Courses, spring 2012
Classroom policies
English 100
University document: student learning outcomes for English 100
Information from your mentor, Dax Garcia
Syllabus
Exercise, January 10
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About punctuation: this is a page from an edition of Aesop's Fables published in 1475 by William Caxton, the first printer in England. The moral of the story is: seventeen years before Columbus it would have been easier to get an A in English 100, because there was only one punctuation mark to learn. But the job of reading was harder.
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In conclusion: some vacation reading for conference week
In just half a page more, I'll be finished with my English 100 paper! So how do I write a last paragraph that really feels like an ending -- not just one more forkful of the now cold and disgusting ramen but a nice intellectual dessert?
By the time they've graduated from high school, most Americans on the college track have learned two ways of doing that. One way is just to loop back to the beginning ("In this paper I will say three things. They will be thing A, thing B, and thing C") and say it all over again with a change of tense: "In conclusion, I have said three things. They were thing A, thing B, and thing C." But just ask yourself if you could possibly be interested in reading a paragraph like that and you'll understand why you shouldn't write it.
Yes: it's formulaic, it's mechanical, it's insulting to your reader ("I know I just said all this, but you've probably forgotten"), it's boring. So high school kids whose wit has survived high school have come up with a different formula: go off on a tangent at the end and introduce a brand new topic. At one extreme, this means going personal ("This is my paper about global warming. I hope you enjoy it. The End"); at the other, it means taking the reader along on a cosmic voyage into the outer reaches of digression ("In conclusion, China's massive new manufacturing centers raise important economic questions. It is important to think about these questions so we can cure cancer!!!!!!!!")
Those are boring too.
But take a look at this new article about the big obvious question raised by studying the fossils preserved in Los Angeles's La Brea Tar Pits: why did these amazing animals become extinct? Why are there no more saber-toothed tigers? What happened to the American lion? ("25 percent bigger than the modern African lion," says the article. "Imagine meeting one while jogging in Malibu.")
Your English 100 technical tip about coming up with an answer is that the article's author, Sean B. Carroll, first did his background reading about the extinctions, then elaborated on two of the possible causes (climate change and human activity), and then synthesized those two hypotheses into a concluding idea which is (a) general and new but also (b) grounded in what the essay has been saying up to this new point.
But the pronounced changes in the environment that marked the end of the last ice age occurred at the same time, including abrupt warming of the planet, rapid retreat of the glaciers and widespread changes in vegetation. In that light, the La Brea fossils offer far more than a window into the past. They alert us to the catastrophic potential of combining climate change and human activity — a combination that is all too familiar today.
That isn't boring! And the English 100 trick is simple, though it does require practice. It's just this:
Synthesize. Etymologically, that word means "put it together."
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The group writing exercise, February 14 and 16
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About our excursion to Hamilton Library on February 28, your news is this:
No, everything you could ever want to read is not online. For now, for instance, this picture and these two are available only via a semi-old-fashioned medium, microfilm -- and microfilm is bad news. The technological hope that the medium once seemed to offer has turned out to be a delusion. Yes, microfilm does save precious storage space. But no, texts on microfilm haven't been immortalized after all. Just like paper, microfilm deteriorates and becomes unreadable. Deteriorated paper crumbles in your hands; deteriorated microfilm goes brown and blurry or turns into sticky glop or dissipates in a corrosive cloud of hydrogen chloride gas.
Furthermore, the projected images in microfilm readers are all more or less unsatisfactory, and the printouts you could make in the bad old days when I was a student were expensive and even more unsatisfactory. But now you can at least read this bad old medium in a good new way. All the readers in Hamilton's microform room are now linked to computers which digitize their optical input, and that connection lets you save your material to a thumb drive (free!) and take it away.
The links you see above are a consequence of that good change. Saved from a deteriorating microfilm of long vanished paper, they are three moments of history that were on the verge of being forgotten forever until Photoshop and I helped history remember again after class on January 12.
English 361
Syllabus
Prose and verse, January 10: the opening of Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (1853) and a poem by William Carlos Williams (1927)
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The idea of metaphor: an example from prose non-fiction
This article from a business magazine, The Economist, explains why one manufacturer of yesterday's technology, Fujifilm, is thriving while another, Kodak, is now bankrupt. To make the financial detail understandable, the author first makes use of a metaphor and then explains it by getting explicit about its vehicle and its tenor. You see:
George Fisher, who served as Kodak's boss from 1939 until 1999, decided that its expertise lay not in chemicals but in imaging. He cranked out digital cameras and offered customers the ability to post and share pictures online.
