Term paper topic

Imagine that you have been asked to write an article on Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues for an academic journal. What are some of the critical approaches you might apply to this text and what aspects of Poulin’s novel specifically would lead you to examine it from those perspectives? Choose a single theoretical approach or concept and discuss how that is applicable to the novel. Make sure to use specific, detailed examples from the novel to support your choice.

Essay length 1500 - 2000 words.
Due date: Wednesday, June 29th

Make-up assignment (summer 2005)

As I mentioned in class, I am offering those of you who want to improve on your midterm mark an opportunity to do an additional assignment that we will post online on this blog, as I think what you learn will also help out the rest of the students. Those of you who complete this assignment will have the weight of your midterm (currently 20% of the final grade) cut in half. The other 10% of your grade will be comprised of the grade you receive on this assignment.

Your goal in this assignment is to provide a 250-300 word description of one of the literary terms listed below. You will need to provide a full list of works that you consult and perhaps quote from in coming up with your definition and only one of these can be an online source. Some of these terms will be theoretical approaches we've either talked about in some detail or ones to which we've alluded at some point. Others will be literary terms that have come up briefly in Culler that I would like you to investigate further.

When you're done, send me what you have via e-mail and we'll post it on the blog, making this part of the blog a sort of mini-dictionary of literary terms for the class.

Here are the terms I'd like you to define. Choose one and then let me know right away which one you have chosen so I can make sure no one else starts working on the same one.

• Différance
• Feminist Theory (Jennifer)
• Focalization
• Intertextuality
• Marxist Theory (Betsy)
• Postcolonial Theory
• Postmodernism (Margaret)
• Poststructuralism (Rachael)
• Reader-Response Theory
• Russian Formalism
• Structuralism (Laura)

The absolute deadline for this assignment is Wednesday June, 29th. No extensions.

Grading update

Graded essays are all waiting outside my office door (321 Old Mill) in the mailbox on the wall, not to be confused with the massive pile of essays awaiting pickup in the cardboard box outside my door.

To find the Response Assignment....

Click on the Assignments tab above

Education and/vs. schooling

Great job in class today, everyone. Great to hear you all talking so much and so articulately about the readings. I'm looking forward already to meeting up on Tuesday to hear your thoughts on the next readings.

Our discussion of Freire and Hooks left us with some interesting questions, whether you're thinking about teaching some day or not. How does education connect with traditional forms of school? Is it the most effective way, do you think?

I'm hopeful from what I've heard in class that today's teachers-in-training are thinking about these questions in creative ways. Do you think that's enough? Or, should we also be more encouraging in our society of creating lifelong learners who don't see their years in school as the end of their education?

Here's that link to John Taylor Gatto's article from Harper's entitled Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why
What do you think of his argument?

Lest I ever paint Canada as a land with no problems....

"Was Canada Too Good to be True?" from the New York Times talks in an interesting way about what is at stake in the Liberal Party's portrayal of Canada as a "singularly virtuous country that adheres more than most to values like honesty, decency, fairness and multiethnic equality, not to mention publicly financed universal health care."

As part of our discussion about how national metanarratives function and often serve the agenda of preserving rather than challenging a society's hegemonic structures, we talked a bit about the role played by the concept of "The American Dream." This recent series of articles in the NY Times called Class Matters provides an interesting supplement to that discussion.

What do you think?

Why and how do we read?

Great discussion today, everyone. As I was saying to Kristie after class, these are all concepts that take some time to think about and more time perhaps even to decide where you stand on them.

Here's the link to the article from the Boston Globe called Reading lists speak volumes in schools and the one from the Washington Post called Odds Stacked Against Pleasure Reading.

(The Washington Post and Boston Globe sites may require you to register to read the stories. If you don't wish to register, this site can help you avoid that)

Read both of these articles and with Graff and Vendler's takes on the study of literature in mind, think back to your own experiences taking "English" in school and perhaps later in University. How did you connect to the works you read? Which books made an impact on you and why? Did you become an English major (or not) because or in spite of how it was taught to you in school?

Click on the comments link immediately below and you should have a box open up where you can post your comment. If you don't see that, you might want to try doing this using the Firefox browser (a good choice anyway. go to getfirefox.com to download it) or using a computer on campus. If you have any trouble, just e-mail me for help.

Final grades are in!

