Week 2 intro Gentles, Welcome to week 2 of Fight the Power. There are several of you who have not yet completed the Attendance Verification quiz. You know how this works: if you don't do this by the deadline, the University will bounce you from the class. So if you haven't completed that quiz, please do so today. I don't know when the deadline is for getting that done, but I do know that if you get dropped from this class, there's nothing I can do to get you back into it. Our work for this week is oddly and sadly timely. Voltare wrote Candide in response to the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. In that quake, around 100,000 people died and 85% of the buildings in Lisbon were destroyed. Given the one-two punch of an earthquake in Haiti this weekend killing over 3,000 people and a tropical storm bearing down on the hundreds of thousands whose houses were destroyed in the quake, Voltaire would have recognized this situation. In the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, many public intellectuals tried to explain it away as a good thing, in fact, as the best thing that could have happened, because it fit perfectly into some grand divine plan. Voltaire couldn't believe that people would characterize such a huge natural disaster, with so many people dead, as a good thing. So he wrote this story about a naive young man with very little understanding of the world, who is suddenly thrust into that big wide world, and is totally unprepared for it. Candide is supposed to be a comedy, but the humor is very dark. Characters are killed in gruesome ways (and then pop up again a couple of chapters later), disease is rampant, hypocrisy is everywhere, and this naive teen is taken advantage of at almost every turn. We'll spend the whole week on this work, with two modules addressing Candide. I've tried to set up this course so that when we have a longer work, (this one, Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life . . . , and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman) we have a whole week to get through the modules concerning it. Let me know if you have any questions. Dr. P Gentles, Welcome to week 2 of Cultures Clashing. There are several of you who have not yet completed the Attendance Verification quiz. You know how this works: if you don't do this by the deadline, the University will bounce you from the class. So if you haven't completed that quiz, please do so today. I don't know when the deadline is for getting that done, but I do know that if you get dropped from this class, there's nothing I can do to get you back into it. Our work for this week is oddly and sadly timely. Voltare wrote Candide in response to the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. In that quake, around 100,000 people died and 85% of the buildings in Lisbon were destroyed. Given the one-two punch of an earthquake in Haiti this weekend killing over 3,000 people and a tropical storm bearing down on the hundreds of thousands whose houses were destroyed in the quake, Voltaire would have recognized this situation. In the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, many public intellectuals tried to explain it away as a good thing, in fact, as the best thing that could have happened, because it fit perfectly into some grand divine plan. Voltaire couldn't believe that people would characterize such a huge natural disaster, with so many people dead, as a good thing. So he wrote this story about a naive young man with very little understanding of the world, who is suddenly thrust into that big wide world, and is totally unprepared for it. Candide is supposed to be a comedy, but the humor is very dark. Characters are killed in gruesome ways (and then pop up again a couple of chapters later), disease is rampant, hypocrisy is everywhere, and this naive teen is taken advantage of at almost every turn. We'll spend the whole week on this work, with two modules addressing Candide. I've tried to set up this course so that when we have a longer work, (this one, Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life . . . , and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman) we have a whole week to get through the modules concerning it. Let me know if you have any questions. Dr. P Gentles, Here we go with week 3 of Fight the Power. I have to admit, this is a pretty slight week, in terms of your workload. We're moving away from Europe to Japan, and looking at a text from a writer who died the year before Voltaire was born. So we're jumping back in time and in tradition. The one thing that connects Ihara Saikaku, the author of Life of a Sensuous Woman, and Voltaire is that they both pushed their cultures forward. Voltaire was the essence of the Enlightenment in Europe, fighting against all the institutions that might exercise power against the common people. Saikaku rode the nexus of a newly-risen middle class, a fully-developed publishing industry, and the human fascination for seeing ourselves reflected in our art to create a new form of literature in Japan, the books of the "floating world." His focus on the middle class for his characters, combined with his frankness about human sexuality -- all while still appeasing the Buddhist monks who acted as state censors -- helped create a new, more secular, Japanese society. Be sure to check out the material on Yoshiwara, the Floating