Literature: January 2004 Archive Page

The term 'flash fiction' can be used to describe several genres or modes of writing. Such writing can include traditional or mainstream short-short stories as well as various other types such as American haibun, ghost stories, monologues, epistles, mysteries, myths, tall tales, fables, anti-fables, parables, romance, fairy tales, horror, suspense, science fiction, prose poetry, and more. It can also embrace several "isms" such as magical realism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, irrealism, and postmodernism. Charles Baxter notes that these short-short stories occupy many thresholds--"they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd." --Pamelyn Casto --Dazzled by Flash Fiction (Flashes on the Meridian)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

I'm Exhausted... Thank You, Students!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Thursday is a marathon day for me... class at 11, 2, and a 2 1/2 hour marathon at 6pm. My first class is "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," during which I asked the students to work in groups to come up with sample thesis statements. Ordinarily pretty dry stuff, but the subject matter was the myth of the American family, and I and my RTA Michelle Fairbaugh tried to get them to look beyond a surface-level critique of family ideals of the 50s. I pushed a little harder than I have in the past, in my effort to get students to research (and understand) opposing views rather than simply think of a research paper as an exercise in finding support for what you already believe. Of course, because I pushed, that meant some students pushed back -- and I thought the result was very productive.

Even before Intro to Literary Studies met, I saw a flood of postings on NMJ responding to the "Flash Fiction" exercises that I asked them to do. We didn't have any time to talk about flash fiction in class, because the discussion on Bernice Bobs Her Hair simply wouldn't end. I'll let Tiffany Brattina describe it for you. Since some students prefer a more contemplative environment, I'll have to find a way to vary the class structure and make the quiet ones feel like their contributions are valid... but I personally prefer a lively classroom with multiple conversations going on at once. I'd like to keep that energy!

While my evening lit class wasn't all that lively when it came to discussing e.e. cummings (we had one of those horrid three-minute-pauses-that-seem-to-last-for-an-hour when nobody in the class wanted to speak), they may have been tuckered out by the good discussions we had on "A Jury of Her Peers" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (see Melissa Whiteman's blog about poetry reading as a game. This is the first time I've tried a blank slate/new critical approach to teaching poetry, but it seems appropriate for a survey course that is mostly being taken as an area requirement... I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.)

Yesterday we had some excellent presentations on Chaucer in my Advanced Studies in English: Media Aesthetics course. I had actually been dreading the Chaucer days because I thought the discussion would be like pulling teeth, but these advanced English majors are an impressive bunch.

So... I'm exhausted! I'll probably update this with links to more student blogs, but for now, I'm all tuckered out to smithereens.

And so to bed...

Update, 30 Jan:

Some students who posted their responses to reading and/or writing "fifty word fiction" (found via a search for "fiction"): Diana Geleskie, Amy Blake, Gina Burgese, Amanda Cochran, Johanna Dreyfss, Lori Rupert, Stephan Puff, Karissa Kilgore, Tammy Moon, Jason Pugh, Tiffany Brattina, Paul Crossman.

(I should note that I encouraged them -- but didn't require them -- to post their fiction online; I assume that it was the interview with Mike Arnzen that really got many of them inspired to try it.)

Canterbury Tales: A Quick Link RoundupLiteracy Weblog)

Online Google searches for Chaucer typically point to watered-down "study guides." There is a real need for good online material on Chaucer, and there are good sites online that attempt to more than serve the lowest common denominator.

A student backed out of an oral presentation topic late yesterday, so I'm trying to fill in the gap a little.