Hi everyone,

Final grades are in to the Registrar's office and any essays due to be returned are outside my office door. Many are not in order and are not in envelopes (completely ran out of those), but all are in the front half of the box.

I'll be back in the office on Monday when, after a luxurious 2-day summer holiday, I start teaching the first of my two summer classes. If you have any questions, please contact me then.

Thank you all for a great semester. I had a blast and I hope you did too.

Have a great summer! For those of you graduating this weekend, I really wish I could be there to congratulate you in person. As I can't be there, please accept my congrats and my best wishes for the future. You've all worked very hard and have impressed me with your diligence and enthusiasm for the study of literature.

Slainte,

Paul

Venezuelan govt. hands out one million copies of Don Quixote

BBC NEWS | Americas | Free Quixotes big pull in Caracas:
People in the Venezuelan capital Caracas have been queuing around the block to collect free copies of the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote.
The Venezuelan government is handing out a million copies to mark the 400th anniversary of its publication.
Populist President Hugo Chavez has urged Venezuelans to draw inspiration from the figure of Don Quixote.

One final topic for discussion: "reading at risk"

"Reading at Risk," a study released in the summer of 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts, yielded some interesting responses in the media. What do you think about these latest statistics? The release last summer of "Reading at Risk" , the NEA study on Americans' reading habits, generated a great deal of discussion in the media and in public on literacy, the importance of "literature," and the education system in this country. What do you think? Is this a problem? Are you surprised? What should we be doing, if anything, to change this growing trend? What assumptions do you see being made in the report and the ensuing debate?

• The original NY Times story about the report's release
• A NY Times opinion piece two days later
• Literary critic Harold Bloom's response.
• Dana Gioia's recent editorial in the Boston Globe on "Why Literature Matters"

(The NY Times and Boston Globe links may need registration. If you don't wish to register, this site can help you avoid that)

Catch-up! Here's the extra credit assignment.

Wow! Well, later that night after our wonderful outdoor class I got hit with a terrible stomach bug and had to cancel nearly all of my classes for the rest of the week. I'm just now getting back to work on all the things I had planned on doing last week. :(

As I mentioned in class, I am offering those of you who want to improve on your midterm mark an opportunity to do an additional assignment that we will post online on this blog, as I think what you learn will also help out the rest of the students. Those of you who complete this assignment will have the weight of your midterm (currently 20% of the final grade) cut in half. The other 10% of your grade will be comprised of the grade you receive on this assignment.

Your goal in this assignment is to provide a 250-300 word description of one of the literary terms listed below. You will need to provide a full list of works that you consult and perhaps quote from in coming up with your definition and only one of these can be an online source. Some of these terms will be theoretical approaches we've either talked about in some detail or ones to which we've alluded at some point. Others will be literary terms that have come up briefly in Culler that I would like you to investigate further.

When you're done, send me what you have via e-mail and we'll post it on the blog, making this part of the blog a sort of mini-dictionary of literary terms for the class.

Here are the terms I'd like you to define. Choose one and then let me know right away which one you have chosen so I can make sure no one else starts working on the same one.

• Différance
• Feminist Theory
• Focalization (Kari)
• Intertextuality (Adam)
• Marxist Theory
• Postcolonial Theory
• Postmodernism (Meaghan)
• Poststructuralism
• Reader-Response Theory
• Russian Formalism
• Structuralism

The absolute deadline for this assignment is Monday, May 9th. No extensions.

Second essay topics for 086 Z1 (Spring 2005)

Imagine that you have been asked to write an article on Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues for an academic journal. What are some of the critical approaches you might apply to this text and what aspects of Poulin’s novel specifically would lead you to examine it from those perspectives? Discuss at least three critical approaches or key questions theory asks about literature that are especially relevant to Poulin’s text and offer specific, detailed examples from the novel to support your choice of these three.

I will also give you a second option for this essay, and that is to choose simply one theoretical approach and to discuss how that is applicable to the novel. This option, obviously, allows you to go into greater detail about this particular approach and the aspects of Poulin's novel to which it connects.

Essay length 1500 - 2000 words. I will literally stop reading after 2000 words, so please make certain that your argument is as concise as it can be.

Due date: Tuesday, May 3

Readings for next class

Aside from the three articles on In the Skin of a Lion, please have read the articles by Harris and Achebe from Falling into Theory.

