Henry David Thoreau had a fraught relationship with technology. As we discussed in our presentation, it is difficult to tell whether he would be on board with our digital projects regarding his work. What we can […]

surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar
poems about nature and landscape
surely  […]

In class on Friday, 4/26, our group put Big Machine in conversation with a few other texts that we had encountered earlier this semester, as well as a few others from outside the class. In addition to The Last An […]

“The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people; but they have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character….Where are their […]

Upon registering for classes last fall, I made the decision to venture outside of my major, English, and take a few classes in the sciences. I wanted to try out a different way of thinking, one that I hadn’t […]

Like the human brain or the deepest parts of the ocean, the potential for discovery in the digital age seems boundless, especially to someone new to computing like me. Literature and Literary Study in the Digital […]

Two weeks ago, I traveled to St. Louis with six other English students and Dr. Paku to present a paper at the Sigma Tau Delta International Convention. During the last day of our visit we went to a courthouse that […]

When we speak of a “diamond in the rough,” are we being ironic? For when we say this do we not ignore the dark and organic geologic history of the shiny diamond’s formation? A diamond comes from the rough; it is […]

Upon its first consideration, the task of choosing a favorite poem from Angles of Ascent seemed difficult, if not daunting. Beyond the difficulty of pinning down one poem in anthology of hundreds, this a […]

Call and Response, our massive anthology, sets up texts of African American traditions in such a way that pieces begin to function as questions and answers to each other. This clever formation allows for […]

“The songs are a way to get to singing” –Bernice Johnson Reagon

On Monday, Paul Laurence Dunbar allowed us to engage with an homage to his poem, “We Wear the Mask:” the Fugees song, “The Mask.” This […]

I can remember a time when I believed computer science and the humanities represented what Stephen Jay Gould would call non-overlapping magesterium. In other words, the two fields emerged from completely different […]

“Black literature is taught is sociology, as tolerance, not a serious, rigorous art form.” – Toni Morrison.
Without presupposing her intentions for this statement, I would like to think of the tone of this […]

Knowing that the end was near, I tried today to make sense of this semester’s work in what I think was the most effective way. I reread “Bloodchild.” I have heard it echoed across the blog and in the classroom that in order to make sense of what we were doing at any point, there always seemed to be value in recalling “Bloodchild.” So, I began to…[Read more]

Today’s (11/27) class was tough. I had this sense that there were twenty-seven different visions of our final project and the necessity of creating just one vision out of those twenty-seven troubled me. We saw […]

In this post, I would like to address the question of Freud’s survival as well as the dynamics of ingroup and outgroup relations in Dawn as they both can be understood as examples of stigmergy. Here is an a […]

The growing anticipation surrounding Ta Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, prompted me to go back and read his essay from The Atlantic “The First White President,” a selection from the book about the ways in which Donald Trump used his whiteness to reach the presidency. Coates’s main argument is that Trump’s rise to power had…[Read more]