Fall 2009
Section 58: T/Th 11:40-12:55
Section 59: T/Th 1:15-2:30
Section 56: T/Th 4:25-5:40
Professor: Dr. Susanne Hall
Email: Susanne.Hall@duke.edu
Phone: 919-660-7063
Office Hours and Location: T/Th 10:00-11:30 and by appt.; Art Building 200B
Required Texts:
Books:
N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. 0268030855.
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper. 0156032112.
Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. 0874216427.
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition. 1603290249.
Websites:
Blackboard: https://courses.duke.edu/
Electronic Literature Collection (ELC): http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
Drunken Boat: http://www.drunkenboat.com/
Links to assigned electronic literature not in the ELC can be found in Blackboard under External Links
Introductions
Purpose
The only course taken by all undergraduates, Writing 20 has a unique importance in Duke’s curriculum; it introduces you to a set of skills that will help enable you to participate in our academic community. More specifically, it will acquaint you with versions of the practices of reading, thinking, writing, and criticism that you will be expected to implement in varied ways throughout the university. While each section of Writing 20 is different, students in all sections learn how to engage with the work of others, articulate a position, and situate writing within specific contexts. The actual labor of producing a written academic argument usually involves taking a text through several drafts. In developing their work-in-progress, students in all sections of Writing 20 practice researching, workshopping, revising and editing.
We will discuss these goals and practices in some detail, but please note that http://uwp.duke.edu/courses/writing20/students/goals.html provides a reference to our departmental goals.
In addition to the universal Writing 20 goals outlined above, there are several specific objectives I would like to highlight in our class:
- Practice “reading generously,” an approach to writing that is critical without being dismissive or superficial
- Identify your personal strengths and areas for improvement as a writer
- Achieve an understanding of the writing process that produces your best work
- Develop a positive attitude toward writing, whether or not it is your favorite mode of academic engagement
By the conclusion of our course it is my goal that you will not only be prepared to make convincing arguments in writing within the university, but that you also become comfortable with the collaboration, adventurous thinking, and critical creativity that makes writing of many kinds both enjoyable and effective.
Course Description
Most Duke freshmen have read widely and well-you’ve opened up books and used your imagination to follow Beowulf through his journeys, grapple with Hamlet’s existential angst, or languish with Robinson Crusoe on his lonely island. No doubt you’ve observed while Jane Austen’s characters wrung hands and hearts, you’ve stood back while Hemingway’s narrators drank too much and said too little, or you’ve watched Fitzgerald’s characters waste fortunes on bad decisions. But rarely have you had a chance to critically examine the literature that writers have produced during your own time on earth.
This course takes up the study of the literature of your lifetime-roughly the last twenty years. One exciting aspect of this study is that as academic writers we will be able to work in conversation with a literary world that is very much alive. What we will discover in looking at the most exciting work of this period is that much of it has been affected by the most important technological development of the later 20th century-one which has developed alongside your generation-the ascendance of the personal computer and the invention of the internet. The effects of these new media innovations will guide our exploration of literature as well as our exploration of academic writing.
Writing Projects and Course Trajectory
The course will be divided into three sections. The first two units will conclude with the submission of a major, revised essay, while the third is a capstone unit that will allow us to reflect upon the themes of our course through a different writing assignment.
In Unit One, “Reading and Writing Electronic Literature: The Body and the Machine,” we will discuss the truly new literary field that has developed during your lifetime-that of electronic literature. We will explore a wide variety of literary projects that exist only or primarily in digital forms; these texts will challenge our traditional notion of what it means to encounter literature. What does it mean to “play” a text rather than read it? As a part of this exploration, we will ourselves explore the uses of new digital technologies, including blogs and image/audio capture and editing, for academic writing.
In Unit Two, “What Becomes of the People of Paper?” we will read the novel The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia. While this novel is still recognizable as a work in a traditional format-most basically, ink on paper-we will explore the ways in which changing media technologies are working to change traditional narrative genres. We will ask, most broadly, what happens to the paper novel in the digital age?
Finally, in our third “capstone” unit, you will select an “experimental” literary work that has been published within the last year and write a review of that text. We will celebrate your critiques with presentations in which you introduce this work to the class, as well as with a class blog that allows you to publish your reviews to the world. Imagine that living authors with Google Alerts set to their names may read your reviews of their new work the day that we publish them!