Ondaatje links

This link will take you directly to my earlier posting on this blog about websites that will give you further information about Michael Ondaatje and In the Skin of a Lion.

If you've found any other sources online that might be helpful, post them in the comments section of this posting.

Readings for 086

(guick update: when I posted this earlier this morning, the articles had disappeared from online reserves. They are now back online. If you don't see them still, just hit "Refresh" on your browser and they should appear)

I had alluded to these readings on our last class before the break, but dropped the ball a bit and didn't pass the exact coordinates along to you until now. Do what you can to read some of these articles before class tonight.

These articles are available for download at the library's online reserve desk. To find them, simply follow this link and then choose "View Course Reserves" under the Do It Yourself menu. Then, search under my name and you'll find links to PDF versions of the three texts I've asked you to read.

It will be very important for you to have hard copies of these articles, but I will see if I can get them printed for you so that you don't need to pay to read these.

Beddoes, Julie. "Which Side Is It On? Form, Class, and Politics in In the Skin of a Lion." Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994 Summer): 204-15.

Fraser, Robert. "Postcolonial Cities: Michael Ondaatje's Toronto and Yvonne Vera's Bulawayo." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 26. 2 (2001): 44-52.

Schumacher, Rod. "Patrick's Quest: Narration and Subjectivity in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion." Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 21.2 (1996): 1-21.

What would Harold Bloom say about this?

BBC NEWS | Americas | Mexican officers brought to book:
Police in Mexico City, one of the most crime-ridden capitals in the world, have been told they must read at least one book a month or forfeit promotion.

The mayor of the district where the scheme is being implemented believes that it will improve their work.

Along with guns, bullet-proof vests and handcuffs, police in the district of Nezahualcoyotl will now have to take a book with them.

If they do not read at least one a month, they lose their chance of being promoted.

Mayor Sanchez says the reading scheme for his 1,100-strong municipal police force will make them better officers and better people.

The list of recommended titles includes such literary classics as Don Quixote, The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, and, on a lighter note, The Little Prince.

Browser issues

Yesterday, thanks to the dogged persistence of my English 086 students I discovered that at least one and perhaps all of my blogs are not displaying properly in Internet Explorer for Windows. The postings are displaying properly, but when it comes time to read comments users only see a blank comment box.

Fortunately, there is a quick solution: the blog displays properly in Firefox, a great browser that you can download for free at the UVM software page (http://www.uvm.edu/software) We're looking into what might be causing this error on IE, but for the meantime, please download Firefox and start using it to access the blog.

You may well find you like it a lot better than IE anyhow. It is faster, and much less susceptible to spyware and adware. You can learn more about Firefox here.

Grades ETA

Keep checking this space for updates.

The following essays are graded and in the box outside my office door:
Landry
Iverson
Burke

Collins
Steeneck
Gordon

Next on the pile are:

I'm teaching today, but will be back at grading by 2:30. If your essay is not done today, it will be ready for pickup tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

General comments on essays

Still working through essays (a list of those I've done and those next in the pile is coming shortly), but wanted to post some comments about some of the common areas I see that need work.

I often write out extensive comments about grammar, clarity, and other writing issues, but I thought it might be even more useful to post a few general observations here on the blog.

Clarity: In nearly everyone's essays there were passages that should have been revised more thoroughly. Always read your final draft aloud and have someone else proofread as well. This will often help you to catch any sentences where the meaning is unclear or the structure awkward. When you revise your essay, continually focus on expressing your ideas as precisely and concisely as possible. Always ask yourself “Have I truly said what I mean? Have I said it as effectively and efficiently as I can?” To see how one can improve clarity and style often with only the deletion, addition, or relocation of even just a single word, look at some of the quick changes that I made as I was going through your essay.

Grammar:
a) Sentence fragments: Again, always proofread and read out loud very carefully to avoid problems of this sort. Here are a couple of useful links that explain how to fix sentence fragments: http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/fragments.htm and http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_frag.html

b) Passive/active voice: Avoid using the passive voice as much as possible. Try instead to use the active voice; it is nearly always more effective than the passive form. Here is a link to a great webpage for information on the difference between the passive and active voice: http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/passive.htm

Punctuation: Carefully review the errors that I pointed out on your paper so that you can correct those in the future. Pay particular attention to the proper use of commas, semicolons, and apostrophes. At this point in your career you should have mastered all of these forms of punctuation. Websites like OWL at Purdue or this Guide to Grammar and Writing are great sources of exercises that will help you to eliminate these types of errors from your work.

