|
Welcome, students of mine! Welcome to English S... This is Roosevelt, my faithful and salmon-loving bear. He has an interesting take on life, and that's one thing I hope you will have, too. |
* Attend class, be awake, participate, and have fun.
* Write weekly in your reaction journal.
* Summarize and critique one work from the list we will use in this class.
* Review one website related to one of our units.
* Plan and conduct your own research project (this will include both an oral and written presentation of your project).
* (June 18, 2008) Here is the explanation sheet for Our Ultimate Project.
Names | Tigers | Suspension of Disbelief | Tracer Bullet | The Stories We Tell | Putting Our Stories to Work | The Bigger PicturePolitical Cartoons | More soon | Home | |
Names, Sapir-Whorf
Something for you to consider (Elgin, 2000). (This is a Word document; download and print it, then bring it to class with you next week).
TigersTigers--as you know from class, Hobbes is one of my favorites. What are tigers in other contexts, other cultures?From Disney, we have our bouncy Tigger...
One of the stories that I grew up with (and quite remember eating, too) was the tale of Little Black Sambo. Courtesy of the Gutenberg Project, here is the original story as a PDF file (1.7MB). My memory of 'eating' refers to the Sambo's restaurants in the US, which served mainly pancakes (quite good as I recall). Here is a glimpse of some postcards (as a PDF 0.3MB) that the restaurant produced. Class on May 14, 2008...symbols Here is an interesting reading by D-L Nelson (2006) on symbols. In addition, the question I posed at the end of class: Where or what are the following contexts? Imagine yourself walking through the front door of a large building in a big city. As you enter, you see many people carrying leather briefcases full of papers; all the men are wearing Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes. In front of you is a large, open lobby with a polished marble floor in which is the company logo. Above on the wall is a series of clocks showing the times in such places as London, New York, Tokyo, and Cairo. The woman at the reception desk is in a suit, too, and she greets you in most polished, polite way and then speaks into the wireless headset she is wearing. A uniformed security agent comes to guide you and ushers you into a brass-trimmed elevator. When the elevator doors open, you find yourself in a luxurious conference room with a long table and a panoramic view of the city 30 floors below. Let us take another voyage. It's been a long day at work, and when you return home you realize there is absolutely nothing in the refrigerator. Undaunted, you walk a couple blocks to a nearby restaurant for some quick food. After walking across a large parking lot, you enter through an automatic door that opens into a waiting area where many people are lined up to order food. On the wall is a menu with pictures of the restaurant's various menu items. Looking around, you see cheap plastic chairs and a dirty floor, but no one seems to mind. When you finally get to the front of the line, the young person at the cash register makes a couple mistakes and finally has to call the manager for help. These are slightly modified passages from Rafaeli & Worline (1999). Please download and read a copy for class on May 28. On the 21st we'll be watching part of The Jungle Book (not sure about popcorn!). Class on June 11, 2008--we'll be discussing Heart of Darkness in this final look at symbols. Plot summary of Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness discussion questions Suspension of Disbelief From Coleridge in 1817, we encounter the idea of 'willing suspension of disbelief,' which refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment. Jacobson (2002) On theorizing presence. What is real? (from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)
Tracer Bullet (one
of my favorite Calvin characters!) Everyone, welcome back for our
second term--I hope you had a good summer.
Class on September 3, 2008 A
bit of reading for you... Message Behind
Obama The
Stories We Tell (the canon unit) Worksheet on
canon How many types of stories?
Twas brillig and the slithy toves... (Jabberwocky)
The 'Wizard of
Oz' = political allegory? Taylor (2005) on Populism, the 1896 US
presidential election, and the Wizard of Oz...as a webpage
here, or as a Word document here: Taylor
(2005)
Putting Our Stories
to Work (the social commentary unit)
Class on December 3, 2008
Worksheet on caricatures,
stereotypes By Kavita Kukarni, here is one use those stories... Billionaires
for Bush: Parody as Political Intervention
Class on December 10, 2008
From class, here is the worksheet on freedom
of expression. Please have a good look at the following two:
(1) An interesting article by Cohen dealing with the issue of free
speech: How nasty are we free to
be? , (2) Next week we'll be talking some about Animal
Farm by George Orwell. Here is a short summary... FINALLY...if
you're ambitious and have time, you're welcome to read the actual story (pdf
of Animal Farm, courtesy of the Gutenberg Project, Australia)
The Bigger
Picture (the civilization unit)
Class on January 7, 2009
Worksheet on civilizations The
original Clash of
Civilizations article by Samuel Huntington (1993) A
response by Eduard Said (2001) titled The
Clash of Ignorance A second response, The
Clash of Civilizations: Revisited after 9/11 by Engin Erdem (2002) As
you know from class, I would like a written report of your research project. The
proper form is here in my computer
guidelines for papers.
A beloved longtime favorite of mine, click here to view Doonesbury.
That beloved penguin extraordinaire, Opus (from
Berkeley Breathed's
Bloom County)...with some sadness, I note the passing of Opus into cartoon
character lore (2008.11.12). He may have become a memory, but that memory is and will
always be a fond one.
One of my favorites, David
Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Home to thousands
of cartoons, many cartoonists, take a walk through Daryl Cagle's
Political Cartoonists Index
Copyright 2011
by Cyrus, Midas, Roosevelt and all the other lunatics.
|
Iraq War CostClick here to learn more about the cost of the Iraq War...Just thought you might want to know: in one of my classes, I 'froze' this with a screenshot and then did so again exactly one minute later. According to this, one minute = $188,000... How terribly, criminally insane...
Additional links, just for fun...Daryl Cagle's political cartoonists index
|