Most blogs die after a few posts, and this one has been no different. It might be depressing to learn exactly what number of personal sites launched into the internet can actually support life, and how many drift off without power, cold and out-of-date. Perhaps the most significant quality of Web 2.0 is its power to make people very excited about new things for very short periods of time.
That said, I can also say that I’ve been looking for an excuse to reboot this blog for a long time now. I originally started it because I wanted a place to post things I write, and to have a base to which I could refer when I talked with other people about writing. I’d planned to post drafts and selections from my fiction writing here, but I learned that doing so can sometimes (in the case of short stories, anyway) be construed as “first publication.” And that’s a problem because, you know, $$$, which isn’t much in the first place with short stories. Not that I would know; rejection is free.
But still I’m drawn to the focus I set up as “writing, criticism, and light scholarship.” That covers a lot of ground, sure. It’s imprecise. It is quite possibly pretentious. But I think the main problem with it is that it establishes a one-way field: after all, what I’m really announcing is *my* writing, criticism, and light etc. It’s kind of like I’ve established a magazine full of Me. I’m not entirely sure there’s a market for that.
And, anyway, I think it would better to fashion this site as more a crossroads than a cul-de-sac. To do that, for a while I’m going to focus on other people’s web sites, ones that have been useful for me in pursuing my own interests, and especially the really enjoyable ones: science fiction, gaming, what’s funny, and, yes, even writing, criticism, and light scholarship. Heavy scholarship I will leave to the academic libraries.
So, then. Welcome! Next up, I'll begin exploring some sites that I've found usefully unusual as a writer, a gamer, and long-time denizen of the Web. This is what the internet looks like from here.
It’s now the 150th anniversary of Fort Sumter, and I’ve just finished Shelby Foote’s three-volume history The Civil War. I think I went through it in real time.
I decided to read the whole trilogy about four years ago, and I was slow getting started. About the same time, I started reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson’s book is straight history: political and military but also economic and cultural; McPherson is rightly praised for giving us the best and most rigorous single-volume history of the war and its era. It’s excellent. I plowed through it in just a couple of weeks, reading in bed.
Foote takes much longer.
For some people I know, Shelby Foote is something close to scripture. This is not just because of the word count. Growing up down South—and this was the suburban 70’s and 80’s South—I knew these books were important. A set of all three, usually boxed, held honored shelf space in most of my friends’ parents’ houses, and mine too. Not an ambitious reader as a kid, I classed them as “big, important, and too long to read.” I don’t think most people who owned them read them either.
But I’ve always weirdly loved the Civil War. I know this is an odd thing to say—I’m not Gary Brecher here. I know the Civil War was a miserable time for everyone concerned. In its essence it was suffering and starvation, destruction of property, fear and burning, blisters and blindness and gangrene. These are things that can’t really be hidden by the thick oil of heroic paintings or the bug-spattered idiocy of bumper stickers.
But what’s compelling about the Civil War is the sheer narrative power of it all. That’s where Foote comes in.
When Edward Gibbon wrote his meticulously researched and objectively analyzed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he never allowed facts to get in the way of his essential pessimism. Foote does history much the same way. There’s a barely disguised Southern bias in his reporting of military and political affairs. Southern retreats are cast as the unfortunateprice of war while Northern routs are delineated in loving detail. What is bold manliness in a Southern commander like Jackson or Hill (standing up under fire, leading from the front) is cast as foolhardiness when Hancock or Reynolds does it. Grant is a blunt calculator, Lee a bold strategist. The latter never appears without a tragic, stainless aura.
Of course this is history by a novelist. No pains are taken to avoid (or indicate) speculation or to separate known facts from imaginative descriptions. Moods are boldly inferred. Character and characters are depicted with authoritative, fictive certainty. Compared to most modern academic history, this is kind of refreshing, but it also makes for double-shotted partiality. History makes a good story, but stories don’t always make good history. You have to know what you’re in for.
Despite the awesome scope and impressive length of this history, there’s a lot that doesn’t make it in. This is strictly a battlefield understanding of the war. As such, it is superb—but there is no war that demands more attention to contexts and causes than this one. When events outside the fighting appear, they come in mainly for satire, but only on the Northern side. The Southern way of life is somehow cast as aristocracy and democracy simultaneously, its graciousness covering a multitude of sins. While slaves are occasionally mentioned, Slavery is not an issue.
A focus on personalities to the exclusion of other causes makes a good story but an unstable history. Jeff Davis opens and closes the whole trilogy, as if his tragedy somehow outweighs all others. (Who today thinks of Jefferson Davis at all?) At times it all comes perilously close to suggesting that secession was right because Lincoln was homely.