Usage: Make certain when using a word or phrase that you are absolutely certain of what it means. I often see papers where it's clear someone has used the thesaurus extensively and has chosen words from there without doublechecking their definitions. If you see a word circled and the word "usage" in the margin, I'm pointing out a word that doesn't quite fit, that means something other than what you are trying to use it to mean.

A few more comments to follow as I go....

Comments now working on recent postings

We've got the comments back working and will have a permanent fix for that soon. We're also working today on a solution for the spam we're still being hit with.

Dept. saves with online syllibi

Dept. saves with online syllibi
Between budget cuts and advancing technology, the traditional paper syllabus is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

This is an interesting story. I wonder how much paper we could all save by using online syllabi and coursepacks on CD?

We talked last night about the shape of the text affecting how we interact with it. How would reading, say, an anthology of articles on a CD change what you do as students? How would it affect our ability to discuss works in class?

Ditching "the Classics"

Here's the link to the article from the London Times about the move afoot to "modernize" the English national curriculum.

Read the article and then take a critical look at the assumptions that are being made in the process about the purpose of studying English and what function the Classics are seen to serve.

What interests you about this discussion? How is the nature of this discussion different than the one we've seen on the website of the parent organization in Kansas trying to pull the "vulgar" books off the curriculum?

Comments on "Chick Lit" posting

For some reason, the comments page on this posting isn't working. You can leave your comments here instead.

UPDATE: We're still having some problems with comments. Working on getting that resolved this weekend.

Classics and "Chick Lit"

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article, Class Finds Meaning in Chick Lit. What they are doing in these classes almost sounds like some of the things we saw Robert Scholes recommend in the article we read by him in our anthology.

How often do college students get to read Bridget Jones's Diary as a homework assignment? Not too often, and not on too many college campuses.

According to Iryce Baron, the University is the only college in the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that offers a chick lit course.

Baron teaches English 281, "Women in the Literary Imagination," which is an overview of the chick lit genre, a new genre of women's literature that is post-feminist and focuses on strong, quirky, comical females and the issues they face. One of the course's required readings is Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary.

Baron said she started the chick lit course after the success of another English 281 course she teaches called "Icons of Marriage and Maternity in the British Novel," a historical British, feminist literature class.

What do you think? Does this sound like a good way to approach the connection between literature and society? What assumptions does the writer of this article make about what one reads in university English courses?

Challenging books in the classroom

Here's yet another site of a group trying to ban books from the curriculum of their local school district. Take a look at their site and look at how they construct their arguments against "poor quality literature and vulgar subject matter (profanity, sex, occultism) in graded reading assignments."

Here's one of the points they make: "It's about selecting high quality literature in required reading assignments, an activity that until now, has never been labeled book banning or censorship." One characteristic of quality literature, in other words, is that it does not "contain an excessive use of profanity including many variations of the f-word, as well as graphic descriptions of rape, incest, pedophilia, oral sex, bestiality, and violence."

Here is their list of the bad words they have found in "vulgar books" like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

What do you think about this? Does the group have a point? Some of the above books are some of the great works of 20th Century American literature? Is it "better" for students to read those or to read something not "vulgar" instead?

DIscussion of essay assignment

The Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose

Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the "great books" that she derided would emancipate the workers.

The Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose is a great article that ties into the readings we did last week by Eagleton and Viswanathan. Please read this entire article and we will discuss it in class soon. This challenges some of the ideas we will see in a number of the other essays we will have read and offers some interesting suggestions for what English studies must do to survive.

Helen Vendler: The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism

From this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on Helen Vendler which refers to her as the The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism.

This passage is particularly revealing about her approach:

Hence the respect for Dame Helen. Hence, too, the grumbling. Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn't like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession.

Her approach is, so to speak, rigorously untheoretical: A poem speaks to her, or it doesn't, and the critical essay is Ms. Vendler's preferred medium of reply. "When I was writing my dissertation on some really abstruse works by Yeats," she once noted, "my notion, which is still my notion, was that if what I write pleases the poet, then what I have done is all right."

Few literary scholars now consider the author's intention as the final criterion in discussing the meaning of a work. So Ms. Vendler's desire to win the approval of poets seems even more striking -- a mark of temperament rather than of professional standards. Perhaps the death of the poet only makes the challenge more interesting.

