British Council website for Nadeem Aslam residency

English 40W: Myths of Britain Spring Semester 2009Jeffrey J. Cohen Much great English literature turns out not to be so English after all: the action of the epic Beowulf unfolds in Scandinavia; King Arthur was a Welsh king before he was an English one; Shakespeare’s Tempest takes place on an island in the Mediterranean, but…

[illustration: Ellis Haizlip talks to Amiri Baraka in a promotional image for “Soul!”] “Soul!” was a groundbreaking TV variety show that aired on PBS from 1968-73. Originating at WNET in New York, the program featured an astonishingly broad range of black and Latino performers, many of who had never been on TV before. “Soul!“ presents…

English major and creative writing minor Gowri Koneswaran (class of 1997) writes: I’ve been thinking about the folks in the English department a lot lately! For the past four years, I’ve been working down the street at The Humane Society of the United States. For some of my non-creative writing, check out this article I…

Had you taken Prof. Carrillo’s class on “Evil,” you, too, could have written about Marilyn Manson.  For this post, I’ll just quote at length from GW student Ali Peters, writing in Monday’s Hatchet: It began with Marilyn Manson. One of my first college assignments was to dissect the lyrics to “The Beautiful People.” For a kid…

When I signed up for this course, I expected a contemporary British reading course, not too different than most literature courses that I have taken so far. Obviously, there was the difference of having Nadeem Aslam teach this course. However, I did not foresee a difference in the way we would discuss the literature –…

Do you ever wonder who is sitting in the front of the room taking attendance? Who is the TA leading your discussion section and grading your papers? As part of a new feature on the GW English Blog “Get to Know Your TA”, we will be interviewing the three Myths of Britain TAs Jessica, Nedda,…