MAJOR AUTHORS: CHARLES DICKENS | Spring 2008
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Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Welles 26
Office Hours: Mondays, 1:20 - 2:20; Thursdays, 2:10 - 3:25; and by appointment.
How To Use This Site
You may be looking at this course site on the web. Or you may be looking at it inside mycourses.geneseo.edu. I've made it available both ways in order to keep as much of it as possible open to public view. Whether you're inside or outside mycourses, you'll use the navigation links on the right to get to most of the site's content. When inside mycourses, you'll have access to additional content using the tabs at the top of the mycourses window (Tools, Calendar, Communicate, etc.).
What the Course Is
This course examines selected works of Victorian England's inimitable novelist and social activist in the context of his turbulent and spectacular times.
How the Course Works
Class discussions, papers, oral presentations, and other assignments in this course are all based on two simple principles. First, reading is action. We don't passively receive the meaning of a text; we make meaning through the act of interpretation. This act of interpretation is not something we do in addition to reading; it is reading. There is no reading that is not interpretive.
Second, reading is a collaborative, not a private act. We interpret texts by following routines that we have learned from other readers, such as ascribing motivation to characters, treating images and actions as symbols, grouping related ideas as themes, and connecting texts to contexts. Moreover, we usually formulate interpretations through conversation (oral or written) with others.
The purpose of our class discussions will be to take collaborative action on the assigned texts: that is, to engage in a shared effort to make meaning. The purpose of the papers you'll write will be to sharpen your skill at participating in a highly ritualized form of conversation known as the literary essay. The purpose of your oral presentation will be to connect our collaborative efforts in the classroom to the more or less systematic collaborative activity known as scholarship. And the purpose of other assignments will be to take advantage of new forms of collaborative meaning-making made possible by digital technology.