[. . .] At first Ms. Vendler appears simply to have assumed a new role in her capacity as elder stateswoman of poetry criticism. But her lectures themselves amount to a solemn warning about the state of cultural literacy and the function of literary studies. The reading of poetry, she contends, requires a set of skills and dispositions being lost in the scholarly rush to interdisciplinarity.

Today's Topic: Challenging books in the classroom

As I likely mentioned in class last night, it was only a matter of time before another story like this one hit the media. What do reactions like the one from this parent assume about why we read the books we read in school?

Pam Russell, an Anne Arundel County mother of three, did something last fall that surprised her a little.

She objected to a book that her daughter, Bridget, a freshman at South River High School in Edgewater, was assigned to read in English class: Maya Angelou's famous 1969 memoir, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Russell was among the parents who objected to book's use of profanity and its depiction of sexual violence.

The fact that "Caged Bird" has been hailed as an American classic has not stopped parental objections, which have dogged the book for years. The same is true for any number of literary works, from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" to Dante's "Inferno."

From On School Reading Lists: A Big Eraser (washingtonpost.com). It's possible you may have to register at The Washington Post website to read the whole story online. It's well worth your while, as there's often lots of interesting stories there.

This article also mentions a couple of important sites connected to this debate: Censoround, a site that tracks calls for the censorship of books, and Parents Against Bad Books in Schools "a website that tracks concerns about library books and classroom texts used in Fairfax County public schools. To enter the site, users must assert they are 18 or older and read a warning about "objectionable or inappropriate" material."

updates soon to come

If all goes according to plan, there should be stuff up here in time for Tuesday night's meeting of my Spring 2005 section of English 086.

I'll be changing the syllabus, obviously, but will keep all the past news and discussions. I'd like this blog to allow us to see the various sections of English 086 that I've taught, am currently teaching, and will be teaching in the future as a continuum and not just a repetition of the same content over and over with no regard for who is actually part of our class group.

This is one of the primary reasons for making this a publicly available blog and not a closed WebCT environment is that it will allow students from different versions of my English 086 course to connect with others and also for people outside academia or at least the UVM English program to join our conversations whenever they like.

All grades now available on WebCT

Hi all,
Sorry for the delay on these. I just needed to find a 5 hour block of time to get all of the grades up on WebCT. These will help give you a better idea of how you earned your final grade. If you have any questions about your grade, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm back teaching on Jan 3 and will have all of your essays in envelopes for you outside my office door. You are also more than welcome to come by and look at your final exams, but these have to be retained by the department.

Finally, Happy New Year to all of you! I celebrated Canadian New Year's a few weeks ago, but hope you enjoy yourselves. ;)

Fighting spam

Over the holidays this blog got hit with a ton of spam. One means of combatting this is by only allowing people to comment who have registered with TypeKey. This is a painless process, and helps keep us spam-free. Sorry for the inconvenience of this.

WebCT follow-up

It turns out that we can still get to our course here: http://diamondback.uvm.edu:8900

I'll have the grades for everyone up there later today.

Grades available today

Hi everyone,

Was just trying to enter the grades into WebCT for you and discovered that over the holidays somehow our webCT site was wiped out. I'll need to add you all to the WebCT site again and then post your marks. :(

Grades will be in to the registrar at 9 this morning, so expect to see them online later today or tomorrow.

I'll let you know soon where I get with getting WebCT back up and running...

Grading update

My family and I all got hit with the flu just after finals, so after battling that for days and days I'm finally wrapping up grading. The essays are done and commented upon and I'm ploughing through the exams right now.

The M you're seeing when you check your grades apparently stands for "Missing Grade." What it really stands for, I think, "Martin's late again, dammit!"

Grades are on their way, though. As soon as they are in the hands of the College, I'll post them up on WebCT so that you can see how you did on all the assignments. Essays will also be available outside my door for pickup likely by Monday or Tuesday. I just need to find enough envelopes for them all!

Hope you are all starting to relax and enjoy the holidays.

Barthes, Guillory and Bloom (in progress)

Hi everyone,

Just a quick follow-up to our limited in-class discussion of Barthes, Bloom and Guillory.

