Syllabus for English 118 (section 4) Creative Nonfiction in Electronic Media, 2006
Professor Landow (office: 338 Carr House; e-mail: george@landow.com); office hours: 1.15-2:15, Tuesday and Thursday. Class meets K-hour the 2.30-3:50 PM, Tuesday and Thursday in the Multimedia Lab Classroom (enter by the spiral staircase in the Grad Center on Thayer Street) with an occasional lab session in the Grad Center Multimedia Lab 7:00-9:00 PM.
Week 1. Thursday, 25 January. What is Nonfiction, and what does it have in common with fiction?
Week 2. Tuesday, 27 January, through Thursday, 1 February. Moving Text into E-space: The Place of Nonfiction in the History of Information Technologies, — Speech, Writing, Print, Digital Media .
Readings: (1) Tom Wolfe, "The Pump House Gang." (2)
Week 3. Tuesday, 6 February, and Thursday, 8 February. Hypermedia.
Readings: (1)
Week 4. Where do I start, and how do I stop this thing? Beginnings and Endings in E-texts. Tuesday, 13 February, through Thursday, 15 February.
Readings: (1) Beginnings in Didion, Johnson, Ruskin, Swift, Wolfe, and selected e-texts; (2)
Suggested additional reading: Said, Beginnings (R).
Week 5. 20 February, through Thursday, 22 February. Telling Stories in Print, E-text, and Hypermedia.
Readings: (1) Selected hypertext narratives; (2)
Week 6. 27 February, through Thursday, 1 March. Nonfictional Genres: The Essay. Tuesday, 13 February, through Thursday, 15 February.
Readings: (1) Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals" [text -- reading questions]; (2) Samuel Johnson, selected essays:
Week 7. 27 February, through Thursday, 1 March. Nonfictional Genres: New Journalism and the Symbolical Grotesque, or The Modern Sage as Exegete of the Real.
Readings: (1) Joan Didion, "The White Album;" (2) Wolfe, "The Put-together Girl;" (3) Invented vs. Discovered Grotesques (from
Writing assignment: Remember, style is a mode of thought. Translate a substantial passage of Wolfe or Didion into Johnson; translate a substantial passage of Johnson into Didion and Wolfe;
Week 8. Tuesday, 6 March, through Thursday, 8 March. Nonfictional Genres: Autobiography, Mystories, and the Blog
Readings: (1) Materials on autobiography; (2)
Writing assignment: Create an autobiographical hyperdocument with least five lexias that employs a symbolical grotesque.
Week 9. Tuesday, 13 March, through Thursday, 15 March. Nonfictional Genres: Travel Writing — The Traveler as Spectator, Listener, Reader, Storyteller.
Readings: John Ruskin," On the Truth of Color" and "On the Truth of Water" (at U.of Lancaster, UK).
Writing assignment: Create passages of two different forms of word-painting.
Week 10. Tuesday, 20 April, and Thursday, 22 April. Writing with Links, or Moving Rhetoric into E-space.
Readings:
Spring Recess. 24 March through 1 April.
Week 11. Tuesday, 3 April, and Thursday, 5 April. Writing as Collage
Readings:
Writing assignment: Take something you've previously written, either for this course or another, and create an electronic or hypertextual collage.
Week 12. Tuesday, 10 April, and Thursday, 12 April. What Does a Victorian Poem Have to Teach E-writers?
Reading: (1) Tennyson,
Week 13. 17 April, through Thursday, 19 April. Writing with Images.
Reading: ; (2) Writing Assignment: Take one of the multi-document projects you have created and add images and other visual elements to it.
Week 14. Tuesday, 23 April, and Thursday, 25 April. Writing with Moving Images.
Reading: Pearl Maria Forss, Authorship; (2) miscellaneous Director and Flash projects.
Reading Period: 27 April-8 May; classes will meet for part of reading period
Final projects are due at 5 pm on the date exam in scheduled.
Related Resources
- Some Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing
- Mechanical Matters -- Punctuation and Diction
- Symbols used in correcting papers
Last updated 3 December 2006