composition

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of picking up Richard Miller's Writing at the End of the World , a book that voiced many of the concerns I was already having and further complicated my stance as an educator. I'd recommend everyone read this book. Miller , a professor at Rutgers University, well-known for his blog text2cloud , examines writing, reading, and what it means to our world. As English instructors, we are often blinded by our idealism. We love reading and writing because we believe it is transformative, that reading can make people see the world anew or inspire them to be "good" (whatever that means). A glass bottle theory, Miller takes a cherry bomb and ignites it from the inside, shattering the illusion. According to Miller, neither literature nor writing is truly transformative. He writes: we tell ourselves and our students over and over again about the power of reading and writing while the gap between rich and poor grows greater, the Twin Towers come...

I have just come off of my panel at the 2011 British Women Writer's Conference on "Educating the Nineteenth Century Child." I presented on Augusta Webster's Daffodil and the Croaxaxicans: A Romance of History, in which I believe Webster has taken and revised the Alice model to support an image of child heroine as emerging New Woman. Before my presentation, came two wonderful presentations, Sandra Burr's "The Curious Case of Harriet and Lousia Beaufort: Questing Women, Inquisitive Texts" and Ashely Faulkner's "Christ Among the Doctors: Pedagogy, Pediatrics, and Divinity in Alice Meynell's Criticism." At the end, when the floor opened up to questions, an audience member remarked that we (all three panelists) were all working on recovery projects. Though Ashley saw his process as a different kind of recovery than the work Sandra was doing, I think this very keen audience observer was correct in her statement. With that said, I believe it f...