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Course Requirements:
Class participation and tickets in: 20%
Paper #1: 10%
Group project on getting to know the department:
30%
Portfolio: 40 %
Note: All assignments listed above must be
completed in order for you to receive credit for the course.
Class Participation:
Class participation means more than just showing
up. You need to have read the assignment for the day and
prepared two discussion questions from the
reading that you will turn in when you enter the room.
These are your ticket in, and without them, you will be turned away
at the door and get marked as absent for the day. While I am sensitive to learning style differences, I am
impatient with people who don't talk out loud about what they are
thinking--I consider it rather selfish, in fact. Shyness means that
you are thinking more about yourself and how you appear to others
than you are about the topic. Again, while I am sensitive to the
fact that some people are insecure, the class discussions are not
about you; they are about topics of language and meaning, and
if you have little that you are willing to say about those things,
you need to rethink why you are here, and especially why you have
chosen a major or minor committed to language in its various forms.
Moreover, I am also impatient with people who think that discussions
are about certitude and showing off one's brilliance; they're about
learning what you and others are thinking by posing questions and trying
out answers. So, a few class discussion mottos: Speak your mind, even if
your voice shakes. Be responsive. Small minds
discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds
discuss ideas.
Paper #1:
Both you and I need to get to know how the other
communicates on paper fairly early in the course, so you will be
turning in a paper on August 27 that will be graded and returned.
It's a good assignment for this type of learning, as you will see.
Group Project on Getting to
the Know the Department:
Each member of the department was hired for their special
area of interest within English Studies. For instance, last year the
department looked at a number of things, such as the need for
staffing for required courses, changes in cultural values, the
number of graduate students we had who were interested in particular
subject areas, the number of undergraduates in the various sequences
within the department, recent retirements, and other factors, and
decided we needed to hire in the areas of technical writing, English
Education, and some area of global literature. This year we will be
searching for a new director for the Writing Program and a creative
writer with a specialty in poetry. When we advertise for a
candidate, we are looking for a good "fit" with the values and
priorities of the department, as well as someone who will be a
productive scholar and a good teacher. Since we are an department
with a commitment to English Studies, we take our specialties very
seriously, but we also look for ways to cross the subdisciplines and
work together.
For this project, you will be assigned to a group. Your group
will be responsible for investigating the program, resources, and
faculty members who are specialists in a particular subdiscipline of
English Studies. Your job will be to present that subdiscipline to
the rest of the class. So, your tasks will be as follows:
1. Find out which faculty members work in the subdiscipline you are
assigned. Actually, here is a
list.
2. Research their particular areas of interest within the
subdiscipline (for instance, within the subdiscipline of literature
we have specialists in children's literature, British literature,
American literature, African-American literature, etc.).
3. Each member of the group must read an article written by a
different person in that subspecialty. You must write a summary of
the article to turn in, but you can talk it through as you present
it to the class.
4. Prepare and present a list of courses that fit within the
subdiscipline.
Final Portfolio:
The final portfolio will
consist of the journal entries and responses that you will complete
over the course of the semester. Additionally, it will contain two papers:
1) A paper about a graphic text of some kind--either a children's book,
a film, or a graphic novel--wherein you discuss the ideologies that seem to be communicated
through the text. Of course you can't discuss all of the various
ideological moves of the text, so you will want to limit your
discussion to one or more of the following: gender and gender roles,
views of childhood, development, and/or growing up, views of
subjectivity and the self, what constitutes "the" good life (as in,
what are presented as "goods"), or "a" good life (that is, what is
presented as moral and upright), family values. Your paper should
focus on the ways the text and image interact to create both
implicit and explicit ideological statements.
2) For your second paper, you
have three options. Pick one of the following:
----Examine the
assumptions which followed you here by finding out what your
favorite story was when you were a kid. You may remember, or you may
have to call home and check. For prewriting, write out the story as
you remember it. Then, go and find a copy of it, and see what you
have "forgotten" about the story. Forgetting can mean that you have
repressed it, or that it has become so much a part of you that you
aren't even aware of it anymore, or that you had no real context for
understanding it in the first place. Think about which of those
things might be operative in your forgetting.
----Write a paper about a text (movie,
picture book, novel, TV show) that in some way is a revision of an
older text. Explore how the newer text makes use of the older text,
and whether or not the ideological assumptions of the newer text
reinforce or actually revise the older text according to more
contemporary sensibilities.
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