Reports and Weblogs
Students in this class will either present a brief (5-7 minutes) oral report to the class or keep an online journal (weblog) of their reading this semester. Both options will involve about the same amount of work, but with the weblog option, you'll be spreading the work out over the entire semester.
You'll sign up for a report or a weblog in class on August 26, 2005.
I. Weblog Option . A weblog (or blog) is a way for you to keep an informal online journal recording your thoughts on the readings. It is your space to write down your thoughts, insights, and opinions about the literature. You can discuss what interests you most about the work we've read, connect the work to something in contemporary culture, analyze a theme or image, write alternative dialogues for the characters, ask questions, and so on.
- You do not need to have any knowledge about creating web pages to choose this option; the beauty of a weblog is that all the technical work is done for you. You simply type in your comments and click on the "publish" button.
- Many free blogging sites are available.which would work well for our
class. Creating an account and setting up your weblog on any of the free
sites will take about five minutes. You should try to choose a site that
allows the creation of an RSS feed, as Blogger does (and as most sites
do). Here are some of the free blogging sites that will work for our purposes:
- Blogger: www.blogger.com. Blogger now has a plugin for Word, which means that if you use Word, you can write your posts in it and then just push a button to have your post published to your blog.
- LiveJournal: www.livejournal.com
- You can also try Mo'time (www.motime.com) or Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com).
- Class members who read your blog and post comments will receive class participation credit for doing so.
Here are the requirements for the weblog option:
1. Write 10 entries of approximately 300 words each. If you choose the weblog option, you'll write at least one entry each week, for a total of ten entries in all. These posts can be long entries (a few paragraphs, or about 300 words per entry) or a series of shorter entries. To allow for exams, holidays, and papers, some weeks have no weblog post due.
2. Post your entry to your weblog by Friday at 6 p.m. You do not need to wait for Friday. You can post at any time during the week, but 6 p.m. on Friday is the due date each week; after that, your post will count for the next week. You can miss a few posts and still receive credit, but your grade would be reduced. Posting all the entries in the last week of class won't be acceptable.
Although your weblog posts aren't due until Fridays at 6, don't wait until the last minute to post your messages. The sites sometimes go down or are offline for maintenance, and you may miss a deadline if you wait until the last minute.
3. Respond to one critical article at some point during the semester. At least once during the semester you'll need to read a critical article and write a post on that. Here are the criteria:
1. The article must be related to the works we are reading this semester.
2.
The critical article should be from a book in the library or from a peer-reviewed journal. You can find these in the library or in databases such as ProQuest, JStor, or Project Muse (http://www.systems.wsu.edu/Griffin/Indexes.htm).
3. You need to indicate when you're writing about the critical article by noting this in the weblog post.
The weblog will be graded primarily on your satisfactory completion of the above criteria (75%), although the quality of your posts (25%) will also be a factor.
| 9-10 posts | A |
| 8 posts | B |
| 7 posts | C |
| 6 posts | D |
| 5 posts | F |
II. Report Option.
In the short space of sixteen weeks, we cannot cover all the topics of interest to the student of this period of American literature. To present information on some of the topics not covered otherwise, students choosing this option will prepare a short short (5-7 minute) oral presentation on one of the topics listed below.
You'll also prepare a one-page "fact sheet" to hand out to the class. This may take the form of an outline, summaries of critical articles, or a synopsis of your argument. You should include at least one critical article or book in preparing your report.
Your presentation may focus on something you wish to work on for your paper. You may also want to work on one of the following:
- Additional information about the social, intellectual, artistic, scientific, philosophical, or historical contexts for the works and authors assigned in class.
- Interpretations of works or aspects of a work not read in class.
- Introductions to authors not specifically covered in the course.
- Discussion of one or more critical works relating to the era, such as David Reynolds' Beneath the American Renaissance or Edwin Cady's The Light of Common Day.
- Background about the social and intellectual connections among certain groups of authors.
The evaluation of your report will be based on the criteria found on the Report Evaluation Form (http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl381/reporteval.htm).
Report Topics and Dates
Note: The dates are approximate.
| September 16 |
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| 1. Women's realism: Alcott (Work, Hospital Sketches, or Little Women) |
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| 2. Women's realism: Rebecca Harding Davis ("Life in the Iron Mills" or Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) |
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| 3. Emily Dickinson |
Allison Lambert | |
| 4. Poetry from Axelrod, Roman, and Travisano's The New Anthology of American Poetry, pp. 469-525 |
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| 5. Contexts for Twain and Harte (race, westward expansion, imperialism, ethnic prejudices) | Andrew Prenger | |
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| October 10 |
1. Sui Sin Far (other stories) |
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| 2. Asian-American immigration and ethnic prejudice |
Nikki Dunbar | |
| 3. Kate Chopin: regionalist or naturalist? (The Awakening) |
Shelley Rust | |
| 4. Abraham Cahan or Anzia Yezierska and immigrant experience |
Tim Roe | |
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| October 28 |
1. Frank Norris and naturalism |
Colin Dole |
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2. Theodore Dreiser |
Benjamin J. Darling |
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3. Crane and journalism (or war or race) |
J. Nicholas Cail |
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4. Race in London's short stories (Northland or South Seas) |
Scott Grose |
| 5. Harold Frederic | Danny Garner | |
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| November 28 |
1. Native American authors |
Michelle Primley |
| 2. "Jim Crow" laws and racial violence |
Scott Powell | |
| 3. Anti-Irish / anti-Catholic prejudice |
Colin Behr | |
| 4. Charles Eastman |
Sara Wike | |
| 5. Mark Twain: later writings |
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| 6. Stephen Crane's English contemporaries (Ford Madox Ford, etc.) | Kyle Farmer | |
| TBA | Sara Clark | |