World, to see just how radical Saikaku's work was for the time. As you read these selections from Life of a Sensuous Woman, try to keep in mind the "frame narrative." Think of the text we're looking at as a painting. The stories that the old woman tells about her life are the main subject, the painting itself. But that painting is in a frame, which essentially presents the painting to us and affects how we see the painting. The old woman is telling her stories to two young men, guys who seem to have completely different understandings of the purpose of human existence and the value of human relationships. Think about how each of them would understand what the old woman is telling them, and then think about where you might fit on the spectrum of values that these men represent between themselves. We're doing just these selections this week, as a bit of a lull before we come back to Europe and the next big movement to push back against the tradition that existed before it, Romanticism. Let me know if you have any questions. Dr. P Gentles, Here we go with week 3 of Cultures Clashing. I have to admit, this is a pretty slight week, in terms of your workload. We're moving away from Europe to Japan, and looking at a text from a writer who died the year before Voltaire was born. So we're jumping back in time and in tradition. The one thing that connects Ihara Saikaku, the author of Life of a Sensuous Woman, and Voltaire is that they both pushed their cultures forward. Voltaire was the essence of the Enlightenment in Europe, fighting against all the institutions that might exercise power against the common people. Saikaku rode the nexus of a newly-risen middle class, a fully-developed publishing industry, and the human fascination for seeing ourselves reflected in our art to create a new form of literature in Japan, the books of the "floating world." His focus on the middle class for his characters, combined with his frankness about human sexuality -- all while still appeasing the Buddhist monks who acted as state censors -- helped create a new, more secular, Japanese society. Be sure to check out the material on Yoshiwara, the Floating World, to see just how radical Saikaku's work was for the time. As you read these selections from Life of a Sensuous Woman, try to keep in mind the "frame narrative." Think of the text we're looking at as a painting. The stories that the old woman tells about her life are the main subject, the painting itself. But that painting is in a frame, which essentially presents the painting to us and affects how we see the painting. The old woman is telling her stories to two young men, guys who seem to have completely different understandings of the purpose of human existence and the value of human relationships. Think about how each of them would understand what the old woman is telling them, and then think about where you might fit on the spectrum of values that these men represent between themselves. We're doing just these selections this week, as a bit of a lull before we come back to Europe and the next big movement to push back against the tradition that existed before it, Romanticism. Let me know if you have any questions. Dr. P Gentles, We'll we've knocked out 1/5 of the semester, and today we begin Week #4. We move into a new intellectual period, Romanticism, which reacted strongly against the prevailing Enlightenment focus on rationality and order. It wasn't just the classic fight between two different generations; the Romantics had a completely different understanding of humanity's place in the universe. While they thought themselves concerned with their own self-fulfillment, their critics usually saw them as self-indulgent. It's a struggle that has gone on for much longer than just the past couple of centuries, walking that fine line of being faithful to your own truths while also accommodating the needs of others. Be sure to check out the Intro to Romanticism web page; it'll be the bedrock for most of your work in this period. You've got two modules and their quizzes due this week. The first is an introduction to this movement, and the second is on William Blake, an English poet who has one foot in the old Enlightenment, and one foot in the new Romanticism. The poems you'll be looking at were meant to be companion pieces. He wrote one volume, Songs of Innocence, that contained the first of each of these pairs of poems. Five years later he wrote a longer volume, Songs of Innocence and Of Experience, which included the response poem, or the second of each pair here. Remember as you read them that the world they are describing has not changed. What has changed is the perspective of the speaker, as the speaker begins to understand how the world really works. You've also got your first primary discussion post due this week. Remember those discussion questions at the end of each module? Well, take just one of them (one question, not one module), and respond to it in about 500 words. Obviously, some questions lend themselves more easily to an extended answer, but you're free to address any question from any of the first four modules. Post your response to the appropriate forum. After you post, you'll be able to see the other responses, which you'll need to do in order to respond to two of them next week. Check the syllabus for the discussion post rubric. One word of advice: do not compose