Category Archives: Uncategorized

GW 2850 _ Final Project Oral Presentations

If there is an electronic aspect to your presentation, you must send it to me the night before so that I can set it up for you in class and we can move through the presentations smoothly. If you fail to send it to me the night before, you will receive a zero. 

Hi Students!

Here is our schedule for the individual meetings. Again, make sure you are prompt and ready with your required materials.

Your meeting will take place in the classroom UNLESS you are scheduled outside of classroom time. In this case, your meeting will be in the English department lounge. (7th floor VC).

IndividualStudentMeetings (1)

After reading the assigned manifestos and watching the art installation/movie by Julian Rosefelt, you probably have a more general sense of what kind of genre ‘manifesto’ is and what the purpose of a manifesto is.

A manifesto is about hope as much as it is about anger and disappointment. It is a declaration as much as it is a poem. It is embedded in the present but also looks to the future.

With this in mind, I would like you to write your own Manifesto. This manifesto can be based on something you actually wish to declare, change, or create. It can be a manifesto in support of a movement you believe in that actually exists or one that you have created yourself or would like to create. ( Apt in times like these…)

On the other hand, it can be completely silly, fictional, or ridiculous if you would like but I would still like it to be thoughtful and satirical if that is the case ( eg  a Manifesto for Cats…)

Regardless, I would like you to imitate the style of one of the manifestos you’ve read or heard. You will only imitate the style the rest will be yours.

500 words. Please print out your manifesto and bring it to class on Tuesday, November 19th. We will be reading these out loud so you may want to do a practice run before you get to class.

This Thursday 10/31 we will be discussing, Roman Fever by Edith Wharton and Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

Roman Fever (1) (1)

Respond to this post as a comment :

Read the article by Charles Bernheimer “Unknowing Decadence” and write a paragraph (4 sentences or more) about what you think decadence is today as an art form based on HIS definition! (Not a popular conception.)

Keep in mind this is an ‘Expert Text.’

PerrenialDecay_Bernheimer

Due by 8 pm Wednesday night. 

Here is your reading for 10/17:

Sufferings (1)

Please print this out and have it for class.

These are excerpts from the larger text so I suggest you do some research online to prep yourself with a background of the author, the context, and the general plot of the work itself.

Free-Write : Due Tuesday September 24th in Class!

You’ve all started the hardest part of the paper : THE THESIS! Congrats! Now for the legwork. In order to help you with this I would like you to take 30 minutes this weekend and free-write about your proposed thesis.

Directions:

Find a relatively quiet space. Set a timer for 30 minutes. Mute that cellular device! (Put it on airplane mode so none of those calls come through!! ) Look at your thesis statement and without any judgement or even stopping to correct your grammar write for 30 minutes. When your 30 minutes are up, re-read what you’ve written, do a little bit of editing but not too much!  Make sure it is double spaced and at least one page long. Plan to print it before Tuesday’s class. 🙂

This will count as your 3rd response!

Can’t wait to hear how this went!

Kant wrote his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” as a response to a call in a newspaper asking philosophers and thinkers to respond to this very question.

Keeping this in mind, for your first response you will create your own, contemporary version of “What is Enlightenment?” considering our contemporary situation, as if you were tasked with defining the idea today. You do not have to have the same title as Kant did so try to be creative and make a new one!

As mentioned in the syllabus, the response will be turned in Tuesday morning in class (Hard copy), 250 words, double spaced, times new roman. Make sure you title your paper and provide a thoughtful answer.

Also! Here is a video to help with your reading of Tartuffe. The performance is a bit cheesy but it stays very close to the text and can give you a general idea of how the play was to be performed and what is going on.

Spaces of Conflict/ Moments of Understanding

Welcome to Great Works II 2850! In this course, we will be asking questions about literature and its relationship to culture. This is a not a survey meant to solidify imposed Westernized images of what literature might mean or be to us personally but it is rather a class meant to unpack and examine the many varied aspects of a text that make up meaning and think through the ways we read. We will look at texts from many different perspectives (cultural, social, philosophical, scientific, and personal, etc…) and find a space in which these many discourses converge.

I would like us to start from a place that does not always make us comfortable. Moments of conflict, indecision, or confusion and think about reading through these works as erring, stumbling through, or wandering without necessarily searching for a truth or reason but rather thinking of the text as a space for engagement.

To offer a bit of a framework, I would like us to investigate the following together this semester:

How can we reevaluate what these texts mean to us and the way in which they are categorized?

What is the value of interpreting these texts and what are the consequences of our interpretation?

What power does language have in our interpretations? Furthermore, what is the relationship between Language and Power?

How can we think about these texts with a greater, global notion of History and how can we problematize this notion?

How do different modes of storytelling create communities and/or centers and peripheries and what does this mean for us as readers?