On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare β Kim F. Hall
βI assign this to my First-Year Writing students paired with a short one-page handout about the use of βIβ in academic writing. Hall models for students what it looks like to fuse personal experience and rigorous analytic work, not only helping students challenge the notion that academic writing can never use first person, but also showing us how the βIβ often generatively unlocks felt tensions in texts. Students especially notice the verbs that Kim pairs with βIβ: βI am entrancedβ (p. 98), βI'm a little lost,β (p. 99), βwhat I really want to know,β βI am stymied,β βI go back to,β βI can't flesh out,β βI offerβ (p. 100). Hall's βIβs show how the best scholarship is always right on the edge of knowing and not knowing, and maybe something like longing.β - Cecelia Lie-Spahn, English & First Year Writing