Good Old Sarah Lawrence

Hi -- I just don't remember if I answered your email. Your name popped up briefly on my ipod (?) but I couldn't find the message. Anyway, writing an essay as an exercise on the Beckett trilogy is quite a job -- and your idea about the two parts of Molloy is a good way to approach it. Of course another would be just to examine the movement from the first to the third. I just teach Malone Dies because it's short and quite marvelous in itself. I liked your class so much that I am giving it again this year (usually I do it every other year), but this was a real example of magical thinking -- the class is small, with two really good students in it this semester, a few middling ones (nice, but way too anxious to show off their intellectual sophistication, which results in blah essays) and the most horrible student I've ever had, a pathological liar and plagiarist who makes me feel sick everytime I see her (luckily she's missed the last few classes and I hope she never comes back). As a group it's just dead. As a teacher I seem to have become quite unpopular with the students as I know I am with most of my colleagues-- I only had three in a sort of Intro to Shakespeare in the fall, still it was a nice little group -- although this semester there are 17 in a course I like, really theories of culture since the late 19th c., odd mix of fiction, poetry, theory. I'm doing Faustus with them, given the topic, and they really seem to like it. Tell me more about what you're doing, where you're living, etc