into the text box in Folio. Rather, do as I'm doing right now, and write your response in an external editor (I use Notepad++ for emails), then copy and paste that response into the textbox in Folio. Believe me, when you see other students lose hours of work to some external glitch in Folio or on campus, you'll be glad you wrote your material independent of the Folio platform. OK, have a good week. Dr. P Gentles, I hope you're reading this on Tuesday morning, and not on Monday evening, because that would be a very unrelaxing way to close your long weekend and day off. This is a short week, and the readings reflect that. We're looking at two poets who were seriously opposed to the culture that surrounded them. John Keats, even though he died at 25, produced more good poetry in six or seven years than most poets do over the span of decades. In just one summer, he wrote three of the most important poems in English. Any serious list of the top 50 or 100 poems in English would have to include at least six and as many as ten of his poems. He was the quintessential Romantic, and, for my money, better than all the rest of them. On the other side of the Atlantic was Walt Whitman, who was experimenting with the form of poetry, and expanding the range of what poetry could look and sound like. He was once fired from a government job because his boss read some of his poetry and considered it pornographic. I don't think we'd go that far today, but his open expressions of sexual desire, and his veiled and not-so-veiled references to his own sexuality, were pretty racy for the 19th century. He also fought hard for the disenfranchised. He gave up one of the premiere newspaper jobs of the time, at the New Orleans Crescent, because it was the first time he saw the slave trade up close. When his angry editorials against it didn't really find an audience in a place like New Orleans -- it had the largest slave market in the US -- he left after just three months. In American literature, I think there are Emily Dickinson people, and there are Walt Whitman people. Emily Dickinson wrote tight, controlled, measured verse. Entire books -- literally, there's more than one of them -- have been written about her use of the dash as a form of punctuation. Some people like that. But Uncle Walt, his poetry just rolls all over the page. He's not bound by the traditions that came before him, and he's not bound by the constraints of the poetic line. Some of it is unsuccessful, but the overwhelming majority of it is bold and daring, as he fights to present himself, and, ultimately, to present each of us to ourselves. You've got your two secondary posts to the first discussion forum due this week. Check the directions and the rubric in the syllabus in order to maximize your potential to earn some easy points. Have a good, short, week. Dr. P Gentles, We're now into week six of the semester, and we turn to Frederick Douglass and one version of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. As with all of our longer works, we'll spend the whole week on this one text. The two modules on Douglass walk you through the Narrative, and place it in the context of other slave narratives and African American literature in general. Perhaps the most helpful piece of information about this text is the pdf file on my web site, found here: https://jpellegrino.com/images/douglass-diagram.pdf. It's the first image on the Douglass images page (a link to it is at the bottom of the Douglass background/bio page). You can click on the image to get a larger version and to download the pdf. It addresses the three big narrative embols that Douglass uses to ground his text, and how each of them do things we don't expect them to do. It also focuses on how this text, and how Douglass himself, changes from beginning to end. While it might be difficult to think of Douglass in the same way that we think of, say, Keats, Douglass' concentration on his own feelings, and his desire to evoke feelings of pathos within you, the reader, place him firmly in the Romantic camp. He'll let others try to logically or ethically prove that slavery is inherently evil; he's trying to elicit an emotional response, and move you in that way. Other than these two modules, you don't have any other work due this week. At the end of next week you'll have your second discussion post due. In two weeks we have our first exam, and in three weeks your first paper is due. So enjoy the leisurely pace of this week, because you'll be a bit busier for the next few weeks. Have a good week, Dr. P Gentles, Depending on how you feel about exams, this week is either pretty light, or will fill you with anxiety. For the modules, you'll be spending some time with another liminal writer, one who straddles both the Romantic and the Modernist worlds. William Butler Yeats was considered "the last Romantic" when he was writing his early poetry, but his later work is filled with Modernist pessimism (see especially "The Second Coming"). Remember, there are TWO podcasts concerning Yeats, so be sure to listen to both of them. In writing, your secondary responses to the second discussion forum are due. Those are the ones where you respond to another student's primary response to a discussion question. At the end of this week, on Friday, you'll also have your first exam. I'll explain below when it will be available and how