Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Crowdsourcing and Self-Instruction: Turning the Production of Teaching Materials Into a Learning Objective

This article describes a lesson plan that harnessed students’ abilities to generate new teaching material by constructing country timelines. This involved crowdsourcing, or the reliance upon task inputs from a large number of people to acquire information. The plan was motivated by an approach that conceives of learning as deriving from the joint activity of individuals with shared tools, and was geared toward promoting self-instruction alongside traditional lectures and exams. By relying on independent research and individual contributions to create a new teaching resource, the course facilitated strategic reading and peer learning and promoted a research-active learning environment. The experience encourages instructors to consider ways to use distributed learning in the classroom to make students both the producers and consumers of innovative content.     

“Where Liberty Reigns and God is Supreme”: The Christian Right and the Tea Party Movement

In this article we argue that the tea party movement is the most conspicuous contemporary vehicle for reconciliation between Christian and economic conservatives. The analysis draws upon participant observation of two recent Christian right events at which the tea party was a central preoccupation. Offering evidence of the dynamics of a shifting framing process, it is argued that the Christian right elites are willing to accommodate strategically the precedence of economic issues but only if these are accompanied by a commitment to familiar Christian right positions on social issues.