What am I reading in ScholarWorks? August 2026

In light of a recent epic blockbuster movie release (and its controversies), for this month’s What Am I Reading in ScholarWorks, I offer this 2020 article by English Literature professor, Tess Grogan, “Speculative Bill.” I am always fascinated by reader reception—how was a text understood in its time period, how do we read and understand it now from our own time period and across the ensuing span?

Grogan’s article focuses on the teaching style of another Smith professor, Bill Oram. The literature of the period in question is not ancient Greece, but the Renaissance. Still, the quandaries brought forth are the same. A hero of this article’s driving questions, showing a possible way forward is (much to my delight) Ursula Le Guin. How does a reader, and in the case of Le Guin, a writer, deal with “politically fraught commonplaces” such as the latent (or overt) misogyny, racism or classism that one inevitably stumbles upon when reading older texts (not just older ones, alas)? An educational practice that uses “admiration and anger” as educator, that understands educating to be also an act of learning from one’s pupils and readers, and that lets “doubt and insistence on the mind’s right to change” to flourish are core to a pedagogy that fosters learning not only of the exterior world, but of one’s interior as well. Enjoy this take on the discourse d’jour!

View in Scholarworks: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_facpubs/35/ 

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