around a horseshoe table. We read and talked and imitated and parodied and played. Eventually, I wrote ‘A Dinner Party’, as part of the classroom exercise to imitate Gertrude Stein’s writings. It includes phrases which I have picked out of Tender Buttons. Unlike the poems of Tender Buttons, it appears as a long central passageway or a column, aligned centrally to the page, like the empty column at the centre of our horseshoe.
by GabrielAdmin | Sep 20, 2022 | Teaching Through Imitation Content
Imitation is perhaps at its best when it’s wrong. Not ethically wrong, but ‘off’ or flawed. This isn’t to say that a worse imitation is somehow qualitatively better than one that is accurate, but that when imitation takes its subject matter as merely a start or distanced reference point, something interesting can happen. To illustrate this, I will mainly wish to mainly talk about my own experiences with imitation, particularly those of a poetry student taking the Ludic Literature module as part of a Creative Writing MA.
by ThomasAdmin | Jun 20, 2022 | Teaching Through Imitation Content
I had been setting essays on Renaissance sonnets for a number of years. Students were producing solid, competent analyses (mainly low to mid-2:1) but the majority of the essays were dealing primarily with the matter or narrative of the sonnet, insofar as a sonnet has a narrative, rather than attending to matters of form – the thing which makes a sonnet a sonnet.
by james@greybear.co | Apr 17, 2022 | Teaching Through Imitation, Teaching Through Imitation Content
My purpose in the below is, at least initially, to offer, for all of those who are interested in teaching through imitation, a view of some of the main historical and theoretical issues and questions, as I see them, and to draw together in a single place some of the recent scholarship and thought on the topic. I will do so via an account of my own experience of teaching literature through imitation and parody in my MA module at UEA, Ludic Literature.
by james@greybear.co | Mar 30, 2022 | Teaching Through Imitation Content
How has the practice of imitation (or parody etc.) affected your creative writing? I only ever seem to parody writers who intimidate me. During a Literature of the Americas course, I found myself reading Longfellow’s sonnets after the manner of Chaucer, Shakespeare,... 
Recent Comments