For everyone who's trying to get together syllabi and course descriptions for E314 courses for the fall, please remember that eFiles is full of materials for you.

http://efiles.cwrl.utexas.edu/e314

The 314 section gives a short introduction to the goals and purposes of each course, offers a few examples of course descriptions and syllabi for each variant, and also includes assignments.

If you are teaching E314 next year, remember to mine these resources!

If you have taught E314 in the past or are teaching it currently, this is a great time to submit resources to eFiles.

This weekend, I saw the movie I'm Not There. Afterward--actually also during--my sister complained, "This movie is too long! It's hard to follow! And why is Richard Gere even in it? I don't get that part. They should have made a normal biopic and had Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan the whole time."

Leave it to public art of the semi-conceptual sort to create stunning cultural texts. Canadian artist Thom Sokolowski has installed 100 nineteenth century tents on New York's Roosevelt Island to commemorate the many populations who were institutionalized there in the 19th century--orphans, smallpox victims, people with mental illness.

I've been making constant use of PennSound this semester and wanted to remind everyone of its existence.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

I posted this over at the Blogora, but I thought I'd post it here too. There's a new way to read novels - it's called DailyLit and it emails you small chunks of novels that are in the public domain. I'd like to assign a novel for one of my classes using DailyLit.

I always assumed that being an English Graduate Student meant that I was going to sit around (under a tree, or at a coffeeshop, or in a bar) talking to other people about books. Wow, does that not really happen. I don't ever have a sense of what anyone else reads.

But I'm curious. And I'm hoping people might tell me here--especially when I ask the question this way: What is your dream text to teach? This can be a quick answer--just a title, or you can feel free to elaborate. Have you ever taught a dream text? Was it a good experience, or did it backfire? You know, that kind of thing.

For those who haven't heard, Mel Gibson recently removed any doubt about his anti-semitism. Upon being pulled over for drunk driving, Gibson let loose with a tirade of anti-semitic remarks including: "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

Thanks to Jon Stewart, we can take special note about how this story gets talked about by bloggers and news organizations. Check out Stewart's breakdown of the news coverage of Gibson. As Stewart shows, it seems news organizations rely on clips of Gibson's films when talking about his reprehensible real life activities. Why show clips of Lethal Weapon when talking about this story?

I just ran across an interesting resource for AIs teaching literature or poetry classes in the lab next year. It is the "Poets on Poets" audio archive, developed by Steven Jones, Neil Fraistat and Doug Guerra at Romantic Circles, an excellent online resource for scholars and instructors interested in all things Romantic.

The "Poets on Poets" archive has audiotext of contemporary poets reading their favorite Romantic poems. These could be used in constructing a day-to-day assignment that teaches modes of interpretation (for example, "how does the reading of the poem emphasize certain elements within the text?").

Egara Kabaji at allafrica.com has an interesting piece on what literature can teach Kenyan politicians. In a discussion about how the Narc government has squandered the goodwill it accumulated in 2002, Kabaji explains how Waiting for Godot or Julius Caesar should offer cautionary tales to the power hungry:

"[Julius Caesar] establishes one thing that any king should worry about: those around him. They will always find a way of misleading the king through the obvious method, flattery, because power makes men susceptible to this. They will always find a way of cheating the king that the people are with him when they are not (remember the referendum drama).

As I start to plan my course for the Fall (Literature and Computer Programming) I'm thinking about a couple of assignments I'd like to try out.

Wiki
We'll be reading at least three novels, one of which is William Gibson's Neuromancer. This novel (and most likely the others I'll teach) uses some strange jargon, and I was thinking that students could contribute to a classroom Wiki. So, when they came across a word or concept they didn't understand, they could do a little research and write a Wiki entry for it. This would allow students to collaborate on interpretation while also doing a writing assignment.