It has taken me forty-plus years of teaching to discover that the best way for me to begin a literature course, undergraduate or graduate, is to have the students copy a passage (or take it from dictation), read it aloud, paraphrase it, and then read the paraphrase aloud.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, January 26, 2024
A Teaching Technique
Roger Shattuck, "Starting from Scratch," The American Scholar 69.4 (Autumn 2000) 47-56
(at 51-52):