Dear Students in ENL200,
For our class this fall, I'd like you to pick a PRIMARY WORK that you will write about a bunch of different ways over the course of the quarter.
Before 25 September, the day of our orientation, I politely but firmly request and, indeed, require that you write a post to this blog (each person should write their own post [see my next post for instructions]) that
1. tells us the name of your work and its author(s).
2. IN ADDITION, provides us with a blurb about the work from any reputable source (a published review or commentary you've found would do, as would an authoritative summary on wikipedia, if you're feeling controversial). Do not write this blurb. Find it. And, of course, let us know what the source for the blurb is.
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Your primary work can be almost anything, but here are some basic criteria to guide your selection:
A. It could be something from what you believe will be your field of study, but no sweat if you're not sure about this. You don't have to be. Figuring out what you want to study is part of the project of your two years of coursework starting this fall.
B. It need not be a book, but it should be a complete work. Don't pick a passage from a novel or a stanza from a poem, in other words.
C. It will probably be easier if you pick something literary. Some of you may delve into visual arts of various kinds and new media over the course of your academic careers. That's awesome. Having written two books about novels, I'm writing about video games these days myself. BUT: English remains centrally a textual discipline, and much of what we're going to read that shall spark your writing this quarter will be concerned with the reading of texts. Thus: something literary, something literary and textual, is probably the path of least resistance for this assignment.
Most importantly:
X. Pick something that matters to you, but not something you love. You will be asked to write about this primary work in a number of potentially conflicting ways. If you only can think one way about it, or if you have an interpretation of it that you are just super attached to, your writing in the class will suffer. You’re going to be asked to have a flexible relationship to your primary work, in short, so choose accordingly.
Y. Pick something that is not new to you. Don’t pick something you’ve never read before or something that’s so alien to you that you don’t already have a sense of what it would be like to work with. Don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s possible there are huge unknown hurdles or surprises out there like a secondary critical literature in a language you don’t speak, or something like that, which would stop you in your tracks.
ASK ME QUESTIONS! You can use the comments below to ask questions. I'll answer, and if need be I'll update the criteria above. I PROMISE to explain what this is all about on the first day of class, and you'll see some more about it when I post the syllabus later this week. If upon hearing what this is all about you wish to reconsider your choice of primary work, you may.
I look forward to reading about your selections!
All best,
John