BARTHES:
As I mentioned earlier, we've talked about Barthes article at many points throughout the semester, but here are a few key points to remember. Barthes, as you'll be reminded from my posting on intertextuality, talks about any text is made up of all texts that have come before it. The author is not a solitary, genius figure who pulls all of the text out of thin air, but rather someone who pulls together all of the things he or she has absorbed and arranges them in a somewhat new form. Barthes argues that it is the reader's job not to "decipher a text" but to "disentangle" it. (reread the last full paragraph on 256)

He says that it is in the reader and not in the author that the text finds its "unity," that the reader is the place where everything comes together. This leads to the most famous line of the article: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (257).

Guillory: The Canon as Cultural Capital (excerpt from his book Cultural Capital)

Guillory's argument isn't so much an attack or a defence of the traditional literary canon, but rather an examination of many of the problematic assumptions that are part of that argument.

First, he talks about "school culture" as the thing which always "remains invisible within this debate [. . . ]. School culture [, he argues] does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of artifact-based knowledge an imaginary culture of the nation-state."

This "imaginary culture" has little relation to the real national "culture," in the ethnographic sense of the word, that is to say the nation's "common beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes" (220). "Culture" when used in the canon debate usually refers to a sense of "refinement" or high culture. He argues that the canon debate often projects our own national culture as a direct extension of Western Culture and that the introduction of "multiculturalism" and non-canonical works into the curriculum is somehow an attack on "the 'great works' of Western civilization" (220).

What Guillory argues though is that this debate sets up a false opposition between the Western tradition and multiculturalism, mostly because these "great works" are in fact "deracinated" artifacts that have been entirely removed "the actual circumstances of their production and consumption" (221) in such a way as to suggest that Homer, Dante, Rousseau, and Tolstoy, for instance, have more in common with each other than with their own cultural and historical contexts. Not only that, they are often taught in translation as "great works of literature in English" (221).

"The function imposed upon schools of acculturating students in 'our' culture often thus requires that texts be read 'out of context,' as signs of cultural continuity, or cultural unity." (222)

Harold Bloom "Elegiac Conclusion"

(this article is the epilogue to Bloom's book The Westen Canon in which he talks about what he believes to be the 100 or so most important works of Western culture)

Bloom's article is a great illustration of what Guillory shows to be the problematic assumptions made in the debate between the "Westen Canon" and the threat of the invasion of "professors of hip-hop" and "multiculturalists unlimited" (225).

He also states in this article that "the strongest poetry is cognitively and imaginatively too difficult to be read deeply by more than a relative few of any social class, gender, race, or ethnic origin" (227) and that those scholars who have become focused on theory "resent literature, or are ashamed of it, or are just not all that fond of reading it" (228).

The love and appreciation of "great" literature is what he argues we should be teaching.

Ondaatje article links

The blog entry from earlier in the term fails to mention that these are available online from the library's electronic reserves page.

To find them, simply follow this link and then choose "View Course Reserves" under the Do It Yourself menu. Then, search under my name and you'll find links to PDF versions of the three texts. I've assigned them for my English 086 students, but you might like to look at these as well.

Answers to a few questions about the final....

On Dec 9, 2004, at 6:12 PM, Julia Kristeva wrote:

hey paul,
i really appreciate it that you are going to post up some notes about guillory,
bloom and barthes. i am a bit confused about them and their exact thoughts.

i have a feeling that i missed class when we talked about spivak. i read it and have a few questions...

Thanks. I'm hoping to get to posting some stuff in the next couple of hours.

You're absolutely right about Spivak in that we never read it, it turns out. That remained on the list from my 086 class over the summer. I deleted it from the blog article list a couple of days ago, but forgot to mention it to everyone. :( Sorry about that!

We talked about the Barthes at a number of points in the course, but without ever getting around to reading the article until now. I've included some important quotes from the article in the blog entry about intertextuality, but will talk a bit more about Barthes shortly on the blog.

I'm also going to add part of our conversation to the blog, as I'm sure many of you have the same questions.

A good site on postmodernism

This is a site that's linked to from the Postmodern Thought site I mentioned a couple of months ago on the blog (in my post about Jacques Derrida). If you scroll down the page, you'll find a good table outlining some of the primary differences between Modernism/Modernity and Postmodernism/Postmodernity.

A few more reading notes to come...

Hi everyone,

As promised, I'll post here a few notes about the articles by Barthes, Guillory, and Bloom a bit later this morning.

