We read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli in my World Literature course in the spring of 2019. This piercing little book narrates her experience volunteering to translate for lawyers who are volunteering to help process asylum applications for child refugees from Central America who have arrived unaccompanied in […]
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, […]
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 […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: In U.S. Literature in Spring 2015, Raeanne Watkins created the following images in response to John Okada’s No-No Boy and John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Okada describes experiences of Japanese Americans after the WWII internment, while Steinbeck offers a parable, set in Mexico, about poverty and wealth. I find Ms. Watkins’ images striking on their […]
Many people do not realize that Jesus was quoting directly from the Book of Leviticus when he said to love one’s neighbors as oneself. This context lends an important layer of meaning to his words. Often his saying is reduced to an encouragement to “be nice” to others. While not a bad admonish as far as it goes, that interpretation […]
William Bartram—the naturalist who effectively missed the American Revolution because from 1774-1777 he left his home in Pennsylvania and traveled through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—had a vast knowledge of ecology, including plants, animals, soil, landforms, and weather, which he demonstrates in his book on that expedition, commonly known simply as his Travels. If the glossary in the Library of […]
Corrigan Literary Review 