Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Ganna Mahmoud wrote this analysis of a short film in my Writing & Inquiry course (AWR 101) at the University of Tampa in Spring 2023. I am delighted to share it here on account of how well she conducts academic analysis in such an engaging and human “voice.” We often hear about […]
One of the books that helped me the most when I was a student was Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Utah State UP, now in the second edition). On the surface, the book lays out practical moves for working with sources in academic writing, moves like “forwarding,” “countering,” “remixing,” and so […]
Laughter echoing through the house, delicious aromas circulating the air, male sports comments shouted at the tv, the pitter-patter of children’s feet running to sneak into the kitchen, clanging of pots and pans, and the ding of an oven are all included in the first few minutes of the movie Soul Food. All of this […]
Do you want to make a million dollars this year? Are you tired of working for minimum wage? Do you want to escape the 9 to 5? What if I told you all of this is possible, and I’m going to teach you how to make this a reality for yourself . . . Enticing […]
Editor’s Note: In the fall 2020 semester, during the pandemic, Jessie Goldstein conducted a survey about her fellow students’ experiences and views of street art for a research essay in my Writing and Research class at the University of Tampa. For a follow-up assignment re-mediating the research (or putting it into a new medium) to […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Gabriela M. Gonzalez took my African American Literature course in the spring of 2020, the semester interrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I so appreciated her final reflection about the course and what she learned that I wanted to share. Reading African American literature can be both gruesome and inspiring. […]
“My Passion for Literature Succumbed to Reality,” writes Bianca Vivion Brooks in an op-ed in The New York Times. While Brooks loves majoring in English—the reading, the writing, the thinking, the discussions—her family sacrificed for her to go to college and count on her to help out after graduating. She needs a decent, steady income. […]
I am writing an essay that celebrates the groundbreaking work of the late Robert Scholes (1929-2016), one of my favorite literary and pedagogical scholars, whose books, especially The Rise and Fall of English (1998) and The Crafty Reader (2001), influenced me a great deal during graduate school and continue to influence me to this day. But as […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: In my English Composition I course, I have started asking students to experiment with how they read, first reading a book (James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) as they usually would, then rereading that same book while trying out my advice for how to read deeply, then writing a comparison and contrast essay […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: My World Literature course asks students to find creative, meditative ways of working with texts from around the globe. In fall 2017, Kylei Strahan took Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Path”—a fascinating, bizarre, deeply multicultural text, written by an Argentine writer, set in the UK, revolving around a location in France, […]
If you want to major in English, you might feel some pressure. Folks might warn you against it. Folks might tell you that you can’t get a job with an English degree, might advise you that a “practical” degree is the safe bet in a rough economy, might crack jokes about you working at Starbucks while writing a novel in your […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Notes: In my World Literature course, I invite students to practice reflective, meditative, contemplative ways of reading. The idea is to slow down, pay attention, and listen. A wide range of creative responses lend themselves to this work, including painting (which I’ve written about). The time spent painting in response to a text […]
Around the age of twelve, Frederick Douglass was sold from a plantation in the countryside to a family in the city of Baltimore. His new mistress set out to teach him to read, and got through the alphabet, until her husband made her stop. “[I]f you teach that nigger . . . how to read,” […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Emilee Rosell took her very first (English Composition II) and very last (World Literature) college classes with me as her professor. She’s now graduated with a BA in English. In this reflection essay, she looks back on what she learned in that last class, and throughout college. I cannot say how inspired and encouraged I […]
I want to begin with joy and enthusiasm. But I always feel ambivalent when giving students advice about grad school in English. The thing is, I don’t know if you should go. I don’t want to push you in the wrong direction. You might benefit from it as much as I have. In my eight […]
Corrigan Literary Review 