Anna Riehl Bertolet

In my teaching methodology, I am a firm believer in complementarity of research and creative work. For this reason, my upper division undergraduate courses include a creative project that precedes and somewhat overlaps the work involved in crafting a research essay. The creative projects I assign in my classes are usually open-ended, with only a few guiding parameters. In my course on “Renaissance Women Writers,” for instance, my students were asked to recreate a literary work in a new genre, and the students were quick to reveal their talents in song-writing, poetry, painting, sculpting, and creative fiction. In my course on Milton, I let the students choose one book of Milton’s most famous epic and simply ask the class to bring Paradise Lost into the 21st century with creativity and flair. And the students followed suit, creating a cake featuring the elaborate landscape of Eden, complete with three scenes involving gummy Adam, Eve, Satan, and Uriel; a narrative quilt; Milton’s Twitter feed; a re-purposed book of impressionistic drawings; a musical piece dramatizing the falls of Eve and Adam; paintings of the War in Heaven, Eve’s Fall, and a diptych starring Sin and Death. And, of course, my Shakespeare courses yield clever performances, songs, paintings and drawings, mini-plays, and short stories that re-imagine the Bard's sources and point to new retellings of his stories.

I write about some of these projects in my forthcoming article, "Reshaping, Refilling, Reimagining: Teaching Shakespeare through Intertextuality."