When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.<\/p>\n
Metamorphosis<\/em>, Franz Kafka (Trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Sometimes I have to read a piece of literature in order to teach it.\u00a0 This one for example.\u00a0 I’d avoided Metamorphosis<\/em> all my life until the day a student emailed to ask for help writing an essay on it.\u00a0 We agreed to meet a week later, to give me time to read it.\u00a0 Which I did, feeling again the long flying cockroaches of my childhood scratching their way across my bare feet or arms.\u00a0 At the end of the week I received another email from her, from the other side of the world.\u00a0 She had left the country, written her essay without my help, then emailed me to say ‘Forget it’.\u00a0 Too late, I’d read it, I’d squirmed my way to the end.<\/p>\n But one good thing came out of the exercise:\u00a0 I discovered its great opening line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug. Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (Trans. by Stanley Appelbaum) ***** Sometimes I have to read a piece of literature in order to teach it.\u00a0 This one for example.\u00a0 I’d avoided Metamorphosis all my life … <\/p>\n