Sybilla Oritur

I am not that thrilled with women’s studies as a field. The idea of choosing your object of study based solely on their biological sex disturbs me and seems both arbitrary and demeaning somehow to the women that get studied. People worthy of study should be chosen on the merit of their thought (or its [...]

A few months ago, i was on one of my atheistic, nihilistic rants that generally occur when copious amounts of alcohol, etc. have been consumed. I remember exclaiming, forcefully i might add, that there could not be a God, because no God would have let Alexandria burn. I am an academic to the core.
Of course, [...]

I first fell in love with Banana Yoshimoto’s writing in CEGEP when we had to read Kitchen as an international component of a Literature class. Actually, thinking back, the entire literature program offered by the International Baccalaureate was just fabulous. We also read Cymbeline, King Lear, WWI poetry by Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg, Kiss [...]

“You’re the first person i’ve shared this with… but… because Old English poetry is alliterative there is a high chance, when looking up words in the dictionary for a given line, that they will all be on the same page.”
I feel special. Now another twenty-something people know this about Old English poetry. I am thrilled [...]

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Penguin Books in the UK has embarked upon a foray into digital fiction. Unlike the highly unsatisfactory wikinovel project - We Tell Stories is not only highly entertaining but also pretty high quality. Six authors of repute have put together six stories that utilize digital media in a way that print cannot.
The sixth [...]

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My recollection of reading Milton what is now five years ago is a little hazy. I know i was sitting in a hairdresser’s waiting room for the last hundred-or-so pages of the assigned readings and that it gave me a new-found appreciation for the depth of research put into what was then one [...]