Jonathan D. Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, wants to restore the magic of literary text for ordinary readers. This Cornell Research article highlights the work he is doing to set up a framework for thinking about poems not as objects for interpretation but as objects for pleasure and delight.
Children revel in poetry: the ridiculousness of nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss stories, the unexpected fun of wordplay. So why is it, by the time most of us reach college that love of poems has vanished? “Students often say they don’t like poetry partly because it’s been treated as an object of interpretation,” says Jonathan D. Culler, English.
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
