Time Schedule:
Jentery F Sayers
ENGL 111
Seattle Campus
Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.
Class description
"Animating 1919"
What is literature's relationship to history? What about literature might be considered "timeless"? How does literature help us understand the past? And how is the production of literature influenced by the material conditions of its time? To unpack these questions, this course focuses on a particular year, 1919, and Anglo-American literature and literary criticism somehow related to that year. These texts, though historically located in 1919, will no doubt still be moving about in English 111. In fact, movement or, more precisely, "animation" will be our refrain.
In the first half of the course, we'll commit to most of our reading. Even if sitting down, we'll be sure to mobilize different methodologies or "critical lenses." For example, we'll contextualize literature and connect it with historical events. To avoid getting rooted in a single approach, we'll also attend to the wonders of literary form. Switching critical lenses will allow us to not only better understand literature's relationship to history, but to also understand how particular methodologies influence how we make meaning. Indeed, the animation of a text is often a matter what tools are in the kit.
In the second half of the course, we'll attempt to "animate 1919" by collaboratively composing digital media projects related to literature. Here, to "animate 1919" will imply taking an Anglo-American modernist artifact and making it move--imagining literature and history anew through digital work. Projects might include, but are not limited to, an interactive map of Winesburg, Ohio, a hypertext version of one of Marianne Moore's poems, or giving sound to John Dos Passos's "newsreels." These collaborative projects will require both a specific methodology and some close reading of things 1919. What's more, they'll bring to the fore how and why literature matters in 2008, not that you were wondering.
Student learning goals
Demonstrate an awareness of the strategies that writers use in different writing contexts.
Read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of evidence purposefully in order to generate and support writing.
Produce complex, analytic, persuasive arguments that matter in academic contexts.
Develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing.
General method of instruction
Computer-integrated instruction with plenty of in-class workshops
Recommended preparation
There is no text book for the course. All texts are provided via e-reserve.
Class assignments and grading
Short response papers (5 total), major papers (2 total), and a series of blog entries (both in and out of class)
70% of grade -- Final E-Portfolio 30% of grade -- Participation