you will access it here. Please, PLEASE, read this until you understand it, then mark this on your calendar. After you've done that, mark it again on another calendar. I WILL NOT grant access to the exam after the exam period has closed, so don't post me on Saturday saying that you forgot, or you were confused about when the exam was available. When do I take the exam? The exam will be available for the 24-hour period of Friday, October 1. You will be able to access it from midnight Friday -- the time when Thursday becomes Friday -- to 11:59:59 Friday -- one second before the time when Friday becomes Saturday. In military time, the exam is available from 0000 Friday to 2359 Friday. The exam is not available on Thursday. And it most certainly is not available on Saturday. Let me repeat that again, for those who may have misunderstood it: the exam is available on Friday, not on Saturday. You may think I am being overly dramatic by repeating myself so many times. But I can practically guarantee that a student will get in touch with me next weekend to tell me that they thought the exam was on Saturday because they misunderstood what was in the syllabus, what was in the schedule, and what I wrote to them about it. So I'm going way overboard in an attempt to circumvent that. If you understand the exam is on Friday and you take it then, you can roll your eyes at my over-explaining here. But if you miss the exam on Friday, you'll just prove that I need to add even more to my explanations. How do I access the exam? The exam is in the "Quizzes" section of Folio. It should be at the end of the list of quizzes. Once you open the exam, you'll have 75 minutes to answer 33 multiple-choice questions. But that 75 minutes is superseded by the availability above. That is, if you open the exam at 11:30 pm on Friday, you will have left yourself just half an hour to complete it. When I gave versions of this exam in a ftf classroom, some people were done in 20 minutes, and everyone was always done in less than an hour. My take on it is that if you're running up against the time limit, you're most certainly overthinking it. There's nothing in this exam that is designed to trip you up. What should I expect on the exam? The exam covers the first half of the course, including Yeats. So you should most definitely complete the material on Yeats before you take the exam. There are some questions that ask you to identify the name of a particular work and its author (those should be easy, since you can obviously access your copy of the texts). Some questions will address the background material on big movements (the Enlightenment, 17th-century Japan, and Romanticism). Some questions will address the background material on particular authors and texts. And some questions will ask about particular themes, symbols, plot points, etc. in the text themselves. Again, a lot of this is already available to you, on my web pages and in my notes in the works themselves. But some of these questions will refer to material I specifically went through in the podcasts, so I'd suggest the review the notes you took when you listened to them. When’s that exam again? Friday. Not Thursday. Not Saturday. Friday. Good luck to all of you on the exam.  Looking ahead, you might want to check out the syllabus for the prompt for the first paper, which is due on October 8. Dr. P ENGL 2100 - EXAM 1 Gentles, I know that our syllabus says that we're scheduled for an exam on October 5, but I'd like to changes that date to October 7. I'm also at a bit of a loss about the formatting of it, and I'll tell you why. There are 115 students in the class, but the most we've ever had in class has been 92 students. This leads me to believe that many of you aren't very good in the mornings. So what I'd like to do is the following: The exam will be on Folio; you get to it through Assessments > Quizzes > Exam 1 The exam will be available for a 24-hour period, beginning at 11:59 pm on Wednesday, and will close at 12:01 am on Friday. So you can choose any time on Thursday to take the exam. Once you open the exam, you'll have 75 minutes to complete it. I expect that you will have your notes and the texts themselves available to you when you take the exam. The exam itself is 33 multiple-choice questions, covering the introductory material for the course, Understanding Comics, The Complete Maus, and the first half of The Handmaid's Tale. The questions are similar in type and difficulty to those you've seen in Tophat. If you have any questions, we can discuss them in class tomorrow. Dr. P WEEK 9 Gentles, This week we move into the Modernist period, which covers essentially the 20th century. The readings we'll be looking at from here on out deal with serious social and personal issues. They reflect a new understanding of the world, one informed by advances in science, a growing understanding of the place of humanity in the universe, and the horrors inflicted on powerless people by those with power and the will to use it. We start with a module introducing the period, and then move on to one of the seminal figures of the century, T. S. Eliot. We're reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem that can be argued to have introduced modernism itself in its third line. Just eight years after this poem was published Eliot wrote what is considered to be the most important poem of the century, "The