A brilliant boss might have turned this idea into something like Facebook, but Mr Fisher was not that boss. He failed to outsource much production, which might have made Kodak more nimble and creative. He struggled, too, to adapt Kodak's "razor blade" business model. Kodak sold cheap cameras and relied on customers buying lots of expensive film. (Just as Gillette makes money on the blades, not the razors.) That model obviously does not work with digital cameras.
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Note for the week of January 31:
Now that we're starting to work up to writing our sonnets, you may be worrying about how in the world you can possibly fit a sentence into a predetermined and mandatory pattern of rhythm and rhyme. At this point in the course, nobody ever believes me when I say that once you know how, it's actually easier to write in a fixed form than in open form. After just a little practice, though, everybody discovers that I was telling the truth.
You don't believe me? Here's your demo. Just click and listen.
And here's one more piece of old business about metaphor: the fashion fault called mixed metaphor, which involves tenors that transfer from one vehicle to another in mid-sentence. It's a tricky maneuver, and people who try it often fall off the vehicle into comic catastrophe.
People who talk in clichés are especially accident-prone that way, and politicians do love clichés. Here, for instance, is a catastrophic political mix of not two not three but four cliché metaphors. The source is a political article from the January 28 New York Times: Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny, "Facing Second Loss to Gingrich, Romney Went on Warpath."
“We had a moment where we kind of started drinking our own Kool-Aid, and it looked like we were just going to blow through it,” said John D. Rood, a chairman of Mr. Romney’s Florida finance team. “There is a little humility in getting your butt kicked in South Carolina, and all of the sudden it’s a wake- up call.”
You get the idea. The problem is a matter of style on the English 100 level. At the start of the communication we're drinking Kool-Aid. That metaphor originated in 1978 when followers of the cult leader Jim Jones committed mass suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. For a few days in 1978 it was original, but after that it became a cliché.
But then we're some kind of wind.
Then somebody is kicking our collective butt.
Then it turns out that the kicker was somehow in bed with us.
I can visualize one of these events at a time, but not all four. The communication has been broken up by what the French theorist Michel Serres calls static. In French, the word for "static" is a great metaphor: parasite.
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PS, February 1: Click here for the complete, R-rated version of the demo above. Thanks for this, Nicole!
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Exam 1, February 9
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Assignment for February 23
A specialized sub-genre of the sonnet is the sonnet about the sonnet. We've read one of them, Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not," and another great one in the anthology is D. G. Rossetti's "A Sonnet."
There are many others. Click here (and this is the first part of the assignment) to read three more, courtesy of that nice cheap little Dover anthology I mentioned in class on the sixteenth, Paul Negri's Great Sonnets. The authors of these three poems are three minor Victorians, forgotten by W. W. Norton and almost everybody else but remembered by the nice antiquarians at Dover Publications. Thanks, Dover!
So print out those three poems and think about metaphor practice for your own sonnets. (A sonnet is a wave. No, it's a world. No, it's a jewel. No, it's a . . . ) We'll talk about the sonnets in class on Thursday, along with two others which are considerably more worth talking about: from the anthology, Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" and Wordsworth's "London, 1802."
Allow plenty of time for that. Milton's poem, especially, is very hard, and you'll have to read it several times, even with the help of the footnotes. But the only fundamental thing to know before you start is that Milton was a Christian poet whose language is saturated with the language of the Bible. Your anthology footnotes some of that language in a basic way, but not all of it -- for instance, not Matthew 11.29-30, where Jesus says, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. . . . For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
And for note 3 you really need to read the whole thing in the original. So click here to read the parable of the talents. In this passage from the Authorized (King James) translation of 1611, the word "talent" has only its ancient meaning of a unit of currency, but Milton is punning on both that sense and the modern sense, meaning "ability."
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In old business from last week, the latest TLS (for you non-English majors, that's the [London] Times Literary Supplement) brings us this valentine news. The same newspaper also carries a detailed historical reconstruction of the events surrounding the exhumation of Rossetti's manuscript from his wife's coffin, and from that article I've learned that the man who told the story of Rossetti screaming and fainting after he found a long red hair lying across the page was a man who did like to make things up.