• When tackling a new topic, I often start my search in Wikipedia, but the page is loading very slowly...
• I found a good bibliography on the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and a
• course website on "Chaucer's Narrative Art," but since I wasn't planning a trip to the library, I'll just blog the links for future reference.
• Luminarium has some quality links to Chaucer work (including audio clips)
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to The Canterbury Tales
  • (Brother Anthony writes:)At Chaucer's death, the various sections of the Canterbury Tales that he was preparing had not been brought together in a linked whole. His friends seem to have tried as best they could to prepare a coherent edition of what was there, adding some more linkages when they thought it necessary. The resulting manuscripts therefore offer slight differences in the order of tales, and in some of the framework links. The tales are usually found in linked groups known as 'Fragments'. The customary grouping and ordering of the tales is as follows (the commonly accepted abbreviation for each Tale is noted in parentheses):

    Fragment I (A)
       General Prologue (GP), Knight (KnT), Miller (MilT), Reeve (RvT), Cook (CkT).
    Fragment II (B1)
       Man of Law (MLT)
    Fragment III (D)
       Wife of Bath (WBT), Friar (FrT), Summoner (SumT).
    Fragment IV (E)
       Clerk (ClT), Merchant (MerT).
    Fragment V (F)
       Squire (SqT), Franklin (FranT).
    Fragment VI (C)
       Physician (PhyT), Pardoner (PardT).
    Fragment VII (B2)
       Shipman (ShipT), Prioress (PrT), Chaucer: Sir Thopas (Thop), Melibee (Mel), Monk (MkT), Nun's Priest (NPT).
    Fragment VIII (G)
       Second Nun SNT), Canon's Yeoman (CYT).
    Fragment IX (H)
       Manciple (MancT).
    Fragment X (I)
       Parson (ParsT).

    There is great variety in different manuscripts but I and II, VI and VII, IX and X are almost always found in that order while the tales in IV and V are often spread around separately.

  • Brother Anthony critiques the value of taking too literally the "contest" framework of the narrative. "Is this Tale the best Tale? The Host's proposal of a contest invites the reader to judge all the Tales but at the same time requires the reader to reflect on the criteria by which the Tales are to be judged. What is the purpose of tale-telling, indeed of all discourse? Sentence or solas? Wisdom or pleasure? The value of a tale becomes more and more related to the value of life, and the Parson is not simply a kill-joy when he declares: 'Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me' (you get no fable told by me) and instead offers a treatise on sin and salvation. Chaucer leads the reader to the point where the ability of any fictional tale to tell the truth is challenged, though not necessarily as radically denied as the Parson would wish. The Parson himself is a fictional character, after all, a part of a Tale."
  • "Modern editions are usually based on one of two manuscripts, both written by the same scribe: the Hengwrt Manuscript and the Ellesmere Manuscript. The former, in the National Library of Wales, is the oldest of all, probably copied directly from Chaucer's own disordered papers, but it lacks the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and the final pages have been lost. The latter, now preserved in California, is more complete, and beautifully produced with illustrations of the different pilgrims beside their Tales, but it shows the work of an editor who has removed some of the roughness from Chaucer's lines. "
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to the General Prologue
  • "More recent criticism has reacted against this approach, claiming that the portraits are indicative of social types, part of a tradition of social satire, "estates satire", and insisting that they should not be read as individualized character portraits like those in a novel. Yet it is sure that Chaucer's capacity of human sympathy, like Shakespeare's, enabled him to go beyond the conventions of his time and create images of individualized human subjects that have been found not merely credible but endearing in every period from his own until now."
  • The title "General Prologue" is a modern invention, although a few manuscripts call it prologus. There are very few major textual differences between the various manuscripts."
  • While I distinctly remember being taught that the pilgrims were introduced in order of their social prominence (see Klein's notes, III B), Brother Anthony notes what had always troubled me -- this order breaks down very rapidly. It won't help us understand medieval society to take this list of pilgrims as an index to social ranking.

A Selection from the Posthumously Published Ernest Hemingway Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, A Very Short Death, c.1959

It was late summer and you were alone in the café. You were sipping vermouth and reading about the war. You liked the way the vermouth tasted good when you drank it with your mouth. The war was going badly.

You tapped your tired fingers on the arm of the wooden chair where you were sitting in the café when it was dark and late. You liked how the chair was made of wood.

"Oh darling, you mustn't talk such rot," she had said. "I'll kill him."

