Assignment Details: Weblog Responses
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ASSIGNMENT DETAILS: WEBLOG RESPONSES
From the syllabus:
Five blog posts. (c. 250 words). These are informal but intellectually substantial engagements with our reading for the day. They can take one of two forms: Summaries will use strategic citation and paraphrase to convey an overview of a given text’s argument as you understand it. This is an exercise in reading-for- content. Provocations will work more critically. Here you might, for example, take a passage and perform a close reading of it, unlocking some particular complexity in the prose; you might compare one work with another; or you might pose questions about some knotty element in the reading – a contradiction, a dilemma-- while taking time to thicken it with thoughtful reflections from other areas of the course. The key is to workshop an idea, a hunch, an argument. Protocols and schedules to be determined.
Additional instructions:
These are individual assignments, but you’ve been broken into groups to ensure coverage of the syllabus. Each student is required to make FIVE posts over the course of the term. Each group is scheduled to respond on FOUR specific days; please make a note of your scheduled days. You have ONE unscheduled post, which you are free to make at any time during the term, on a reading that especially interest you. You can feel free to respond to another posting in this or any other post, engaging another students’ idea(s) directly – but always in the spirit of generosity. For each blog post, you are required to upload your text by midnight the night before the relevant class period. Groups have been named for classical rhetorical tropes, for no particular reason. But it would be fun to know what your trope is, wouldn’t it? Look it up!
GROUP A : ANAPHORA
Carter, Christopher W. Conroy, Jane E. Corcoran, Kayla M. Coudert, Alexis C.
GROUP B : METONYMY
Culbertson, Kieley A. Degrazia, Leah F. Flynn, John P. Mixon, Elise A. Otradovec, Ivy-Victoria
GROUP C : METAPHOR
Pinckney, Shauntell L. Rallis, Dimitra K. Reilly, Shannon E. Segura, Collin D. Seiden, Benjamin S. GROUP D : CATACHRESIS
Smith, Adrianna Stid, Sophia R. Teferi, Mekleet M. Tucker, Ivana R. Viator, Margaret A.
GROUP E : SYNECHDOCHE
Walsh, Jade D. Watson, Alexander D. Widerlite, Elise C. Zost, Mary K.
RESPONSE SCHEDULE
T., September 11: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland GROUP A
Th., September 13: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Gilles Deleuze, “Lewis Carroll”* GROUP B
Week 4
T., September 18: Sigmund Freud, “On the Interpretation of Dreams”*; begin Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass GROUP C
Th., September 20: Karl Marx, “The Fetish of the Commodity and its Secret” and “The Process of Exchange”*; Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”*; Lewis Carroll, selected photographs* GROUP D
Week 5
T., September 25: Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass; Ferdinand de Saussure, From Course on General Linguistics*; ESSAY 1 DUE / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS
Th., September 27: VISIT TO GEORGETOWN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. With Dr. John Buchtel, Director of Special Collections. Begin watching Alice in Wonderland (1951), film, C. Geronimi, dir.*; and Alice in Wonderland (2010), film, T. Burton, dir.* GROUP E
Week 6
T., October 2: Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation”*; Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass; Alice in Wonderland (1951), film, C. Geronimi, dir. and Alice in Wonderland (2010), film, T. Burton, dir.* GROUP A Th., October 4: Roman Jakobson, biographical note, and from “Linguistics and Poetics”* GROUP B
Week 7
T., October 9: Bram Stoker, Dracula GROUP C
Th., October 11: Bram Stoker, Dracula; SPECIAL COLLECTIONS ASSIGNMENT DUE / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS
Week 8
T., October 16: Bram Stoker, Dracula; Jacques Derrida, Youtube videos*; “Letter to a Japanese Friend”*; from Of Grammatology, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” “The Outside and the Inside,” and “The Outside Is the Inside”* GROUP D
Th., October 18: Bram Stoker, Dracula; Derrida, continued. GROUP E
Week 9
T., October 23: Bram Stoker, Dracula; Michel Foucault, from The History of Sexuality: “The Incitement to Discourse” and “Method”*. GUEST LECTURE: ANNALISA ADAMS / GROUP A
Th., October 25: Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”*; Franco Moretti, from Atlas of the European Novel* GROUP B
Week 10
T., October 30: Historical materialism: Terry Eagleton, from Marxism and Literary Criticism* (chs. 1, “Literature and History” and 2, “Form and Content”); Raymond Williams: “Determination” and “From Reflection to Mediation”*; Optional text (only for the brave!): Fredric Jameson, “Preface” from The Political Unconscious* GROUP C
Th., November 1: The new materialism: Sharon Marcus et al., “Surface Reading: An Introduction”*; Leah Price, from How to Do Things With Books in the Victorian Period*; Brian Dettmer, selected art pieces* GROUP D
Week 11
T., November 6: Franco Moretti, From Graphs, Maps, Trees*; New York Times articles on Digital Humanities*; Robert Lanham, “Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview”*; ESSAY 2 DUE / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS
Th., November 8: Literary sociology: Pierre Bourdieu, from “The Field of Cultural Production”; Jim English, from The Economy of Prestige* GROUP E
Week 12
T., November 13: Reviews of 2666; Roberto Bolaño, 2666, front matter* GROUP A
Th., November 15: Roberto Bolaño, 2666, “The Part About the Critics”* GROUP B
Week 13
T., November 20: Roberto Bolaño, 2666, “The Part About the Critics”* GROUP C
Th., November 22: NO CLASS; Happy Thanksgiving / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS Week 14
T., November 27: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”* GROUP D
Th., November 29: Video games as a culture industry? Possible guest lecture via Skype. Readings TBD. GROUP E
Week 15:
T., December 4: Video games as critical art? Readings TBD. VIDEO GAME CLOSE READING DUE / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS
Th., December 6: Last day of class: what is literary studies now? / NO MANDATORY BLOG POSTS
According to Google’s algorithms, the visual cliché of “writer.” Do not be this man.