Note Bene

During the semester, additional events and activities will be incorporated into the schedule. Some will be required and others optional. Keep checking this site and the course Announcements. 

Week One

Tuesday, August 21

• In-Class Reading, Discussion, Activities

Thursday, August 23

• Baldwin. "How I Learned to Stop Hating Shakespeare"
• DuBois. “Criteria for Negro Art”
• Eliot. "Tradition and Individual Talent" (look through the pdf to find this essay).
• Hughes. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
• Hurston. "What White Publishers Won't Print" 

Week Two

Tuesday, August 28

• Culler. Chapter 1 
• Stevens. Chapters 1-2 and Glossary 
  • lookup: allegory, canon, mimesis, Neo-Platonism, and any other term you find useful
    • You should purchase your copy of Stevens for the rest of the course.
• Plato. Excerpt from The Republic: “Allegory of the Cave”

Thursday, August 30

• Earhart. "Can Information be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon"
• Gallon. "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities"
• McPherson. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation"
• Rambsy and Rambsy. Cultural Front. 
   
  • Read at least one post to read in each at each of these links: 
    • metacanon
    • mappingDC
    • Baldwin
    • Hurston
  • Explore the sites metacanon.org and vidaweb.org

Week Three

Tuesday, September 4

Notes for prioritizing the reading (I expect you to read it all, but here's some help focusing your time).
 

1. Stevens. Chapter 3-4 
2. Excerpts from  Decameron (Read this brief biography of Boccaccio and ONE tales [aka "novels] from the First Day), Heptameron (read the intro on the website and ONE of the tales from the First Day), Canterbury Tales, and various Fairy Tales (Choose a tale and read the variations - if the tale you picked only has one version, please choose another).
3. Required Viewing:
   • Choose ONE of the following (Of course, you can watch both):
     • Kaur, Valarie. Divided We Fall: America in the Aftermath Director. Sharat Raju.(2008)

       Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath from Sharat Raju on Vimeo.

     • Omori, Emiko. Rabbit in the Moon (1999)[You need your HU Library account to log into Kanopy]
       
   • In addition to how they fit into the information in Stevens, how do the primary texts today fit into imagined categories (i.e., stereotypes, archetypes, tropes, etc.,). This discussion helps set up our later discussion of Structuralism and Narratology.
4. Excerpts from eighteenth-century dictionaries
   • British Library. "Dictionaries and Meanings"(Please browse the examples of dictionaries: remember that for each example there are further links to explore).
   • Lexicons of Early Modern English (Explore the site; be prepared to share your observations).
   • Simpson, John. The First Dictionaries.. OED Blog. Oxford English Dictionary. (16 August 2012). Accessed 20 August 2018.

• Optional:
  • Podcast on The Encyclopédie. In Our Time. BBC4 (26 October 2006). Accessed 20 August 2018.

Thursday, September 5

• Stevens. Chapter 5
• Nietzsche. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”
• Poe. "The Man of the Crowd"
• ---. "The Raven"
• VictoriaWeb. “Aesthetes, Decadents, Symbolists.” 18 May 2008 (Accessed 15 August 2018)

Mini Essay 1 of 5 

Due Saturday, September 6

Prompt: Free Write on Course Material so far. Submit your Mini-Essay here.

• This should be approximately 500-1000 words.

Week Four

Tuesday, September 11

• Shakespeare. Macbeth  I-III
• Introductory video on Voyant, Early English Ballad Project, and Old Bailey Online
• Optional:
  • Audio versions of the play at Librivox
  • BBC Film Version (1983) [Kanopy]
  • Royal Shakespeare Version (2003) [Kanopy]
    • This one has Patrick Stewart (if that is of interest to any of you).
  • Kurosawa's re-imagining of the play in feudal Japan, Throne of Blood (1957) [Kanopy]

Thursday, September 13

• Shakespeare. Macbeth IV-V

Mini Essay 2 of 5 

Due Saturday, September 15: Submit Your Essay Here

Prompt: Run one or more of the following texts (TBA - plain text files will be provided) through Voyant. Write down your observations and try to form a possible thesis/hypothesis about what you have observed. Tying this to the critical/theoretical readings so far is encouraged.

• This should be approximately 500-1000 words.
• Include a link to your Voyant visualizations and at least one image you created.

Week Five

Tuesday, September 18

• Eliot. “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• ---. The Wasteland
• Optional
  • Audio for Prufrock (LibriVox)
  • Recording of Eliot reading Prufrock (YouTube)
  • Podcast: "The Wasteland and Modernity" In Our Time. BBC 4 (26 February 2009)
  • Ford, Mark. "Ezra Pound and the drafts of The Waste Land" British Library Website. 13 December 2016
  • Audio for Wasteland (LibriVox)
  • Kipling's "The Love-song of Har-Dyal" and Background Notes

Thursday, September 20

• "T.S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism"
• Optional:
  • Kingsbury. “Pride and Prejudice: The thorny legacy of Vanderbilt’s Fugitives and Agrarians"
    • NB: Be aware of how this narrative is constructed, what is emphasized, de-emphasized, left out.
  • Morrison. “Eliot, the Agrarians, and the Political Subtext of New Critical Formalism ”
    • NB: Be aware that this is from a volume of essays trying to "rescue" New Criticism from its associations with racism.
• We will also workshop Essay 1, so bring what you have.

Essay 1

Due Saturday, September 22: Submit Your Essay Here

Prompts: Choose one of the readings from the course. Create an analytical article about it that focuses on one or two of the theoretical/critical questions raised in the course so far.

1. Notes!