Linda Avril Burnett, Ph.D

English at Algoma University

Overview

Ph.D (McGill University)
M.A. (Dalhousie University)
B.A. Honours English (Dalhousie University)
B.A. Philosophy (University of Toronto)

Dr. Linda Burnett, who completed her Ph.D at McGill University in 1999, has been teaching at Algoma University since 2004, where she has taught medieval and early modern drama, Shakespeare, the poetry and thought of John Donne, early modern women's writing, literary criticism, modern and contemporary drama, Canadian drama, tragedy, Detective Fiction, Science Fiction, and the literature of India and postcolonialism. As well, at Algoma, she has supervised an honours essay on the film of David Cronenberg and a VISA 4005 project on Shakespeare and painting. Her research interests include the theatre of Atlantic Canada, feminism and tragedy, contemporary feminist and post-colonial adaptations of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare, scepticism and Renaissance tragedy, and the work of Margaret Cavendish. With respect to recent projects, Dr. Burnett edited Canadian Theatre Review 128: Theatre in Atlantic Canada (Fall 2006), and her "Traversing Tragedy: Shakespeare's King Lear and Alison Lyssa's Pinball, The Women's Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein's Lear's Daughters, and Joan Ure's Something in it for Cordelia" is forthcoming in Essays in Theatre's special issue on Shakespearean adaptation. As well, she currently is editing Theatre of Atlantic Canada (2010), which will be volume 16 in the Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English series published by Playwrights Canada Press. Since coming to Algoma University, Dr. Burnett has received four SSHRC Institutional Grants (Laurentian).

 

Teaching Philosophy

Whatever she is teaching, Dr. Burnett approaches her subject from a feminist perspective. A writing class, for example, would include a section on language and gender, with essays such as Emily Martin's "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles" and Carol Cohn's "War, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War" at the centre of discussion. In a Science Fiction class, both not-so-feminist works, such as Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and feminist works, such as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, would be read side-by-side. And in a seminar on tragedy, a genre in which aesthetics and sexual politics have long been linked, students would consider how theoretical constructions of tragedy have focused on the male hero and marginalized woman, deemed an "inferior" being by Aristotle, limiting our reading of tragic drama.

While Dr. Burnett's approach to her subject is feminist, her approach to teaching is best summed up by the words of Alice Walker's Meridian: "I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers." In other words, Dr. Burnett believes that learning is a two-way street, and that students learn the most when they learn to ask good questions. When a class is really working, therefore, the questions flow in both directions, with students coming to appreciate how the best questions work to spawn further such questions, coming to appreciate, as e.e. cummings puts it, that it is "Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."