You felt broken and drunk in the cool night and remembered the white boat on the river.

DID YOU?

a. Grit teeth and think about the war.
b. Order a brandy that overflowed and ran down the stem of the glass and think about the war.
c. Notice the electric light hanging over the empty terrace and think about the war.

--The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (McSeeeney's)

What's extremely funny about this format is that it's not too different from the reading quizzes I give. Since it's so easy nowadays for students to download plot summaries from the Internet, in order to motivate students to keep up on their literary readings, I will make a multiple-choice test, with questions that list four things that did happen in the reading, and one other event that will sound plausible to someone who has only a basic understanding of the plot, but that didn't really happen.

--'She's a Flight Risk' Resumes

Isabella v has started posting again, after a long hiatus (which I noted in December).

I only learned about it after getting an e-mail from "isagirl@hushmail.com" responding to a blog entry I wrote last year.

We copulate, we procreate, the species thrives. Love and every other emotion that we connect to it are the froth of nature?s wildness. But if it is froth, it is wonderful froth. But I think that stepping back and admitting that romantic love is not an entity with a life of its own allows us to recognize that love, even romantic love, takes its likeness and continuity from the stories we tell about it. And as stories change, so does that experience. --John Spurlock --Love and Lovesickness 2 (The Blue Monkey Review)

Richard Dawkins's theory of the "meme" (a cultural unit that spreads, almost like a living virus, from brain to brain) is very useful in deconstructing cultural truths that are powerful because they work extremely well. Have you read the story of the creation of the diamond engagement ring custom? It does a great job deconstructing that particular "timeless" myth. (I recently blogged about diamond engagement rings.)

I wanted to tell you that I am scared to death of your class... Give me something known. I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. I don't take hints. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me. I am not good at reading between the lines. I was never taught in school how to do that. I need help in that area. I don't always remember everything I read. When I study for a test... I have to recite things in my head 50 times before I remember it. What I am trying to say is I am going to give this class my 100%. I will do my very best. It just might not be THE BEST compared to everyone else. I will need a lot of help. -- A student in my American literature surveyA Student's Plea: 'Give Me Something Known'E-Mail)

I was touched by the honesty, passion, and determination in in this student's plea (excerpted here with permission). During the first class meeting, I tried to emphasize how a college-level literature course differs from a high school English class; I am not looking for papers that accurately summarize major plot events, or essays that spit back at me my own lecture notes.

In a literature course, I am of course trying to teach content; I'd like students to know who F. Scott Fitzgerald is, to recognize why A Streetcar Named Desire struck the right cords at the right time, to apply the social and spiritual messages in The Secret Life of Bees to their own lives, and to understand some of the major cultural and historical forces that have shaped American culture in the last century (feminism, Freudianism, Marxism, etc.).

In order to have the kind of deep, thoughtful conversations that build communities and lead us to personal revelations, we will of course have to read the darn texts about which we are supposed to be talking. And my student asks a legitimate question... how are we supposed to read literature? Lurking behind that question is a deeper one... why do these authors make their messages so darn hard to decipher? Why don't they just condense their message down to a few sentences, so that we can read it quickly, think about it, and then move on with our lives?

"Give me something known," my student writes.

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot responds to a very similar statement.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The question is, who knows it? And when and where was it known? For a long time, it was "known" that the Earth is flat, that women have inferior intellects, that the Bible sanctifies slavery, etc. Pythagoras and his followers were greatly troubled by their discovery that the square root of 2 is irrational, because it upset what they "knew" about the cultural function of numbers (to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world).

"I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me."

But what if someone doesn't want you to know something? What if someone is generating lies, using half-truths to influence your mind?

I have written about Michael Moore in the past; he's a brilliant filmmaker and political activist. All documentary films persuade a particular point of view, and Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is a masterpiece. Everyone "knows" that "Bowling for Columbine" refers to the bowling class that the killers attended shortly before their spree. But did they attend bowling class? When challenged, Moore claimed that the reference to bowling in the title was a silly distraction. Perhaps more telling is this... have you heard that George Bush held up a plastic turkey for the TV cameras during his secret trip to Iraq? The Washington Post reported that it was indeed a real turkey, roasted and decorated just the way Grandma would have done it.

