Developed by Nicholas Devlin, Baruch College

This teaching material was developed as a result of the CUNY 1969 Teach-in & Retreat that took place in Summer 2024. The assignment asks students to use materials from the CUNY 1969 project to develop confidence with the conventions of close-reading (or rhetorical analysis) and annotation. 

By approaching the SEEK Matters literary magazine from 1969 with the same care and attention that they are asked to use on more canonical authors in their English courses, students will be encouraged to remember that their own literary, critical, and artistic work calls for serious critical attention and careful reading. Throughout this process, students will continue to grow as a critical community in the classroom through transhistorical political and critical dialogue with CUNY students from the past.

The Teaching Material

Faculty Information

Nicholas Devlin is a comparatist who works primarily on the English reception of Greek and Latin materials in early modern historical writing, political theory, drama, and poetry. His research focuses on early modern writers who adapted forms, narrative structures, and figures from classical tragedy to respond to political and religious crises in the years between the French Wars of Religion and the regicide of Charles I. His recent work has appeared in Philological Quarterly, and he is currently at work on a project that examines how tragedy served as a rhetorical structure and affective vocabulary for the narration of history in early modernity.

His work has been supported by the American Trust for the British Library’s Transatlantic Fellowship as well as various fellowships from the City University of New York. He taught in the Department of English at Baruch College as an adjunct lecturer and graduate teaching fellow and, starting in fall 2024, will serve as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Licensing Information

“Social Annotation and Close-Reading with the SEEK Matters Literary Magazine” is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

“Social Annotation and Close-Reading with the SEEK Matters Literary Magazine” created by Nicholas Devlin is an open educational resource (OER).