This course calls for a spirit of adventure and a willingness to be open to innovation in our reading as well as in our writing. New technologies for writing are fundamentally changing the landscapes of both creative and academic writing in ways that we cannot yet fully understand; our course exists upon these shifting sands and will engage in experimental forms of academic writing as well as in the more traditional forms that continue to persist alongside them. This course will prepare you to participate in the modes of writing the university uses now, and at the same time it will allow you to think through the ways these modes may change in your lifetime.
Policies and Procedures
Assignments and Grading
Assignments:
Response Writing (Wikis/Response Papers) 10%
Coming to Terms journal blogs 10%
Forwarding essay + portfolio 25%
Countering essay+ portfolio 35%
Review blog + presentation 10%
Participation + peer support 10%
Response Writing includes all of the short writing assignments we do connected to course readings. These assignments will include written responses to assigned questions (response papers) as well as an experimental form of response we’ll be trying, the response wiki in which we’ll collectively author a Wiki page in response to our text. This will not be an authoritative text, like a wikipedia entry. Rather, it will be an exploratory text-a somewhat chaotic mix of voices that gets our discussion going. Details will be elaborated in class, but some contributions will include providing links to material-textual, audio, visual-that you think is in some way relevant to our discussion of a text. The motivation behind this experiment is that rather than responding to a limited set questions I deem important, you will be free to pose your own interesting questions about the text, at the same time that you use emerging technologies to point toward answers to those questions. We will use this experiment to consider new ways of academic writing made possible by digital technology. Although these documents are collectively authored, you’ll make a comment, visible only to me, about what you’ve contributed to the page and why, and you will be evaluated on the thoughtfulness and innovation of your own contributions.
Your Coming to Terms Journal Blog entries (CTJ) will be a series of 4 informal writing assignments in Unit 1 written as you read/play electronic texts. By publishing these 1000 word journals to the class in Blog form (instead of keeping a private journal), you will gain access to multiple records of your peers’ experiences with these texts, which may help you as you develop your Forwarding Essay. This is especially helpful for many of these challenging texts that are never the same twice in a fundamental way. Some of these journal blogs may be submitted for publication on the website for our textbook Electronic Literature, so that later readers of this text and researchers of electronic literature may use your journal entries as a part of their own reading and writing about these texts. These possibilities will be discussed later, and your work will only be published online with your permission and under conditions you permit (anonymous, etc.)
In your Forwarding Essay (FE), a multi-modal essay of 5-6 pages (of text), you will take Hayles’s argument about the body and the machine in Chapter 3 of her book and forward it through application to another electronic text. This essay will involve the strategic use of various software platforms that will allow you to represent electronic literature in the essay.
Your Countering Essay (CE) will be an 7-8 page essay that will be written in Unit 2 in which you argue the other side, uncovering values, or dissent with Hayles’s argument in Chapter 4 on The People of Paper, using that en-counter to propel your own argument about the novel.
These terms (“coming to terms,” “forwarding, “countering”) are drawn from Joseph Harris’s Rewriting, and the specifics of these assignments will be addressed in class.
Your Review Essay (RE) will be a blog entry of 1000-1200 words in which you review a recent literary work of your choice from the Spring 2009 issue of the online journal Drunken Boat. This review will published in two ways, as you present it during our end-of-semester colloquium, and also on a blog which will invite the response of authors, many of whom have Google Alerts set to their names and may see the blog.
Class Participation occurs in many ways; the most obvious is actively joining our conversations together in class, but this is not the only mode of required participation. It includes the quality and quantity of your oral contributions to class, in-class writing, group work, peer review activities, and conferences, as well as attendance and timely submission of all drafts. You will submit a reflection on your participation at the end of the course that I will use to help formulate your grade.
Grading Policies:
Submission of all assignments is required in order to receive a passing grade for the course.
Late assignments are penalized by partial step drop (e.g. B becomes B-) per school day. Assignments more than one week late receive an F (0 points).