Intertextuality lecture notes

By popular demand, here are my lecture notes on intertextuality, which includes some of the more important passages from Barthes' "The Death of the Author"

Exam questions

PART A: Essay (60 marks)

Two of these three questions will appear on the final exam. You will be asked to write one essay that fully answers one of those two questions.

1) In the Skin of a Lion and Volkswagen Blues are full of intertextual references. Define intertextuality and look at several of the ways in which intertextuality functions in both novels.

2) What is literary theory? Why is it important for students of literature to learn about theory? Using In the Skin of a Lion as an example, discuss some of the ways in which theory can help us to understand Ondaatje’s novel more fully.

3) Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues are frequently referred to as postmodern novels. After defining literary postmodernism by identifying some of its most important characteristics, pinpoint and describe in detail one way in which each of these novels is decidedly postmodern.

HERE'S WHAT THE QUESTION FOR PART B WILL LOOK LIKE.

PART B: Passage identification and discussion (40 marks)

CHOOSE FOUR OF THE FOLLOWING SEVEN PASSAGES AND IDENTIFY THE FOLLOWING:

• The title and author of the text from which the passage is taken (1 mark)
• The significance of this passage. Questions you will want to address in your answer include: What do we learn from this passage? How does this passage connect with the rest of the text from which it is taken? What is important about this text? How does this passage tie into other ideas or theories we’ve seen in any of the other texts we’ve looked at in the course? What else do you notice about this passage? (9 marks)

FOR PART B, ANSWER ONLY IN COMPLETE SENTENCES AND PUT YOUR ANSWER IN PARAGRAPH FORM:

Articles we have read prior to the Final Exam

Here's the list of articles we've read over the course of the semester. You'll also find this list there for you on the final exam so that you don't need to remember any of these titles.

Readings for the last week of classes

Thursday, Dec. 2:

Chapter 8 and the appendix from Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author." Falling Into Theory, 253-57

Tuesday, Dec. 7

John Guillory, "The Canon as Cultural Capital" Falling Into Theory, 218-24

Harold Bloom, "Elegiac Conclusion" Falling Into Theory, 225-233

Topic(s) for second essay

As discussed at length in class on Tuesday, here is the essay topic for the second essay:

Imagine that you have been asked to write an article on Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues for an academic journal. What are some of the critical approaches you might apply to this text and what aspects of Poulin’s novel specifically would lead you to examine it from those perspectives? Discuss at least three critical approaches or key questions theory asks about literature that are especially relevant to Poulin’s text and offer specific, detailed examples from the novel to support your choice of these three.

I will also give you a second option for this essay, and that is to choose simply one theoretical approach and to discuss how that is applicable to the novel. This option, obviously, allows you to go into greater detail about this particular approach and the aspects of Poulin's novel to which it connects.

Essay length 1500 - 2000 words. I will literally stop reading after 2000 words, so please make certain that your argument is as concise as it can be.

Due date: December 7th at the latest

Citing your sources using MLA Style

Here are some links that will help you with MLA Style. Diana Hacker has published a number of great guides related to writing essays and documenting sources etc. It appears that her entire book is not online. Check out this section of her website for information on using MLA style

http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/humanities/list.html

This page at her site shows how to do "in-text citations"

http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/humanities/intext.html

There are many other sources online for similar information, though they are not as comprehensive as Hacker's site.

Here are a few others that might be of help:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html
http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocMLA.html
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/cws/wworkshop/MLA/bibliographymla.htm

This site deals with how to cite online sources of information.
http://www.westwords.com/guffey/mla.html

These should answer all your questions. If you're an English major though, or still plan on taking English courses, purchasing the MLA Style Guide is a good investment.
You can purchase it online at http://www.mla.org/bookstore:

WebCT, marks and blogging

I've set up a WebCT space for the course where I'll be able to share marks with you securely. Just go to
http://webct.uvm.edu and you should be able to find your way to the login page for WebCT.

Unfortunately, I need to have the registrar's office add all of your names to the course in order for you
to get your marks so it might be later today before it's up and running. If you're around campus later
his morning, I'll be putting the marked essays in the mailbox outside my office at 321 Old Mill.

To save you an unnecessary trip, I'll use our course blog to post the names of the people whose essays
are done and waiting for them at my office as I get them done. Keep checking that site throughout the
day until you see your name on that list.

