CUNY Academic Commons

This is an article from College English about how the poet-essayist-activist-teacher June Jordan navigated standardized vs. subjugated language practices in her CUNY class. It’s a super powerful essay and shows, among other things, how one’s personal experiences and positionally can be inseparable from one’s academic perspective. This essay was…[Read more]

This is a list of readings and other sources that are related to or alluded to in Beyonce’s visual album “Lemonade.” The file attached is just the first page, but you can view the whole thing here: https://diasporahypertext.com/2016/05/07/download-the-lemonadesyllabus-compiled-by-candice-benbow/
I think this could be a great resource for…[Read more]

This is the Author’s Note and Introduction from journalist and trans activist Janet Mock’s 2014 memoir Redefining Realness. Closeted for much of her young adult life, Mock describes the motivation behind and difficulty of sharing her personal history as a trans woman of color. Mock mentions a Marie Claire that, she felt, misrepresented her life…[Read more]

This short article is about how “natural selection” was actually one of a number of metaphors Darwin tried out to encapsulate his theories of evolution. It is by Kensy Cooperrider, a cognitive scientist specializing in metaphor at U Chicago. I like this article’s interdisciplinary approach. I found it through Rhetsy, which is a weekly email…[Read more]

I encountered this recent interview between these two fiction writers in a recent podcast produced by the New Yorker magazine. Saunders is one of my favorite contemporary writers and in this interview, Safran Foer and Saunders discuss their writing process, the role of “goodness” and ethics in their work and other things. Here is a link to the…[Read more]

This is the introduction from Lisa Maruca’s 2007 work, which traces some crucial changes in modern Europe in how people engage with texts. I first encountered this chapter as in college student in a class on 18th Century literature. I forgot who wrote it and wanted to use a concept from it for a paper this semester, so I emailed my old professor…[Read more]

This 2015 New Yorker story describes the rise of mass-market-paperback book publishing. It also has some interesting images of classic books, such as the Great Gatsby, that were republished with pulpy covers to try to appeal to different readers. The author of the piece is Louis Menad, a literature professor at Harvard and cultural critic. I found…[Read more]

This article was published by the journal Pedagogy in 2012. In it, Laura Aull analyzes two commonly taught American literature anthologies, the Heath and the Norton. She reveals how anthologies perpetuate notions of which texts are canonical or exemplify “American” “literature,” particularly through their introductory, prefatory or framing…[Read more]

This is an article I love by bell hooks, where she discusses her positionality as a woman of color in the academy. One of my favorite things about this essay is the way its style mimics the content; hooks subtly uses a mix of more academic and non-academic language.

This is a picture of railroads between New York and San Francisco, soon after the construction of the transcontinental railroad. It shows several destinations across the country in between as well. The web page says it may actually be a board game! A better-quality image can be found at this link:…[Read more]

These are four of the paintings Barthes discusses in his essay on the Renaissance artist Arcimboldo. These paintings were made in the mid-late 1500s as part of Arcimboldo’s Four Season series of allegorical portraits. They were painted separately but I found it easier to upload an image with all four right next to each other. The one on the upper…[Read more]