A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.

No reporter ever called the turkey plastic -- it was a real cooked bird, but its purpose was decorative. Look at how Michael Moore introduced the subject.

it turns out that big, beautiful turkey of yours was never eaten by the troops! It wasn't eaten by anyone! That's because it wasn't real! It was a STUNT turkey, brought in to look like a real edible turkey for all those great camera angles.

Nowhere does he call the turkey "plastic," but later he writes that " fake stuffing in the fake bird was just the right symbol for our country" under Bush. While it's defensible to call the turkey a stunt turkey, it was still a real turkey -- not a fake one, just as a stuntman is still a real man. I don't have any information on whether that stunt turkey was eaten or not, and my guess is that neither does Moore.

Moore could simply have written "Bush sucks," but anyone can do that; his method of creating a scene, convincing his readers to become enraged at the scene, and then prompting them to come to a particular conclusion is far more effective than the simple expression my student longs for.

I won't spend any more words writing sweeping romantic generalizations about what literature is, or why the books we study are supposedly great (actually, I choose some that are mediocre; there's even a complete flop on the syllabus). Neither I nor my students has the resources to determine whether George Bush's statement X is a lie, or whether Michael Moore's video clip X is a misrepresentation. We don't have access to the White House or to Moore's cutting room floor.

But we can agree to focus on a particular text that is finite and known; F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't going to write another chapter of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" anytime soon. We can all read this primary text, which is the complete and total authority of all things relating to the world of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and then practice, in a civil and responsible manner, the skills that permit us to compare our interpretations, to probe our disagreements, and to examine the biases and cultural values that condition us to react a particular way to our shared texts.

I can give some practical tips on how to read literature... write notes in the margins; underline unfamiliar words and look them up; read once to get a basic sense of what's happening, scan looking for patterns and ambiguous areas, and then read again with the intention of testing a thesis. For instance, a few years ago when I re-read Bernice Bobs Her Hair, I noticed a racial thread that was extremely obvious once I started looking for it. (I'll have to leave that for later, since my class is about to begin.)

Technology in American Drama NewsE-Mail)

I recently received this announcement from my publisher: "I'm pleased to let you know that your book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950, has been named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title."

A little googling reveals that this award is given to about 3% of the 20,000 or so academic works submitted each year to Choice (a library selection journal).

In a related development, my Amazon.com ranking for this book has now rocketed to 1,679,643 -- I'm rapidly gaining on
Distributional ecology and abundance of dung and carrion-feeding beetles (Scarabaeidae) in tropical rain forests in Sarawak, Borneo (1,652,252).

When she got home she found her inbox stuffed with new messages, many of which were junk mail. One message was titled "BBC World service proposal," but Onwueme said she just skipped over it. | The BBC sent a second e-mail, which she also did not take the time to read because it had the same vague title. --Susan MacLaughlin --Professor lands international radio deal (UWEC Spectator)

Tess Onwueme, a playwright from Nigeria, is a former colleague of mine from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The Beeb was trying to ask her if they could broadcast a radio performance of her play, Shakara, The Dancehall Queen.

I always taught one or two of her plays whenever I had a drama class. I would tell the students that we would have a guest lecturer who "is an expert in the plays of Tess Onwueme." When Tess walked in the door, often wearing a bright purple or red turban, I'd tell them who she was. The students always got a kick out of her visits.

She also makes a great plantain dish, the recipe for which my wife has bugged me a few times to request from her.

One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll post soon, btw); and I suspect others will follow suit. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find this text canonized amongst a new academic audience because of Montfort’s account of it here. --Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages --Wor(l)d Games (MGK)

As George wrote in a comment to the above entry, "Stuff like this is why I like reading blogs."

