Boffin\u27s Books and Darwin\u27s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting

Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for acquisition and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning that was often represented in the literature of the age as a source of prestige and social legitimation. Through interdisciplinary readings of Victorian fiction, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, my study examines how textual representations of collecting helped to define nation, class, and gender in Britain from the 1830s to the turn of the century and beyond. Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, including approaches from museum studies, I explain how Victorian writing about collecting, from Charles Dickens\u27s earliest works to fin-de-siècle lepidopteran narratives, participated in the formation of individual and collective identities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, prominent author-collectors asserted their specifically male authority and British dominion abroad through travel narratives about acquiring exotic artifacts for the nation or assembling proprietary collections exhibited back home. Meanwhile, Victorian novels included an array of collectors of all ranks, many of whom seek to enhance their professional or social status through their collections, which are often the products of competition or emulation. However, from mid-century on, a period in which museums proliferated and the British empire grew during the age of the New Imperialism, authors increasingly turned to the figure of the collector to convey anxieties about habits of consumption that threatened personal identity or social stability and a world of objects that were not necessarily under the consumer\u27s control. Thus, even as collecting helped to order knowledge, material culture, and social relations in nineteenth-century Britain, it also posed certain challenges to the social identities and forms of subjectivity the Victorians attempted to forge for themselves, as their collections and texts show

Putting It Together: Layout Exercise

This hands-on short activity (~20 minutes, or longer with optional writing, reading, and discussion components) introduces students who are studying comics to layout, a key component of comics’ graphic language. Students begin thinking about the arrangement of panels on a page or over the course of several pages in comics. Students reassemble a wordless page of comics that has been cut up into separate panels and then explain how their new page constitutes a coherent, meaningful page

Making Gatsby Great: Fitzgerald’s Revisions

This discussion-based activity asks students to evaluate how effectively successive drafts of a passage of dialogue in fiction communicate tone and character. Working in small groups, students read three versions (manuscript, unrevised galley proof, and first edition) of a famous passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Examining dialogue tags and dialogue, students identify the strengths and weakness of each version and explain why the final version is (or isn’t) the best. Students may be invited to write their own version of Fitzgerald’s passage. They will recognize the importance of revision in the writing process

Storytelling in Comics: Who, When, and Where in “Here”

Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking short comic “Here” (1989) revolutionized storytelling possibilities in comics. It may be used within a short story unit to demonstrate familiar elements of fiction, including setting, plot, and character. Moreover, its inventive use of panels within panels to juxtapose past, present, and future can serve as a model for students’ visual rendering of multiple points in time within a single location

RAW

Raw magazine (published from 1980 to 1991) was the premier English-language showcase for avantgarde and international comics in the 1980s and a harbinger of the graphic novel boom of the early 21st century. It was coedited by future New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly and her husband, veteran underground cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose seminal graphic novel Maus was first serialized in Raw. Raw promoted the idea of comics as a serious adult literary and artistic form by publishing formally innovative contemporary comics, translating the work of established international cartoonists, and reprinting works by early 20th-century artists. Its wide-ranging subject matter and styles highlighted the medium\u27s versatility, and its attention to design and printing brought an art-world sensibility to comics. Moreover, through its forays into book publishing, Raw influenced the developing concept of the graphic novel as an artistically and commercially viable form

The Annotated Mariner: Reading and Writing in the Margins

This activity, which incorporates students’ imaginative writing, uses Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 annotations to his Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a model for literary response and interpretation. Through guided discussion, students will first examine selected marginalia from Coleridge’s poem as an attempt to read the narrative through a particular interpretive lens. Afterwards, working in pairs or groups, students write their own glosses to the poem from the perspective and in the voice of assigned figures. By exploring Coleridge’s glosses and comparing their own, students will see how readers’ backgrounds shape reading and understanding of a literary text

Boffin\u27s Books and Darwin\u27s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting

Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for acquisition and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning that was often represented in the literature of the age as a source of prestige and social legitimation. Through interdisciplinary readings of Victorian fiction, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, my study examines how textual representations of collecting helped to define nation, class, and gender in Britain from the 1830s to the turn of the century and beyond. Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, including approaches from museum studies, I explain how Victorian writing about collecting, from Charles Dickens\u27s earliest works to fin-de-siècle lepidopteran narratives, participated in the formation of individual and collective identities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, prominent author-collectors asserted their specifically male authority and British dominion abroad through travel narratives about acquiring exotic artifacts for the nation or assembling proprietary collections exhibited back home. Meanwhile, Victorian novels included an array of collectors of all ranks, many of whom seek to enhance their professional or social status through their collections, which are often the products of competition or emulation. However, from mid-century on, a period in which museums proliferated and the British empire grew during the age of the New Imperialism, authors increasingly turned to the figure of the collector to convey anxieties about habits of consumption that threatened personal identity or social stability and a world of objects that were not necessarily under the consumer\u27s control. Thus, even as collecting helped to order knowledge, material culture, and social relations in nineteenth-century Britain, it also posed certain challenges to the social identities and forms of subjectivity the Victorians attempted to forge for themselves, as their collections and texts show

Blowing Off STE(A)M: The Value of the Creative Arts for Gifted STEM Students (IAGC 2017)

The following is a collection of teaching documents, including classroom activities and assignment prompts, used in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy’s Graphic Novels, Creative Writing, and Modern Theater classes. These materials are easily included in courses with broader topical focuses, however, either as single-day activities or units of study. The specific materials included here are especially beneficial as means of encouraging student creativity, building up a variety of communication skills, rewarding experimental work, and providing new outlets for critical thinking and social-emotional development

An Examination of the Relationship Between Perfectionism and Neurological Functioning

Clinical perfectionism is the rigid pursuit of high standards, interfering with functioning. Little research has explored neural patterns in clinical perfectionism. The present study explores neural correlates of clinical perfectionism, before and after receiving ten 50-minute, weekly sessions of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), as compared to low-perfectionist controls, in specific cortical structures: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), right inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Participants in the perfectionist condition (n = 43) were from a randomized controlled trial evaluating ACT for clinical perfectionism and low-perfectionist controls were undergraduate students (n = 12). Participants completed three tasks (editing a passage, mirror image tracing, circle tracing) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure neural activation. Results indicate that only the mirror image tracing task was associated with reduced HbT in the DLPFC and MPFC of the perfectionists whereas activation in the other tasks were relatively similar. There were no differences were observed in the right DLPFC, MPFC, and right IPL between the posttreatment perfectionist and non-perfectionist control groups. Our findings suggest an unclear relationship between neural activation and perfectionism