Bronwyn Averett

  • why studying literature will break your heart, rot your brain, and destroy all your chances of happiness

    Why do we always know who the bad guy is? Let me specify…we’re not talking complicated, Dostoyevskian, “which one of the three brothers is the most irrevocably effed?” kind of bad guy. We’re talking two guys walk into a novel, and one of them you’re really going to hate. So, I guess we’re talking Tolstoy.. Read more

  • Dispatches from the classroom

    Oh the illusive “ne…que” Why is it a negative when it’s stating a positive fact? Why??? This is something that can only really be taught by example. (And by “only really” I mean only really if you teach somewhere whose reputation for immersion learning must be kept intact…at all costs…don’t speak any English…EVER…do you hear Read more

  • why studying literature will break your heart, rot your brain, and destroy all your chances of happiness

    Hey – yeah, you there. Did you know that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude? (1) * Oh, you weren’t aware? Well, maybe you already knew that the whole time you were sitting, alone, at the bar, expecting your date to walk in any minute, you were in fact singing a syntactical Read more

  • shocking statistics of 19th century literature

    I sort of already knew that incarceration was more of an industry than a public service in this country. Which means I was none too surprised to learn that, while the United States has only 5% of the world’s population, we have almost 25% of the world’s prisoners.* Here’s a coincidence. Did you know that, Read more

  • S/Z, or, the “if you give a mouse a cookie” of theory

    S/Z is the first work of proper “lit’r’y theory” I ever picked up. It was a required course for comp lit majors, and I have my suspicions that this was the first work listed on the syllabus precisely so that we could take the appropriate advantage of drop/add week. Years later, and after having read Read more

  • keita, the canon, and what the hell does “interdisciplinary” mean anyway?

    [Disclaimer: this post  is not “finished” in any sense. I wanted to publish it, because I think that it deals with some of the underlying threads we should consider as the battle between the legitimacy of the humanities and the bottom lines of the administration continues to wage throughout the country. But I really, really, Read more