I don't know what it is about interactive fiction, but it prompts a lot of autobiographical essays like this one. (See also SPAG newsletter editor Paul O'Brian's review.)

And homestarrunner.com features a text game this week.

I oughta add a new category: geekiness.

A good man-eating plant needs a deep root structure to anchor it in place when the man it's eating flails and fights for its life. So the deeper the seed, the stronger the root system. This is why you need so much blood meal. The man-eating plant doesn't care where it gets its blood. Whether in the hellish depths of earth or in the burning shine of the sun, it only thirsts -- at this point -- for blood protein. --Michael A. Arnzen --How to grow a man-eating plant (Eternal Night)

Mike is my next-door neighbor here on The Hill. I can't remember... does he have any plants in his office?

According to Mike, this story made the Top 10 "Best Horror Stories of 2003" in an online poll, and voting is still open through 21 Jan. Check out his humbly-worded entry in The Goreletter.

"It was the Critic, in the New Yorker, with the essay." --Eric Mayer --Who Killed the Detective Novel? (Eric Mayer)

Not, says Eric.

Chipping away at Pygmalion and GalateaJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Pygmalion is a legendary sculptor (whose role as King of Cyprus seems unimportant to most versions of the story) known for carving Galatea, a statue of a woman so beautiful he is no longer interested in real women. Moved by his devotion, the goddess of beauty Aphrodite brings the statue to life, and the artist marries his creation. Since the Greek legends were oral tales, I don't think there's any such thing as a definitive version of the Pygmalion legend. Bulfinch's Mythology is a good source of the main plot details. This legend about an artist has long been popular with artists; a sequence of four paintings by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones presents

1. a solitary artist ignoring real women and contemporary statues,
2. attracted to the creation that sits on the pedestal where he carved it,
3. embracing the newly living statue, and finally
4. kneeling before her.

I notice that only the third and fourth images in the series seem to be readily available online in poster form. (The images are from ABC Gallery, which unfortunately inverts the order of the third and fourth images.)

By contrast, a picture by Jean-Léon Gérome has Pygmalion embracing Galatea's upper body while the rest of her is still stone. What seems to be another angle on the same scene shows Pygmalion lunging forward, his cloak trailing out behind him, while most of her body is still stone (I've heard of chiseled abs, but this is ridiculous! Yuk, yuk! Sorry.)

The cynical and brilliant George Bernard Shaw took on the pretensions of the upperclass with his play Pygmalion, which, stripped of its rather bleak and realistic ending (Higgins is insufferably smug, and really does deserve his solitude) was later the inspiration for the high school musical standard My Fair Lady. The artwork for the original show features Higgins as a puppeteer, pulling the strings on Eliza, and up in the clouds a twinkly-eyed God is pulling strings on Higgins.

It takes the intervention of a goddess to turn Pygmalion's obsession with a particular artifact into a real relationship. Since classical goddesses don't seem to intervene from Mt. Olympus anymore these days, we're left with what we've got: computers. In the 80s, I recall seeing ads for some dumb movie in which teen geeks hook a Barbie doll up to a computer and it somehow comes to life as whatever completely interchangeable supermodel was selling a lot of magazines that year. As a geek teenager during the 80s, I was presumably part of the target audience for that film, but now I can't even be bothered to Google for its title. The mad professor of the German silent film Metropolis performs a similar transition, turning a metallic Robot-demon into a life-like simulation of a woman (though she's still a Robot).

I can't help but think of "Barry," the fellow who hit blithely on a chatbot over a period of several days, as recorded by Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. Barry's behavior was apparently so predictable that the program kept feeding him answers that generated responses that the program was equipped to understand; I think Turkle notes that Julia didn't so much as pass an intelligence test, but rather Barry failed one. (For a brief reference to the Barry/Julie exchange, see the review, "The Bewitching Miss Julia".) Julia the chatbot was a personality with no body, Galatea was a body with no personality. We can't compare poor Barry to Pygmalion; but I bet there's a postmodern conference paper in looking at a sister AI program, Alice, and "her" relationship with her creator, the brilliant but star-cross'd Richard Wallace.

