Course Schedule
*This schedule is dynamic and will evolve as the needs of the class evolve. I will tell you well in advance of shifts in deadlines, changes in readings, or other assignments. As always, if you have questions, please ask.
Week One: Jan. 11
Topics: Introduction to Digital English Studies
Syllabus Highlights
Readings: Syllabus and course policies
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr
“You Are What You Read” and “10 Things You Didn’t Know about Your Books” (readings and response due Friday 1.15 by 8 PM)
To do: Familiarize yourself with Medium. Set up an account. Share your url with Dr. Ralston. Write your first post in response to the following prompt:
When has a piece of writing, something you wrote or read, made a significant impact on your life? What qualities or context made that piece of writing so significant?
Week Two: Jan 18
Topics: Digital English Studies cont.
Readings: “Bookrolls as Media” William Johnson (pdf on Blackboard)
Suggestions for a 21st century English Department
Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” pdf on Bb
To do:
Read over Literacy Practices assignment
Reflect and respond to any of the following prompts about “The Garden of Forking Paths”:
How does the story problematize the seeming authority and truth of a history book? What is history according to this story? What is the relationship between history and fiction? How are they similar? How do they differ?
Is it significant that the story replaces an act of nature (the rain) with a human act (Yu Tsun’s actions) as the real reason for the unfolding of historical events? Why is that important to the concerns of the story? Is human life fixed, tied to, or determined by natural forces?
What is Borges’s notion of the role of human beings in the determination and directing of their own history and evolution? According to Borges, what can the human creative powers, will, and imagination, accomplish?
Week Three: Jan. 25 Meet in person (if possible)Owens G02
6:30–9:15
Topics: Reading, Thinking, Interfaces
Readings: “How Computers Change the Way We Think” Sherry Turkle (pdf on Bb) and “How We Read” N. Katherine Hayles (pdf on Bb)
If on a winter’s night, a traveler pp. 1–102 (through Chapter Five)
Respond: How have our readings so far, changed or disrupted your understanding of what a text is or can be? How might your own writing be impacted by this revised understanding?
Week Four: Feb. 1
Topics: Literacies
Readings: If on a winter’s night, a traveler pp 103–168
Literacy Practices Due
No Medium response due.
Week Five: Feb. 8 Synchronous Zoom
Topics for Zoom class: One of the concepts that comes up repeatedly in this book is the idea of erasure: the erasure of texts, of authorship, of history both personal and collective, and ultimately of reality itself. Consider what this idea means to Calvino and how it manifests itself in these chapters.
As we have seen, Ludmilla repeatedly talks about a kind of book she would like to read, and then that kind of book always shows up immediately afterwards. How do these stories fulfill her readerly desires? What does this say about the relationship between reader and text?
Readings: Complete If on a winter’s night, a traveler
Respond: You, as a reader, are directly addressed and involved in the narrative of Calvino’s text. Did you feel this to be limiting in any way? Did you see yourself in the text? In what ways is Calvino’s text subversive?
Week Six: Feb. 15 (Optional Zoom, Bonus Content)
Readings : Scott McCloud Understanding Comics (pdf on Bb)
N. Katherine Hayles: “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” pdf on Bb
Respond: What is your familiarity with The Great Gatsby? Have you read it before? More than once? At different times in your life? What adaptations with The Great Gatsby have you seen?
Introduce Media Specific Analysis :Gatsby
Week Seven Feb. 22 Synchronous Zoom
Readings: Judging Gatsby by its Cover
Jonathan Gray: “Paratexts” pdf on Bb
Begin reading The Great Gatsby graphic novel try to get through Ch. Four
Respond: What is the experience of reading The Great Gatsby as a graphic novel so far? I’m interested in the ways your reading might be different than previous readings or what changes/stays the same in reading the novel through the graphic novel.
Week Eight: March 1
Readings: Complete The Great Gatsby graphic novel
Respond to one of the following : How are Tom and Gatsby portrayed differently? What visual cues in the graphic novel emphasizes their differences?
In his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald wrote, “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” How are these perceptions reflected in The Great Gatsby?
The Great Gatsby’s title was not Fitzgerald’s choice and never his favorite. How would the book’s reception be changed if it were instead called Trimalchio in West Egg, The High-Bouncing Lover, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, or Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires?
Critic Thomas C. Foster argues that this book isn’t about Gatsby. It’s about watching, seeing, and blindness (Twenty Five Books That Shaped America). What do you think he means?
Why is this book so often taught to teenagers? What does it have to say to us at that age? What does it say now?
Final words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” With what thoughts or feelings does this leave the reader? How does the graphic novel represent these thoughts and do you find it more or less impactful than reading it in the traditional text format?
Week Nine: March 8 (Bonus Content: Optional Zoom)
Readings: Haas “Wampum as Hypertext” (pdf on Slack)
Prompt: Haas mentions that a wampum is “a hybridization of the oral tradition and symbolism is woven into the material rhetoric.” Where else do we see this hybridization? Where else can hypertextuality take place? What other seemingly-non-related things function similarly to hypertext? To social media?
Week Ten: March 15
Begin The History of Love 1–92
Week Eleven: March 22: Synchronous Zoom
The History of Love 93–152
Media Specific Analysis Due
Introduce Choose Your Own Adventure Analysis
Read and Respond (however you would like) to “The Perils of Choose Your Own Adventure Books”
Week Twelve: March 29
Introduce the Final Project
Read: Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games
Ryan: “Can Coherence Be Saved?” pdf on Bb
Response: You may often be asked why you are studying (majoring or minoring) or even why you’re taking courses in English. As we are approaching the last few weeks of the course, how might you explain why studying texts and their meaning has become important? So, why English?
Week Thirteen: April 5: Bonus Content: Zoom
Complete The History of Love
Respond to any of the following:
Leo fears becoming invisible. How does fiction writing prove a balm for his anxiety?
Uncle Julian tells Alma, “Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” How does this philosophical take on the artistic process relate to the impulse to write in The History of Love?
Many different narrators contribute to the story of The History of Love. What makes each of their voices unique? How does Krauss seam them together to make a coherent novel?
Why might Krauss have given her novel the title The History of Love, the same as that of the fictional book around which her narrative centers?
CYA Analysis Due (extended until April 9)
Week Fourteen: April 12 Meet in Person Owens G02
Readings: Chion “The Three Listening Modes”
Listen: 99% Invisible: The NBC Chimes
Listen: Lincoln in the Bardo
Respond to any of the following: What is the bardo, and how does it function in George Saunder’s book? In what way does the bardo apply to those who are living as well as the dead?
Which ghost stories did you find particularly engaging …funny …moving …sad …even irritable?
Was there a point at which the ghosts took on a “life” of their own … when their actions developed into a cohesive plot?
How do the ghosts’ feelings — their anger, resentments, and desires — reflect the events of their previous lives?
Week Fifteen: April 19: No Class, Wellness Day
Continue to listen to Lincoln in the Bardo
Week Sixteen: April 26: Last Day of Class -Synchronous Zoom
Complete Lincoln in the Bardo
Respond to any of the following:
What does Lincoln come to understand, through his own personal loss, about the carnage of the war and the cost in lives and misery for an entire nation?
Roger Bevins says that “all were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.” Vollman responds by saying “It was the nature of things” and that we are all “suffering, limited beings.” Do you agree?
George Saunders has described the question at the core of this book as, “How do we continue to love in a world in which the objects of our love are so conditional?” Did you find this to be true, and do you feel like you came to a deeper understanding of mortality?
Final Project Due April 30