Several of our assignments will require the submission of working drafts. These drafts are not incidental to our course; in fact, they truly constitute its core. These drafts are not individually “graded,” though they will receive responses from the class and/or from me. All drafts will be a part of a portfolio that you submit along with your final draft. Keep all drafts on which I comment to include in your portfolio, as well as all feedback received from peers. This portfolio will also include information on your work as a peer reviewer and a short reflection upon your experience writing the essay. A portfolio that is missing elements will not be accepted for submission. The standards upon which the final drafts of your essays will be evaluated will be presented as we discuss each project.
Informal writing assignments-the Response Writing and Coming to Terms Journal Blog entries-will receive a grade of satisfactory (ü), or unsatisfactory (ü-). Exceptional work can receive a ü+. Consistent ü (or ü+) will yield an A for your final grade in these categories, while consistent ü- or unsubmitted work will receive an F (0). A mix of ü and ü- will receive a C. You may inquire at any point in the semester about your current grade for these assignments.
All other assignments will receive letter grades, which are converted to weighted numerical grades by Blackboard. These grades as computed by Blackboard will not be rounded up at the end of the semester and are final. See last page of syllabus for more information.
Format of Written Work
Traditional written work should be typed in a normal font in a standard word processing program (preferably MS Word). The formatting of documents should follow MLA standards as explained in Chapter Four of the MLA Handbook. Citation should likewise follow MLA format, as described in Chapters Five and Six of the MLA Handbook (this will be addressed in class).
When submitting work electronically, save the assignment using the following format: last name_assignment.doc (e.g. Jones_CTJdraft.doc). All work due online should be posted on the class Blackboard site two hours before our class meeting on the day it is due (unless otherwise noted). In addition, you should always print a copy of your work and bring it to class on the due date. This provides me with an enduring record of all of your work, and also facilitates my ability to comment on your work in the way that I think will best benefit you.
A final note-computers often malfunction, and at some point during college you will lose written work if you don’t take measures to back it up. Please find a way to reliably back up your written work, especially your long-term projects. You might consider buying an external hard drive or a zip drive, or consistently emailing recent drafts to yourself (which has the advantage of being free). Duke provides Webfiles to you free (http://www.oit.duke.edu/comp-print/storage/webfiles/index.php) Computer problems are not considered a valid excuse for late work.
Attendance Policy
Because this course is a seminar/workshop, attendance is particularly important; your absence not only impacts you, but often also diminishes the functionality of the course as a whole. Although I expect you to attend all scheduled class meetings, I understand that conflicts inevitably arise. I allow each student two absences without penalty. One exception: absences on days when your writing is to be discussed in a seminar workshop or a peer-critique group will be penalized. Missing a scheduled conference with me also counts as an absence. Except under significant extenuating circumstances, each absence after the second-regardless of the reason-will result in a partial-step drop in your final course grade (e.g. an A- becomes a B+, a B becomes a B-, and so on). I suggest you reserve your absences for illness, nonnegotiable engagements away from campus, and true emergencies. Excessive absence can result in failure of the course.
Missing class does not excuse you from keeping up with what happened that day, and all assignments must be submitted on time unless you have arranged an alternate due date with the instructor in advance. In the case of significant extenuating circumstances, your responsibility is to inform me as soon as possible of your situation and to work actively with me to develop and adhere to a plan for making up missed work.
Two tardies (more than ten minutes late to class) constitute an absence. If you arrive late to class, it is your responsibility to see me when class is over so that I note your attendance.
I will use both email and Blackboard as a means of communicating both with the class and individual students. I consider that an email sent to your Duke address is required reading for the course, as are the announcements posted on Blackboard.
This is a writing course, and one of the most common forms of writing in our culture is the email. The email is, generally, an informal medium, but in the university setting, your should remember that every email you send to a professor represents you as a student, and therefore you should use academic English (rather than internet shorthand) in those emails.
I check my email often, but you should never count on me responding to emails about assignments sent right before they are due, nor should you count on a response during weekends.
Conferences
Many students tell me that the most helpful aspect of their writing course were the discussions we had in conference with each other. Talking with a professor can be intimidating at first, but one of the benefits of being at a school with such a great student/teacher ratio is that teachers have time to talk with you and know you personally. The students who take advantage of this are routinely those who not only do well in class, but they also enjoy their courses the most. My door is always open to you, even (and especially) if you are confused about an assignment and don’t quite know how to begin our discussion.