I'll have these all done today (Friday) and will be diving right into the midterms after that.

Continuing our discussion on the election

If you're interested in continuing the discussion, that's what the discussion section of this site if for. Drop by that part of the site and add your two cents.

Today's Topic: Articles we've read prior to the midterm

Eagleton, Terry. “The Rise of English”

Freire, Paulo. “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”

Graff, Gerald. “Disliking Books at an Early Age”

Hooks, bell. “Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy”

Menand, Louis. “The Demise of Disciplinary Authority”

Ohmann, Richard. “The Function of English at the Present Time”

Robinson, Lillian S. “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon”

Scholes, Robert. “A Fortunate Fall?”

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.”

Tompkins, Jane. “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation”

Vendler, Helen. “What We Have Loved, Others Will Love.”

Viswanathan, Gauri. “Introduction to Masks of Conquest”

Ondaatje readings

The following readings are at the Reserve desk in the library and should be available for you soon. Please have them read by Tuesday, October 26th.

Updates: Readings and Midterm

If you click under the assignment tab, you'll see that I've placed our readings on In the Skin of a Lion on electronic reserve. To find them, simply follow this link and then choose "View Course Reserves" under the Do It Yourself menu. Then, search under my name and you'll find links to PDF versions of the three texts I've asked you to read.

It will be very important for you to have hard copies of these articles, so please print your own copies and bring them with you to class. Please have all three read by next week.

The Midterm will be happening on Thursday October 21 and will cover all the material we read prior to In the Skin of a Lion from both the Culler book and the Richter anthology.

The format of the exam will be short and paragraph answers, with perhaps a few multiple choice questions thrown in. Review the gist of the essays from Richter that we read and make sure to review the concepts Culler talks about. Questions about theory, literature, meaning etc. will be a central part of what you will need to remember from Culler.

We will discuss this in more detail in class on Tuesday.

More on Derrida

Here, from George H. Williams, is another useful blog entry on Derrida's death and the inaccuracy of some of the descriptions of his work that have followed.

Jacques Derrida 1930 - 2004

Last week, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died. We've discussed some of his ideas in class, but the following links will help to give you a bit more background on the work of this extraordinarily important theorist.

You'll find a number of obituaries online that recount his life, the best of which came from The Guardian.

Michael Bérubé, an English and Cultural Studies prof at Penn State, posted on his blog an intro to Derrida that he wrote for his students a number of years back. Bérubé's blog is a great place to stop daily for some first-rate and often hilarious political commentary.

In this story, Deconstructing Jacques, at the Guardian Online books page, another great resource worth following regularly, a number of British writers and academics are asked what they thought of Derrida and his work.

This Postmodern Thought website is a fabulous set of links to sites related to many theorists including Derrida. Take your time here and start to explore the work of some of the theorists we've discussed briefly in class (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Eagleton) and many other important ones we've yet to touch on.

As I've said before, English 086 is not here to give you and overview of every theory and theorist under the sun but to give you a sense of theory and how it can be applied in critical approaches to literary texts. The next step is for you to start to explore some of these approaches in greater detail.

What's a blog? Why use it for our class?

Welcome to the world of blogging!

I've held off using other tools at our disposal (WebCT or a standard website) over the last couple of months as I worked with the great people at the Center for Teaching and Learning and the CIT department to get this off the ground. This is an experiment of sorts to see how effective a tool blogging can be for courses in English. English 086 seems an ideal test case given how much of what we've been talking about surfaces regularly in the news.

The way this site is laid out is not typical of blogs, but makes this both a venue for regular blog-type postings and discussions as well as for pulling together important documents such as the syllabus or essay assignments.

The tabbed sections are quite self-explanatory. I'll be adding a lot of related resources and links to course material on the Resources page and, on the Discussions page, I will suggest some topic for discussion that you may want to participate in. As I am the only one who can "start" a discussion, e-mail me with any topics you think we should discuss there and I'll get the ball rolling. As you will see, you can "comment" on any posting to the weblog, so feel free to do that.

One of the things I like about using a blog for this purpose is that this blog will likely remain the course blog for all of my future sections of English 086 and the dialogue that it begins will carry on over the many iterations of English 086 that I will likely teach over the years. This site is also open for anyone to explore, getting away from the idea that course websites (in WebCT for instance) should be private and only for the students currently in the course.

More on blogging and blogging resources on our Resources page very soon.