The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition – MLA 2021 Update
Considering the composition classroom as a mad scientist’s laboratory, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition introduces different kinds of writing as experiments. Writing an essay is a task that can strike fear into a student’s heart, but performing an experiment licenses creativity and doesn’t presume that one knows the outcome from the start. The Mad…
Pop Culture for Beginners
Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides tools for thinking critically about how meaning is created, reinforced, and circulated. Privileging a semiotic approach, the book’s first part, “The Pop Culture Toolbox,” outlines the development of pop culture studies; explains the semiotic framework; introduces students to a variety of…
Mad Scientist’s Guide is mad indeed! A review by Stanwix von Stuffypants
I must confess to having been dubious concerning the “merits” of this so-called Mad-Scientist’s Guide to Composition from the moment I first espied its advertisement in the solemn pages of Canonical Literature quarterly; however, because I pride myself on staying abreast of what passes for “pedagogy” these days, not to mention what the youth are…
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe’s only long fiction has provoked intense scholarly discussions about its meaning since its first publication. The novel relates the adventures of Pym after he stows away on a whaling ship, where he endures starvation, encounters with cannibals, a whirlpool, and finally a journey to an Antarctic sea. It draws on the conventions…