Plagiarism & Academic Honesty
Plagiarism is the act of representing someone else’s intellectual work as your own. Plagiarism is a serious offense, because it undermines the integrity that supports a scholarly community. As such, the penalties for plagiarism are harsh. All instances of cheating and plagiarism will be referred to the Duke University Undergraduate Judicial Board (minor, first-time offenses may be settled by faculty-student resolution), and serious plagiarism will result in failure of the course. See http://judicial.studentaffairs.duke.edu/policies/policy_list/academic_dishonesty.html for more details.
Sometimes cases of plagiarism can arise due not to malicious intent, but instead due to a student’s confusion about how to properly represent ideas which are not his or her own. If you are experiencing confusion, please ask for help before submitting an assignment. Additionally, if you have questions about citing sources or what constitutes plagiarism, visit http://library.duke.edu/research/citing/ and http://library.duke.edu/research/plagiarism/.
I expect each student to uphold the Duke Community Standard. You may review it here:
http://www.duke.edu/web/HonorCouncil/communitystandard.html
Academic Citizenship and Classroom Conduct
The academic community you have entered, and within which we are learning how to write, is a place defined by the free exchange of ideas. It is a place in which differences of opinion can be expressed safely. While I encourage differences of opinion, intellectual disagreements should never provoke personal attacks or rude behavior.
Part of showing your respect to each other and to me is to arrive prepared to class. This means bringing any and all texts we have read for this meeting, as well as paper copies of any texts you have written. As with any course, you should find a way to organize the materials associated with our course and bring them to class each day.
A final word about using laptops and the Internet in class. Our course is in many ways about the way that technology has changed and is changing our lives and our writing practices. In Electronic Literature, we’ll see that Hayles makes a distinction between “hyper attention” and “deep attention.” Hyper attention is a cognitive mode characterized by “a craving for continuously varying stimuli, a low threshold for boredom, [and] the ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously” (Hayles 117). Brain imaging research indicates that this is how your generation thinks; your brain actually looks different from your parents’ brains because of emerging technology that has shaped your development. Therefore, the internet has changed the way students write; you may move from writing a paper on your computer, to answering an email from a family member, to checking Facebook, to watching a new YouTube video, to IMing a friend down the hall, and (finally) back to writing the assignment. Hyper attention has its merits, but the academy continues to value deep attention, which involves the ability to concentrate on a single text for long periods, an ability to shut out external stimuli, and a preference for one data stream at a time (Hayles 117). You need to learn deep attention to succeed in college, and you’ll be required to exhibit it during our class meetings. My current position is that it is just as disrespectful for you to check your email, Google Reader, Facebook, IM, cell phone, etc., while your classmates or I are talking as it would have been to take a phone call, watch a television, or read a newspaper in class in previous decades. Failure to adhere to this policy will result in my asking you to leave our class for the day and marking you absent.
Additional Resources
Writing Studio
The writing studio is a great resource offered to Duke students; its online and in person centers contain many helpful resources about academic writing as well as the chance to work with a tutor to improve your work. You can schedule an appointment at any stage of the writing process. Visit the Writing Studio’s website (http://uwp.duke.edu/wstudio/) to find out how to schedule an appointment and to access the studio’s online resources.
Multimedia Project Studios
The Multimedia Project Studio (http://www.oit.duke.edu/comp-print/labs/mps/index.php) includes two multimedia production facilities for Duke students, faculty and staff. These studios are located on East Campus in 115 Lilly Library and on West Campus in Old Chemistry 016. Both labs feature high-end, integrated hardware and software that encourage imaginative creation and editing of graphics, Web pages, audio and video. Production tools include industry standard software, including Final Cut Pro Studio and the Adobe CS3 Master Suite (includes Photoshop and Dreamweaver).
Academic Accommodations
Students with learning or other disabilities who believe that they may need accommodations in this class should visit http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/t-reqs/ld.html to learn about Duke’s policies concerning academic accommodations. If you anticipate a need for accommodations due to disability, please contact me as early in the semester as possible. All communication about disabilities will be kept confidential.
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