“It has always frustrated me that some of the works I like the best, I cannot teach,” she says. “Every literature department outside of the English-speaking world is focused on canonical literature. They have to be. We cannot wallow in the burrows and cul-de-sacs of English literature. That’s not what those students are there for.”
So while her students are busily preparing essays on Jane Eyre or the sonnets of Shakespeare, Macdonald has begun to record podcasts on the burrows and cul-de- sacs.
Her strategy is simple: talk for about 10 minutes every week about one book that she loves. To narrow her focus, she’s choosing books alphabetically, according to the surname of the author. Of her seven podcasts so far, the first was Margery Allingham’s The Beckoning Lady, the second John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain, and so forth. The books will be from the 19th or 20th centuries and most, but not all, will be originally written in English.
Macdonald, who is British, teaches Flemish students and hopes to introduce them and other Flemings to more English literature through the podcasts.
It shouldn’t be too difficult: The casts are conversational and more than a little amusing. During her discussion of the Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate, for instance, in which a daughter, who is also an excellent cook, is condemned by her horrific mother to care for her until the day she dies, MacDonald questions: “Why don’t you just poison the old witch?”
The podcasts can be downloaded directly from MacDonald’s website or on iTunes. They are as informed as you’d expect from a literature professor, but they’re also delightful to listen to. You find yourself taken back to the rousing literary debates of your university days and realise that you miss those very, very much.
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