Tag: teaching
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On Teaching (and Not Teaching) True Crime in Creative Nonfiction
My second CNF course is underway, and the class members are enthusiastic and engaged. We’ve just started the essay, both lyric and personal, and students are enjoying sharing their favourite David Sedaris pieces. But we’ve also just learned of a tragic death in our college community, and I’m feeling jolted back to last winter, when…
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The Great Gatsby, Crime Fiction Tropes, and One of the “Crimes of the Century”
The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. The reviews were lacklustre, and so were sales, failing to reach the acclaim of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s previous two novels. Then high school English teachers got their hands on it and . . . the rest is history. I’ve taught Gatsby several times, each time with…
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Adjuncts and Murder Mysteries
This was intended to be the third of three posts about academic mystery fiction, but a social media comment from Janice MacDonald made me pause. She noted that her Randy Craig series, set in Edmonton, is an instance of a Canadian academic who investigates murder within an English department. I’d been suggesting that, unlike in…
