Week 1 Newsletter

Dear Students

This is the first of the weekly newsletters I will send out this semester. I am sending this out on a Monday, but in general I will send them on Fridays. For the most part, they will be divided into three sections: “General Reminders & Announcements” (these will concern our class as well as any opportunities, etc. that come up college-wide), “Completed Work” (this will discuss what we have done and will usually focus on the week that the newsletter is sent), and “Upcoming Work.” There will also be a “Highlights” section at the beginning that gives you the most important stuff. But, please read the entire newsletter each week. I will post them as announcements on Blackboard and the course site, and I will email them to you. These will supplement what on the course syllabus, but also check the syllabus once or twice each week.

Highlights:

Change to schedule: I want to spend a little more time on “What is Literature and Does It Matter?,” Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler.
Please respond to Blog Post #2, which is based on this chapter.
In the second half of the week, read the poems on the course site by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
I will ask you to annotate these as well, but I will post instructions on Tuesday.

General Reminders & Announcements

It is very important that you keep in touch with your professors, especially while we are holding classes online. All of us want you to succeed in our courses and learn things that will interest and benefit you throughout your lives. Communication—in the case of this class, by email—is very important. Please reach out to me if you are confused, want to schedule a meeting, wish to discuss late work, etc.
I have taken one pass at grading Blog Post #1, and I will take another one tonight. If you haven’t done so already, please post yours by the end of today. As I’ve told some of you already, I would like the work for each week to be completed by Friday, but if you get behind on a given week reach out to me and we will work something out.

As I read through the posts, I noticed that some of you have not “published” yours yet. I didn’t grade these because I assume you are still editing the post. Please click the “Publish” button once you are done. I also didn’t give you a grade if you posted your blog response as a comment on someone else’s post. Please post all blog responses as stand-alone posts.

I have decided to post tutorial videos to the course site As of now, you will find two, one that offers a shorter guide for how to post to the blog and one that covers hypothesis, which is a tool I will be using to comment on your blog posts.

And, last thing about blog posts, I want you to think of these as informal opportunities to try out ideas from course material. The questions are open-ended, and my hope is that help you to think through ideas from this material. It’s not as important for you to get a question “correct” as it is for you to address it specifically and as fully as you can.

Paper 1: the assignment for this paper will be out on Tuesday. Look for an announcement on that day.

Completed Work

The big, important task of Week 1 was getting started. You learned to navigate how each of your professors have interpreted this online learning environment. This is a big challenge that you should all congratulate yourselves for seeing through. We have all made different choices, and we have different skills: some of us are very good at digital learning and some of us have never touched a computer. Good job!
You also introduced yourselves using the course blog, and I enjoyed reading about all of your interests and what brought you to the College. I won’t get the chance to meet you in person until we go back to campus, and even then, you will have completed this course and gone on to bigger and better things. So, it was really nice to get a chance to learn about you in your posts.
In the second half of the week you started “What is literature and does it matter?” from A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory by Jonathan Culler. This chapter gives you a pretty good overview to a question that should be on your minds. Namely, what makes something literature and is there a point to studying it? You might also be wondering about how writing about literature bears on your degree program. Culler approaches these questions by highlighting the ways that literature asks us to think about language itself, how it’s structured, how others use it to influence us, how we use it in various capacities. Thinking of literature as the study of language makes us more attuned to the function of language, and if you grasp nothing else this semester, it is this that I want you to take away from the course. I will be posting a screencast lecture regarding this chapter later in the week.

Upcoming work