Waste Land." Please make sure you spend some time with this poem on the website. The notes there are essential for your understanding of it. Click on anything that's underlined for a pop-up with a gloss, translation, or explanation of the text. Lines that have a clock icon after them contain an image that has to do with time. Lines with a muted microphone after them contain an image dealing with either miscommunication or the impossibility of communication. And lines with a human form after them contain an image that breaks a body down into smaller parts -- what we call synecdoche. You've also got your first paper due this week, in Dropbox #1. Please read the prompt in the syllabus (and repeated in the dropbox). I know that the prompt is long, but I want to make sure you understand what the prompt is asking you to do. I give you a number of topics you could address, and even lay out what you should be doing in each paragraph. But please read the note to the examples, so that you don't end up writing about the wrong thing. Again, let me know if you have any questions. Dr. P WEEK 12 Gentles, I was told last week that some of my emails to multiple people haven't been making it through google's filters, so I apologize if you haven't received them. Those of you that did know that we've knee-deep in what we'd call "modern" writers (as opposed to modernist writers), even though many of them were writing over 70 years ago. So for those who didn’t get those posts, let me quickly recap the last two weeks before moving on to look at what we’re dealing with this week. With Modernism, we see a type of writing that truly begins to reflect the world around it. The changes actually began almost half a century earlier, in the middle of the 19th century, as the old “certainties” — especially the concepts behind institutional religion — were being chipped away by discoveries in science. So we see things like scientific methodologies applied to the Bible, both in its language and its archeology. New discoveries in geology and astronomy disproved long-held beliefs. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, and the growing popularity of Utilitarianism as a philosophy were all stones thrown at a fragile glass house. So by the late 19th century, it felt like the wheels were coming off of society in general. Political upheavals in Europe, more new scientific discoveries – and indeed the creation of a whole new field, psychology, just strengthened the feeling that things were spinning out of control. What did all those old institutions (national governments, institutional religion and individual faith, the workplace, etc.) have to offer a world where the very idea of an “objective” reality couldn’t be taken seriously? And WWI was just the icing on the cake. Peoples' understandings of what gave meaning to their lives were shaken by the terror, barbarity, and inhumanity that we saw we were capable of. The ties that used to bind society together were unraveling, leaving us all, individually, alone. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Akhmatova’s “Requiem” both deal with the fragmentation, the individual subjective experience, and the sense of loss that pervaded society at the time of their composition. Both are heartbreaking in their own ways. And in many ways, the Négritude movement was both an obvious outcome of this trend, and a great response to it. As Europeans saw themselves as more and more isolated, non-Europeans began to question why they unthinkingly supported European values, when they had values of their own. Négritude was born as a response to Europe’s inhuman colonization, subjugation, and use of Africa, but instead of just crying over previous histories, it offered an alternative view of the world, one that wasn’t Eurocentric, but specific to Africa (which is, in itself, a bit of a problem, since Africa itself contains so many cultures and histories). Philosophically, the only response you can have to such a world, where belief in such a thing as “absolute” truths is just a form of lying to yourself, is to champion a new perspective. So what Négritude did for Africa, Existentialism did for each individual. It can all be summed up in the overarching concept that sits behind it: “Existence precedes essence.” Ask yourself, is there such a thing as “human nature” that can remain consistent, no matter what? You'll see that the answer is "no." Are there moral guidelines that can apply in all situations, and at all times? Again, "no." So, as individuals, we have to step up and create our own values, then act on those values, no matter what others may think or do. Our readings for this week, short stories by Borowski and Marquez, explore Existential ideas at the social and the individual levels. So be sure to go through the Intro to Existentialism web page; it has a lot of background information you’ll need. And since you’re working through three modules, you don’t have any writing due this week. Next week is lighter on the reading, but you’ll have your primary post for our third discussion forum due on that Friday. Again, my apologies to those of you who didn’t get my earlier emails. The problem arose when I sent out a call for papers for a conference I administer to over 700 email addresses at once. Google saw it as a violation of their terms of service, and so restricted my ability to send emails to groups of people. When I found out, I appealed to their user ombudsman, who looked over what I’ve been sending and restored those privileges. Dr. P Gentles, Since this is the home stretch, and the holidays are almost upon us, I’m offering you an unexpected gift, which, to my mind, is the best kind of gift. There are two parts to it: 1. Your second paper for this class is now an optional assignment for you. If you are satisfied with your score on the first paper, you can elect to have that score count doubly for you (as the score for your first and second papers). If you would like another shot at the same prompt, as applied to different texts, you can write the second paper. 