Here is the list of people’s stubs, available for comments on Friday:
- Beth: Hal and Mario’s relationship
- Danielle: Stasis
- Louis: Suicide
- Randy: Marijuana
- Sean: Fears and phobias
- Scott: AA
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Here is the list of people’s stubs, available for comments on Friday:
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Your final portfolio should include the following items:
Please complete the “stub” portion of your portfolio first (so that others may comment), no later than Friday, 8/21 @ 5 p.m. All other portions of your portfolio are due no later than Sunday, 8/23 @ noon.
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Your final piece of writing for this short course is designed to help you surface and articulate the significance of your experiences and insights in this class. The point of a reflective essay of this nature is to describe and analyze your experiences so as to reach new understandings of yourself in relation to the text, your peers, the world.
To that end, please describe at least three specific moments, experiences, scenes, quotes, etc. that have had a major impact on your development as a reader/writer/thinker/literary critic/English student/”word nerd”.* For each
In essence, you’re close reading your own experiences here to locate the important themes that have arisen in the last three weeks.
Once you have described and analyzed your experiences, write a short introduction and conclusion that track the themes that emerged from your reflection. What terms, concepts, and phrases provide evidence of the complex ways that your thinking/being has progressed and shifted over the course of your time?
Please bring a draft of this essay (with at least two examples and their analyses) with you, in digital form, to class on Wednesday. The final draft is due with your portfolio on Friday, and may either appear on your blog or you may send a copy to me via email.
Questions you might consider as you move toward choosing particular moments/experiences to work with:
*You don’t have to address all of these categories. Pick and choose the one/ones most relevant to you and your experiences over the past three weeks.
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Given our conversation about the role of endnotes, I thought you might like a taste of that same conversation from Infinite Summer. You can find the entire call and response here, and below is a small taste of Matt Baldwin’s take, which sets the tone for the rest:
I have gone back and forth on the issue about two dozen times in the last month, and right now I’m learning away from “essential literary device” and toward “gratuitous pain in the ass”. Plus I just don’t buy any of the rationales I’ve heard for them: that they simulate the game of tennis, that they simulate the fractured way we’d be receiving information in Wallace’s imagined future, that they are there to constantly remind you that you are reading a book, etc. I’d be more inclined to believe these theories Infinite Jest was the only thing Wallace had written that included them. But the more you read his other works, the more it becomes obvious that Wallace couldn’t even sign a credit card slip without bolting on an addendum. The dude loved endnotes–I’m pretty sure that’s the only real reason they are there.
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CUNY (or at least a couple of particularly intrepid graduate students at CUNY) are hosting a one-day conference on Wallace and his work. Read the entire call for papers here, but a few highlights are as follows:
We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Wallace’s work. Some suggested directions:
1) Reconsideration of Wallace’s Oeuvre: Papers examining Wallace’s neglected early works Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair; new perspectives on Infinite Jest; the direction of Wallace’s later work.2) Wallace’s Literary Context: The reception of Wallace’s work and the way his image has been shaped by his fans, the media, and the academy; examinations of Wallace’s relation to his literary forebears, both 20th century and earlier; Wallace outside the bounds of “postmodernism”; Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature.
3) Theorizing Wallace: Wallace’s treatment of language and formal or figurative qualities in Wallace’s writing; applications of narrative theory to Wallace’s texts or consideration of his narrative innovations; Wallace’s analytic, phenomenological, or existential contexts; treatment of the self and subjectivity; relation to ethics/values/morality; feminism and gender issues.
4) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wallace: The use of math, logic, philosophy, science, technology, politics, sociology, psychology, law, etc. in Wallace’s work; pedagogical issues related to Wallace’s work.
The deadline for 250-word proposals is this coming Friday, 8/15.
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Below is our working list of criteria for our own wiki entries:
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Just a quick heads up: we’ve been very generously given a brief shout-out from the good people at infinite summer. You can see the link here. No pressure or anything. Just say smart things. 🙂
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