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.
  • "The Beaver" From Buffon's Natura History
  • Grimm and Grimm. "The Three Spinners"
  • ------. "The Willful Child."
  • Vonnegut, Kurt. "The Shape of Stories." YouTube. Accessed 1 September 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 Broadside Ballad Project, and Old Bailey Online
  • Optional:
    • Audio versions of the play at Librivox
    • BBC Film Version (1983) [Kanopy]
    • Royal Shakespeare Version (2003), starring Patrick Stewart [Kanopy]
      • .
    • Kurosawa's re-imagining of the play in feudal Japan, Throne of Blood (1957) [Kanopy]
    • BBC modernization of the play starring James McAvoy. "Macbeth" Shakespeare Retold. BBC. [YouTube]

  Thursday, September 13

  • Shakespeare. Macbeth IV-V

  Mini Essay 2 of 5 

  Due Saturday, September 15: Submit Your Essay Here

  Prompt

  Select a text or texts we have read so far in the class to run through Voyant . Write a 500-1000 word analysis of what you observe.

  Instructions

  1. Select your text(s)
     • This folder contains some of our reading as plain text files (txt), which are easier to upload into Voyant.
  2. Upload it/them to Voyant
     • If you are looking at more than one text, you may want to view them separately before combining them
  3. Experiment with the program. Look at different views and options.
  4. Write 500-1000 words analyzing what you noticed
     • For example, did anything surprise you or meet your expectations?
     • Were there visualizations that made sense or didn't
  5. Important: Most of all, try to tie your analysis to one or more of the concepts we have covered so far
     • At this point in the semester, this would mainly be Stevens, but the Digitial Humanities readings could also be useful for this
  6. Also Important: In your mini-paper, include a link to your visualization as well as an image.
  Stuck? Here are some possible ways to approach this:
  • Compare a combination of Hurston, Baldwin, Hughes, and/or DuBois using Voyant. What similarities or differences stand out to you? What is your analysis (aka argument, hypothesis, thesis) about this?
    • The posts from CultureFront may be useful for such an approach
  • Compare different versions of Cinderella
  • Examine a text referenced in Stevens, such as Longinus. What do you notice about its diction, etc?
  • Run all of Macbeth through Voyant. See if you can tie your analysis to what you plan to look at in Essay 1
  • Run some or all of the character Lady Macbeth's soliloquies through Voyant. Do you notice any changes or patterns?
  • Compare a speech by Macbeth with one by Lady Macbeth
  • Focus on just one passage from Macbeth.
  • Compare Macbeth to trends in all of Shakespeare plays or just 1-2 others

  Later on Thursday night, I will make and post screencasts walking you through some options on Voyant. If you have a text that you want to analyze but are having trouble making it go through Voyant, email me but if time is running short, keep moving forward: you can always analyze what you think went amiss.
  
  If you cannot see your comments on Mini-Paper 1, let me know by Tuesday. Everyone who turned in a Mini-Paper last week did fine. This assignment is also ungraded and meant to prepare for Essay 1. I am going to fiddle with DropBox to see if I can make sure the comment shows up for you (it is just one comment this time, but there will be more for Essay 1).

  More details will be posted on Essay 1, but basically, you are going to analyze a text from the class, using a concept, theory and/or framework we have covered so far. Part of these first three written assignments involves you sorting through your own inclinations before we address 20th and 21st-century theories.

  Stay safe this weekend

  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 essay about it that focuses on one or two of the theoretical/critical questions raised in the course so far.

1. Notes!