One of my greatest joys over the last five years has been designing and delivering university courses in English literature and composition. I have taught six classes as an Assistant Professor (limited-term in 2016-17) at Bishop’s University, nine classes as a Course Instructor in the English Department at McGill University, and one class (three times) as a Course Instructor in McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management. This last course focused on grammar, rhetoric, and effective business writing; in English, I have taught Canadian, American, and British literature at all undergraduate levels, ranging from introductory surveys to advanced seminars and an individual reading course.

Some of the books I taught in 2016-17! Araby the cat is nonplussed.

Some of my favourite novels to discuss with students have been Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. I’ve also had great fun with short stories like Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and the (sometimes difficult) poetry of T.S. Eliot and H.D. You can read more about the courses I have taught here.

Preparing lectures, which has been a staple of my life for a number of years, is a fascinating exercise in selection and balance. The best lectures are drawn from the centre of a sort of Venn diagram whose circles represent what is interesting to me, what is essential to know about a given topic, what will be intriguing and relevant to students, and what might provoke further thought or develop in rich new directions. Coming up with six to nine of these kinds of lectures a week is a bit like driving down a sixteen-lane highway somehow in all sixteen lanes at once. It also provides excellent practice in the swift conception of reasonably intelligent and thought-provoking comments on almost any given topic, on command…

In all of my classes, I introduce students to the institutions and ideologies that guide canonization, encouraging them to scrutinize the artistic and material factors that determine how and why we read what we read. Was the last novel you read on a university syllabus? Was it the winner of a major prize? Who makes these decisions, and what aesthetic, political, and institutional assumptions do they reflect?

I believe that “responsible reading”—a practice that engages and strengthens empathetic impulses—is the most important skill students can acquire from an education in the Humanities. Students trained in the critical analysis of literary texts develop the ability not only to engage compassionately with the world around them, but to interpret everything from social and news media to human behaviours conscientiously and imaginatively. I teach responsible reading and critical analysis in literature classes by establishing a culture of curiosity in my classrooms and by helping students to acquire the tools they need to express both inquisitiveness and insight.

Because where would we be without questions?