literary interpretation

Hi, all. A quick note: today’s class is going to meet in the classroom in the ITS building. Enter the building, take a left at the help desk, and head all the way down the hall to the last door on the left. See you there.

In case you missed it, or lose yours, I’ve posted the paper 3 assignment on the syllabus, and will also link it here. Do come see me if you have any questions — and don’t forget your research question for Wednesday.

A reminder that you should be reading and commenting on The Golden Notebook this weekend. Many thanks to mercurylanes for leaving some great comments on one of the sites; I’ll look forward to seeing what the rest of you have to say. Please let me know sooner rather than later if you’re having any problems with the commenting function…

As you’ll have noticed, I forgot when I was talking about tomorrow’s class that I’d made the (very, very wise) decision at the beginning of the semester to cut the Lukacs essay from the syllabus. So it’s just Eagleton.

This, however, constitutes the opening of your on-blog discussion of Eagleton. What’s unexpected in the essay? What catches your attention? What gets under your skin?

I hope that your session in the library yesterday was productive.  I’ve been enjoying reading your first essays thus far, and look forward to hearing about your second papers.

I do, however, have one request for all of you:  as you send me documents, or as you upload them to Sakai, please be sure to save them as “.doc” files — that is, as files that are compatible with versions of MS Word prior to 2007/2008.  ”.docx” files are incompatible with my system, and require me to jump through several conversion hoops, the sum of which wind up breaking all of your formatting.

So:  yes on “.doc”; no on “.docx”.  Many thanks, and have a great weekend!

Yes, it’s that time. I’ll be handing this out in class this morning, but I’m also posting it here for your convenience. Let me know if you have questions!

paper-2

A quick post to lay out some of the details of the blog assignment:

Let me know — perhaps here in the comments — if you have questions…

This site is yours to make of what you want, a space for further interaction, for exploration, for testing out some of the ideas that come up in our discussions or in your papers. I’ll be asking each of you to take the lead on our discussion of one day’s reading here on the blog, but I also want to see you trying things out here for yourselves, thinking actively about how this blog might be made a useful space for practicing the kinds of reading and writing that we’re working on this semester.

So any number of things might provide a good topic for a blog post. Here’s an incomplete list that my colleague Meg Worley gave a class of hers:

• Isn’t it cool the way that Author X uses puns to achieve effect Y?
• Aargh, I just can’t get my head around today’s reading.
• Does “jargonterm” mean P or Q — or something else entirely?
• Wow, Reading Z really reminds me of last week’s episode of Lost.
• I could use some feedback on this complex problem I’ve been wrestling with…
• Did she say A or B in class yesterday? I forgot to write it down.
• Hey, I’m in a play this weekend, and y’all should come!

You’ll no doubt find other things you want to post about, too — things you stumble across on the web that the rest of the class should see, things you find in your research that the rest of the class might be interested in. This kind of sharing is what makes group blogs exciting; I’ll look forward to seeing what you come up with.