This will be my last post for the semester and, appropriately, I’ll use it to talk about finals, and one of the assignments I used in my upper-level class. The major assignment for my Dickens and Childhood class was a pretty standard term paper. But I also asked students to contribute to Wikipedia, an assignment
Tomorrow is the last day of classes, and the semester has gone by remarkably quickly. Before Thanksgiving I posted about next semester, discussing some of the plans I have and some of the changes I’ll be making based on my experience this fall. Today I want to quickly cover a topic I’ve been thinking about
Not to be snobbish or melodramatic, but without Dickens many common words might have been confined to the dustbins of history. He might induce boredom in junior high students, but his career, spectacularly narratable and the subject of numerous biographies, brought a number of words from the messiness of orality into the messiness of print.