A Burning: Good Books Are Hard to Read

Stylistically speaking, A Burning is compulsively readable. It is told in short chapters, written in economic prose, alternating perspectives and foci on characters. Majumdar seems to be a skilled writer who knows our short attention spans intimately and recognizes the need to move briskly to appeal to our constraints.

Workshopping Workshops

The efficacy of asking people to attend workshops so often is debatable. In my own opinion, it is actually counterproductive to what we want to do. With so much information being channeled to people on so many different digital platforms, most of it, I think, cannot be take up and absorbed. It mostly becomes exercises …

Talking of Rhet-Com in Bangladesh

Speaking about Aristotle might be necessary because of the overwhelming impact he has had on so many academic fields, I will give you that. But I find it hard to rationalize speaking about Cicero or St. Augustine to a Bangladeshi audience. And if such ancient figures are bad enough - they at least have the comparative benefit of being on the written record as opposed to contemporaries in other parts of the word - talking about 20th century figures of rhetorical education as Kenneth Burke s simply inexcusable because they operate in a Western liberal, democratic principle that are not organic to the societies of the Global South. Furthermore, there are extant rhetorical figures and examples readily available for 20th century postcolonial contexts.

City Eyes

I wanted to tell him that I read those words in a novel for class. In it the speaker - in one of many equivocating asides - expounded on how living in a city in India makes everyone develop a type of cataracts. Beggars, in all their motley shapes and forms, are so natural to our cities that they have become invisible. The are the unsubstantial beings, cloaked like poltergeists or djinns, that our minds filter out as we navigate the city.

Designing Online Courses: Balancing Content and Community

Online courses can easily become too overwhelming to understand. This has less to do with the learning materials and activities and more about how the information and instruction has to be delivered through writing in the online format.

An Elegy of a Piece: Review of Pico Iyers’ Falling Off The Map

The name alone is enticing enough. It is the neatly packaged moniker which perfectly hooks the reader – in this case, me – who might be interested. I pointed at it for the boy minding the store. He labored out of his seat, and seeing what I was pointing at, said: “Do you really want to see it? Are you going to buy it? It’s really stuck in there; will be hard to get out. Why do you want it anyway?”

Looking for Shah Jalal

The avenue leading up to the mazaar was much wider than any other road I had yet seen in Sylhet. Cars were parked in a row along the middle of it as apposed to the side: it used a system of parking completely different than what I was used to. Stalls stood on both sides of the avenue, which gave the place the look of being more a peddler trap than the ascetic shrine the word mazaar conjured up in my mind.

Using OER for Composition Classes: Benefits and Costs

Rhetoric and composition and first-year composition, especially, are particularly well placed to provide information and teaching materials in an open manner. Because much of the work we do and focus on is communication and writing, in particular, we don't have to adhere to any proprietary materials.

Kotka Beach

The trail we walked through cut through a field, the jungle did not hold sway there. It was the plain of tall grasses and small shrubs; with singular trees the height of a tall man rising up like scrawny watchmen. A small woodpecker skipped over the bare ground about five meters ahead of us, pecking at the earth looking for grubs and maggots. When we got too close it would fly straight down the path, get some breathing room away from us—the pesky intruders into its realm. It kept doing so for a good twenty minutes before it got fed up and flew up irritably to the branches of a tree that overlooked the path, and waited for us to move past.

Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: Addaing with Noam Chomsky and the Illustration of Genius

The beauty of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy is that Gondry is able to flesh out this Chomsky; though it must also be said that their conversations do talk about his biography and social beliefs. Yet the focus of the film is their conversation about language and how human beings might think, which Gondry illustrates in beautiful, little animation. Though not a linguist, academic, or philosopher, or because he is none of those things, Gondry is able to present a picture of Chomskyan linguistics and philosophy that is clear and subtlety thoughtful.