2. If you choose to write the second paper, I’ve extended the deadline until this Sunday, November 21, at midnight. The way you elect to have the score for your first paper count doubly is just not to submit a second paper by midnight on Sunday. So when I begin to look at these papers next week, if there’s not one in the dropbox for you I’ll know that you chose not to write the second paper. Again, just to be sure that you’re clear on this: your second paper is optional. You can choose to have the score for your first paper count for 30% of your final grade, not just 15%. If you choose to write the second paper, you have until midnight on Sunday to turn it in. If you choose not to write the paper, you don’t have to do anything. This week we’re walking through the one author I hate giving short shrift to, Seamus Heaney. I won’t bore you with stories about the man, but believe me, his poetry is moving, timeless, and universal. When he was alive he was the most popular poet in the world, with literal groupies who would track his live readings and attend them like some group following Phish or the Grateful Dead. They were known in the media as “Heaneyboppers.” I’ll be in touch at the beginning of the week after Thanksgiving to go through the protocol for the final exam, but if you remember the midterm, this will be given in the same format and available for the same 24-hour window, on December 3. Gentles, I've been in touch with Turnitin's support people about not being able to see the marks and grades on your papers. Usually, this is something that just affects students, but this time I can't see them either. They've been trying to restore the grading overlay from their backups, but haven't been successful so far. I hope they'll be able to do it, but out of an abundance of caution, I'm going to rewrite my terminal comments and put your grade in the native scoring area in Folio. Since I'm having to redo all of these from scratch, dor more than one class, it will probably take me most of the day today to complete them. Because you've been delayed in this, I'm extending the deadline for your second paper until next Sunday, November 28, at midnight. That paper is still optional, but it would be unfair of me to cramp the time you have to complete it when you still can't see your grades on the first paper. Once I complete your papers, I'll send you another email telling you that they're available for you. I apologize for this; Turnitin has been having some handshake problems with Folio this year, and it's been causing a lot of scrambling for both you and me. In any case, I hope you enjoy your break week. When we come back we've got just one more module, and then the final exam. I'll post more about the exam near the end of the break. Dr. P Gentles, I've got just one final apology and one final reminder for ENGL 2112: Fight the Power. First, the apology: Before our break, I noticed I was getting the "there's been unusual activity on your account, so prove you're not a robot" page from google more frequently than I did in the past. Pretty soon I was getting it every time I tried to search for anything. I thought it was just an annoyance, but then google shut me out of my account. Our IT people here said everything was fine on their end, so I should deal with google. I sent their support team a message from another email account, but they said they couldn't address the account with the problem if I was contacting them from another account. I explained to them that I obviously could not contact them from the account with the problem, because the problem was that I couldn't access that account. I didn't hear back from them about that one, but obviously, they were working on it. Then, five days later, my access was restored, with no explanation from their support team. When I opened up my email, I had over 500 unread posts. I've spent the past three days slogging through them when I wasn't teaching or grading, and I'm currently down to a little over 150 unread. So if you posted me recently, I apologize for not getting back to you. If I come upon an email from you and the matter is still timely, I'll respond. Now, the reminder: Your second exam will be available for you to take beginning at 12:00 PM tonight (December 2) and continuing until 12:00 PM tomorrow (December 3). You can open the exam at any time during that 24-hour period, and when you do, you'll have two hours to complete it. The format is exactly the same as the first exam, with 33 multiple-choice questions. The average time you all took to complete the first exam was about 40 minutes, and the class average on that exam was an 86, so you should be fine on this one as well. Good luck, Dr. P