Status Updates From The Norton Anthology of Wor...

I can't get these lines from Ghalib's first couplet out of my mind this week:

...it's no use
forcing your way with love:
it's a form of fire
that doesn't catch when lit
and doesn't die when doused.

Up to Dickinson this week:

As lightning to the Children eased
with explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --

Into the "Age of Revolutions" with a discussion about a short excerpt of Rousseau's "Confessions." The students had an interesting discussion about the tension between his claims of authenticity and self-justification.

Students (and me!) really enjoyed our discussion of Aphra Behn, the first woman who was a professional writer, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Mexican nun celebrated for "her spirited defense of women's intellectual rights," and who wrote "my desire to learn was stronger than my desire to eat."

Finishing early modern east Asia with my students by discussing haikus and kabuki from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.