I can't remember whether I had already decided to use the Pygmalion legend when I came across a discussion of computer simulation, art and puritanism by hypertext publisher and software designer Mark Bernstein. He used software called Poser to create a 3D model of a "The Greek Slave," a famous 19th-Century sculpture. (By the way, U.Va's resources on "The Greek Slave" are worth a visit. The site features an engraving of the statute in its exhibit context, as well as contemporary responses to it.)

Bernstein notes that in translating the statue to a 3D model (or, more accurately, a 2D snapshot of a 3D model) he had to work with the placement of the subject's hand in order to avoid the appearance of obscenity. I don't work with visual images that much, so my reaction is hardly scholarly. Once Bernstein characterized his creation as possibly obscene, it is hard for me to think of it as otherwise. Maybe simply seeing a digitally-generated nude body was creepy enough for me -- it hardly matters what gesture her hands were making.

I'm more conscious of the effort it takes to read between the lines of an ostensibly simple text, like the lyrics to "Paper Doll". Arthur Miller uses the song in The View from the Bridge, a play about a man's inability to cope with his own lust for his sexually-blossoming niece. "I'd rather have a paper doll that I could call my own/Than have a fickle-minded real live girl." Is this a veiled reference to pornography? I never thought of that before, but it's possible.

I don't know whether pornography seriously affected the development of photography and cinema; it's more likely that censorship, production codes and rating systems were the dominant factor, but the legality and economics of internet pornography are hard to ignore. I found over 2000 references to "pornography" in Wired. (The hits to my site will probably increase now that I've used "pornography" three times in one blog entry.)

Our brains permit us to predict the outcome of our actions, so that we don't have to rely on instinct or learned knowledge when faced with new situations. The imagination is an important tool for survival; and we all know the healing, restorative power of fantasy (and I don't just mean the sword-and-sorcery pulp variety; "Reality TV", spectator sports, and highbrow literature also cater to our need for fantasy). But imagination is not enough; we share our fantasies (and purge our fears) by creating artifacts, using a medium of some sort. By playing with his own digital paper doll, and talking about his experiences, Mark is probably on the right track. When Torill visited Seton Hill, she noted that every new medium has raised the same warning cries -- this is too realistic, it will overwhelm the senses, it will confuse the delicate and vulnerable in our society. I don't see virtual friends taking the place of real friends anytime soon. But if you look at it from the other angle, maybe our artistic creations will be given something closer to "life" through the assistance of digital authoring packages, synthesized speech, and chatbot scripts. We're very good at imagining we have relationships with fictional characters, if the execution is good enough; and the computer is just one more medium.

At any rate, as a culture, I think we'll learn to adapt to the way digitally altered images affect our minds, but if we don't develop the habit of critiquing the effect that various media have upon our psychology, our aesthetics, and our ethics, then the marketers and demagogues who control the media will be our masters. Perhaps the only solution is to put more sophisticated media creation tools into the hands of more members of the general public; democratize the huge power of digital manipulation, so that it is easier for all of us to put our imagination in forms.

I don't know when I'll have the time to write another massive blog entry like this, but it has been an enjoyable way for me to start collecting my thoughts about the Media Aesthetics course I'll start teaching next week.

From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune. | The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be. --Pat Holt

--10 Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)  (Holt Uncensored)

Mostly geared towards fiction writers. Some of the tips are a bit too broad; number 8, "awkward phrasing," isn't that helpful. Still, I appreciate this glimpse into the mind of a literary editor.

Jerz Course Books -- Spring 2004Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For those who are interested, here are links to the required purchase books for my classes; in a few days I'll post the full syllabi:

• Seminar in Thinking and Writing II (no new books)
• EL 150: Introduction to Literary Study
  
• EL 267: American Literature 1915-Present
  
• EL 309: Advanced Study in Literature -- Media Aesthetics

Update: Whoops, I posted those links hastily and got called away before I could check them. They should all work now.