Syllabus: Fall 2017

Course Information

ENGL 5270

Section 001, Course #33052

We meet Tuesday and Thursday 11:00-12:50, Heller Hall 216 (occasionally in an alternative room to be announced)

The course home page can be found at: <http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/f17/5270>.

Resources Needed

• Literature in the Digital Age, Adam Hammond, Cambridge University Press (2016). # ISBN 9781107615076
• Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Tom Bissell. Pantheon (2010). ISBN-10: 0307378705, ISBN-13: 978-0307378705
• The Island: A Novel. Max Brooks. Del Rey (2017). ISBN-10: 0399181776 ISBN-13: 978-0399181771.
• Graphs, Maps, Trees. Franco Moretti, Verso (2005). ISBN-10: 1844671852, ISBN-13: 978-1844671854.
• Printouts of shorter texts available as PDFs via the course Moodle site. You are required to print these texts out and bring them to class.
• access to a printer, or funds for printing
  
  

Grades

• 25% Midterm Exam
• 25% Final Exam
• 25% Essay and Abstract
• 5% Digital Humanities Project
• 20% Participation, including your completion of the various exercises, reading responses, quizzes, and participation in class generally: in-class activities and contributions, online discussions, attendance, conferences, class discussion, promptness.

Note that unexcused absences in excess of 3 will deduct 2% each from your overall grade

Purpose

What is the nature and status of literature in digital culture?

Through readings, discussion, writing, and digital scholarship, we will pursue this question and its implications. Doing so will not only expand our knowledge of digital literary studies, the digital humanities, popular online culture, avant-garde literary experimentation, and video-game criticism/theory, but shed new light on our sense of history, culture, literary form, reading, authorship, and narrative.

According to the learning goals for this course, by the end of the semester you will be able:

• to recognize and analyze literary production outside of traditional genres and forms (readings, essay, exams; 1,2)
• to explain why the nature and status of literature in digital culture matters historically and culturally (readings, essay, exams; 2, 5, 7)
• to discuss literary aesthetic techniques operating in born-digital genres (readings, essay, exams; 4)
• to understand and describe ways that digital technologies have affected the production, reading, and study of traditional literary texts (readings, essay, exams; 2)
• to historicize digital culture, video games, and the digital humanities (readings, essay, exams; 5,6)
• to analyze traditional works of literature using the tools of digital literary study (digital humanities project; 6)
• to understand and discuss the differences between print and digital media and their implications (readings, essay, exams; 2)
• to explain and critique distinctions among high-, low-, and middlebrow cultural production implied in the term "literature." (readings, essay, exams; 1,2)

(Note: In the parentheses after each goal, the words indicate the course requirements that achieve that goal; the numbers refer to how each goal corresponds to the English Program's numbered learning outcomes.)

Requirements

Readings

The readings are an essential aspect of this course--not just for the information they contain, but for the experience of reading them.

You will be expected to complete all the assigned readings and writing for each day by the beginning of class. You should mark the book or printout to help you locate key words, ideas, names, passages, and examples in the future, such as when you're studying for the exams.

See the online handout on the practices of Active Reading.

Preparation Sheets, Reading Guides, and Online Discussions

As preparation for reading assignments, I will often give you prompts to respond to, either online or in print. Your responses should give evidence that you have read the assigned reading and that you understand it well enough to summarize key points from it in your own words and to reflect on their implications and consequences. I will list all the work that you were to turn in on this site's page "Handouts and Assignments."

Essay, Abstract, and Presentation

For this course, you will write a 8-12-page essay analyzing a born-digital text as an example of "the literary."

(Note that a "text," as the term is used above, can be verbal, visual, or aural, a combination of them. In this sense, a "born-digital text" is any piece of cultural production that is native to online culture: a web site, to a video game, an internet meme, an YouTube video, etc.)

While you will quote and cite at least four critical sources (in addition to the digital text you are analyzing), the purpose of this essay is not simply to summarize your research of these sources, but to marshal them to help you

• make an argument for the literary nature of your chosen digital text and
• explain to a general audience how such a text can be read as literature.

We will create a course web page linking to each of your chosen texts online as a resource for those interested in the possibilities and varieties of digital literature. You will write a 200-word abstract of your essay's argument to go with the link on this page.

At the end of the semester, you will also give your classmates a 6-8 minute presentation of your essay's topic and argument, including a show-and-tell of your digital text.

Exams

There will be mid-term and final exams, which will be a combination of opened- and closed-book formats.

Early in the semester, I will go over in detail the kinds of things you'll be expected to remember, understand, and be able to discuss on the exams.

Attendance

Since this class will function as a community of thinkers, readers, and writers concerned with the questions raised by our course's subject matter, your regular attendance is absolutely necessary. The UMD policy states:

Students are expected to attend all scheduled class meetings. It is the responsibility of students to plan their schedules to avoid excessive conflict with course requirements. However, there are legitimate and verifiable circumstances that lead to excused student absence from the classroom. These are subpoenas, jury duty, military duty, religious observances, illness, bereavement for immediate family, and NCAA varsity intercollegiate athletics. For complete information, please see: http://www.d.umn.edu/vcaa/ExcusedAbsence.html

1. Allowed Absences:

You are allowed a small number of absences which you can spent however you wish: 4 (in a MWF class) or 3 (in a TT class). Allowed absences do not excuse you from the work due or completed on the days you are absent, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up. Save your "free" absences for a rainy (or snowy) day.

2. Unexcused Absences and Penalties:

Absences in excess of the budget of allowed instances deduct 2 percent each from your overall grade.

3. Excused Absences and Penalties:

In the case of serious, legitimate, and verifiable conflicts that result in absences in excess of the allowed number, the UMD attendance policy states that absences can be excused if

1. you contact me prior to, or as soon as possible after, the circumstance resulting in your absence(s)

2. you provide written documentation from an authoritative source (e.g., a doctor, the Athletic Department) which speaks specifically to the reason you were unavoidably unable to attend class that particular day.

Like the other types of absence, documented, excused absences do not excuse you from the work due or completed when you did not attend, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up.

Like the other types of absence, documented, excused absences, do not excuse you from the work due or completed when you did not attend, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up.

4. Tardiness and Leaving Early

In addition to your budget of allowed absences, you also have 3 or 4 instances (depending on the TT or MWF schedule) of arriving late or leaving early to use if necessary. Instances in excess of this allowance will decrease your overall grade by 2 percentage points each. If you need to leave class early, even if it's one of your allowed instances, please arrange it with me in advance

Participation and Class Discussion

Class participation will include reading aloud from or explaining what you wrote in preparation for that class meeting. Be sure you have a hard copy of your text. I will try to call on a good number of students, and I do expect everybody to be prepared to speak. I will often collect your printed writings at the end of class.

To help evaluate your participation, after each class meeting I will ask you to log the quotations from the readings which you orally raised and commented on via posts to a Moodle forum, "Classroom Contributions." Please log only quotations that you contributed to discussion out loud.  Post one message for each quotation using the format of this example:

M 3/14: Orwell, The Labyrinthine World of Doublethink
His mind slid away...contradictory, to know/not know, memory, unconsciousness, forget. 35.3

This format of each message includes:

• a header (including the date of class, the work's author, and a word or phrase that sums up the topic or point of the quotation),
• a string of key words from the quotation, especially from the beginning and end, to help us find the passage on the page,
• the page number (with tenths to indicate how far down the page).