Quixotic Valentines

Students in Melanie Holm's class have been reading The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, a satiric eighteenth-century novel that re-imagines Don Quixote as a teenage girl on the marriage market. Holm asked her students to collect some of the heroine's more forceful rejections of male suitors and constructed a tumblr where she put all of her condemnations of contemporary expressions of "love" (or at least love of her person and money) on valentine candy hearts.

The point was to encourage students:1) to close read for satire; 2) to examine the text as a oral object to be read aloud (asking how the comic dialogue sounds); and 3) to get them to make connections and analogies between the author's criticism of gendered ideas about love and marriage, of amorous fungibility, and issues of female materiality and autonomy, and our current cultural engagement with these issues.

Check out the tumblr here.