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There is a nice recent anthology of American literature, spanning centuries, that should be handy for my son's English class. I know I'm an old fart cranky guy, but good Lord the introduction! Here is a quick take-down of it from a recent review:
My wife was once an English grad student in the 1990s and her seminars were full of this stuff. I'm happy to report that the anthology itself is actually quite nice once it gets to the actual authors.
The anthology is an accompaniment to an interactive “online teaching initiative” – an “open-source platform” or “technology-enabled mediascape”, possessed of “low-bar flatness” and benefiting from “user-generated input” and “pedagogic bi-directionality”. Those who are put off by these modish phrases will not be reassured by the language that prevails elsewhere in the same introduction. Writing in the curious argot so ubiquitous in university English departments, where the essayistic must pretend to some sort of quasi-scientific rigour, the editors cram their paragraphs with words such as “coordinates”, “clusters”, “force fields”, “nodes”, “ecologies”
My wife was once an English grad student in the 1990s and her seminars were full of this stuff. I'm happy to report that the anthology itself is actually quite nice once it gets to the actual authors.