Assignments
Preparing for Class
Some of the reading is difficult, much of it is beautiful (even lovely), some is technical, and some is just plain strange. But all of it is interesting. There's also a lot. Trying to do it all at once will leave you overwhelmed; the assignments are therefore structured so that you can read them in semi-discrete sections over the course of the week. Please begin them early, so that you have time to digest the material before discussion. I've often tried to signal in the titles of each section one way to think about the reading in the context of the week and the course -- be sure to give some thought to them before class.
Participation
I expect you will arrive at class with thoughtful and well-prepared responses to the reading, with questions for clarification or discussion, and with an interest in listening and responding to what your classmates have to say. Of the three, listening with care is the most difficult, and I'm especially impressed by students who manage it. Last, I encourage you to enjoy yourselves! Life is short, let's have fun.
Some informal principles to guide you in conference:
- Use evidence: the most compelling contributions are usually rooted in the text. There’s also a real pleasure to be had in careful, close reading.
- Charity: treat others (and texts) with the respect you’d want for yourself. Respect is not the same as agreement! The most profound respect can take the form of deep disagreement, well-enacted. Literally, re-spect means to “look again” — to look again, or look with generosity, curiosity, and care, even, or especially, at positions you feel most inclined to contest.
- Humility: try to avoid thinking that you know-in-advance. Sometimes this knowing refers to ideas and arguments, sometimes to values and morals, but either way, knowing-in-advance tends to preempt learning. Another way to put this: try to mobilize curiosity before (or coincident with) criticism.
Sometimes I will call on individual students for contributions to discussion. I do this on the assumption that all students are prepared, and that the difference between the voluble and the taciturn is one of disposition, not acumen. I understand this can be scary for some students, and if you are one of them, I urge you to speak to me soon outside of class.
One easy way to get involved is to ask for clarification about ideas you don’t understand or words you don’t recognize – I guarantee that others will be grateful for your questions. Another way to get involved is to try and cultivate a disposition of genuine curiosity about what your colleagues have to say and why. This could change your life.
Response Assignments
About one-half to one full page in length, due by 10pm the night before class, sent via moodle to the conference.
They are not meant to be comprehensive accounts of the text. They are, instead, an opportunity to home in on an aspect or aspects of the reading you found particularly interesting. What’s gripping? What’s puzzling? What do you find yourself trying to figure out? Alternatively, what’s so unspeakably boring that you can hardly stand to speak of it? Show us your thinking, and we’ll pick up in class where you leave off. Feel welcome to incorporate pictures and other media.
All responses should do the following:
(1) indicate the passage(s) in the text that best get(s) at what you’re trying to work through
(2) use your reflections to pose an intentionally energizing hypothesis or question and underline it.
(3) offer some remarks about how/why your topic of focus connects to the central claims of the text and the themes of the course as a whole
How to Read at Reed
What are the author's principal arguments? How does the author defend those arguments? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this defense? Be sure to consider the evidence the author uses, as well as how the author interprets that evidence. Be sure also to consider the key conceptual distinctions the author invokes to make the argument.
How does the author situate their arguments in the context of other scholarship? What conversations are they entering into? How might the concepts, methods, or conceptual distinctions that this author employs be of value for work on other topics?
I encourage you to keep a record or journal of the feelings you have as you read. That's because your affective reactions are often an excellent point of entry to a text or topic -- provided you are willing to reflect on the relation between your thoughts and your feels. One way to do this: try to imagine your feels as stand-ins for wishes (or, if you want to try something really interesting, as negations of wishes). Another way to do this: When you say to yourself, "I think this is the case," try substituting it with "I wish this were the case," and see what happens.
Plus, here are some questions meant to get you to think about aesthetics, writing, structure, and style:
How is the text constructed? Does it have an internal architecture? One way to get at this is to "reverse outline" your notes or the text itself - to strip off words, to reduce each paragraph to a phrase and each section to a sentence, in order to reveal the architectural bones beneath (unless, of course, it is exoskeletal or cartilaginous in form). If the text were a building, what kind would it be: a mud hut? a one-room schoolhouse? a cathedral? a museum? a labyrinth? a yurt? your dorm? And in what architectural style: neo-classical, neo-brutalist, gothic, modernist, arts and crafts, postmodern? This will help you think about how to structure your own essays.
Was the text beautiful? Did it feel good in your mouth? In your ear? On your eye? Why or why not? Pick a favorite sentence or paragraph and try to articulate what makes it so appealing. Alternatively, or in addition, pick a sentence or paragraph you think is an offense to the English language (or at least unwieldy), and think of how you'd do it differently.
Take note of the various genres at work in your reading. Here are some of the more common ones: romance, satire, irony, comedy, tragedy, fantasy, fiction, fanfiction, and love stories featuring vampires. You'll want to think especially about their relation to the facts or material presented. Facts aren't facts until we have decided to call them facts, and even then, they mean differently depending on the interpretive frames in which they appear. One of those interpretive frames is genre -- it's a way of organizing a story. And that is why genre matters - a lot.