Most of all, one wants a sense that both sides actually believed in something. Foote’s haloed descriptions of Southern arms make it easy to picture an army of idealistic heroes fighting a horde of invading stumblebums. It should be remembered that both of these armies endured tremendous hardship. Both thought much of their purposes. Both sustained themselves by heroic verses.
So why read it?
The answer is Shelby Foote’s writing. I’m someone who works at it (though never hard enough or long enough), and for me it’s an astonishing pleasure to read such a tremendous voice sustained at such great length. While Foote’s treatment of history off the battlefield is shallow, his prose itself is never anything but deep. There’s an achievement here that is not only one of historical writing, but of Writing.
Such a comprehensive embrace of the entire scope of the war, battle by battle, makes sameness seem almost inevitable, but somehow it never arises here. Foote finds the language for each turn of moment, the right tone for each stage of the war. Never pretentious and never overreaching, he nevertheless sometimes gets whole passages that must be read again, immediately, because they are so musical. He stands well behind his subject, never forcing his own person onto the scene. (I counted three references to contemporary events, all of them relevant.) His weariness in the latter half of volume 3 is apparent, but it is a weariness of war, never a weariness of telling.
It’s impossible to think that anything less would keep a reader—this reader, anyway—going through all those three thousand pages, all those 1.2 million words. It’s compelling, it is somehow urgent, it fills four years, and it’s difficult to imagine that it will ever be achieved again.
So I hear that the governor of Virginia has declared April to be “Confederate History Month.” In this, Virginia joins several other states in an official celebration of Southern heritage peculiarly centered on the most inhospitable and least charming half-decade of that region’s complex history. Virginia’s declaration was notable for its omission of any mention of slavery. Pundits on both sides of the cultural divide were predictably incensed. You can imagine.
I’m sure you’ve been shaking your head at knee-jerk Yankee liberals who find any praise of the Confederacy to be anathema. As a matter of fact, I’m right there with you. There’s a lot to respect in the drama of the Civil War, and on both sides—obviously, or people wouldn’t be so drawn to it. No one who reads much about the period can come away without admiring aspects of the Southern effort during those darkest days of American history.
It may be hard for some conservatives to believe this, but even liberals value things like honor, valor, and fortitude. Those are the first qualities of the first thing we think of when think of the Confederacy, which is the Confederate Army. In these virtues it was without peer. There has never been a military force—perhaps never a large organization of any kind—so ably led and so willing to endure so much. We will argue about the reasons why this army was in the field, but there is no getting around the fact that (mutatis mutandis) it is surely the most committed and most skilled fighting force the world has ever seen.
And my northern friends are too quick to reject the Confederate military out of hand as a weapon devoted to the defense of slavery. It’s pretty well-established that the average Southern soldier seldom had slavery on his mind, and certainly not as his primary motive for fighting. Southern citizens cast their lot with secession and found their home states invaded by what was then (spiritually but also legally, from their POV) a foreign foe. The Southern soldier fought for home and family, motivated mainly by a desire to turn back the invader and to be, as Jeff Davis famously put it, Left Alone.
But the mistake too many people make is to take the skill and honor shown on the battlefield by Lee and Jackson and the rest as a microcosm of the Confederacy itself. It’s easy to do; Shelby Foote did it for three thousand magnificent pages. Focusing on dramatic battles and colorful leaders takes us away from precisely the issue that is at the heart of the whole secession crisis, and the one that the Virginia declaration so stupidly overlooked. Jeff Davis wanted to be left alone, but he and his fellow secessionists were never so self-deluding to pretend that the crisis at hand was anything but centered around slavery.
Indeed, they welcomed the focus. Consider the words of the Confederacy’s first Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in his “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861, when it was all getting started:
“The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. …
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Stephens goes on for some 5,000 words, but the gist is here: the Confederacy was to be a new nation designed, from the ground up, to preserve the supremacy of white men and sidestep America’s creeping tendency towards equality. There are still those today who try to argue that Southern secession was about abstract constitutional principles, States’ Rights and whatnot. Stephens, Davis, and the rest of them never made that mistake.
The only Right that mattered enough to force some States’ secession was the right to maintain slavery. This had been the issue for decades—there had been near-secession crises before, always about the extension of slavery to new territories or the right of northern states to restrict Southern travelers’ human property. The break of 1861 came in direct response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was widely regarded as an abolitionist candidate. Secession was all but accomplished even before he took office, all in anticipation of the actions it was feared he would take to limit the spread and maintenance of slavery. Southerners saw in the new President a bogeyman of their own greatest anxiety, the loss of a way of life based on the subjugation of one part of mankind by another.
And this is the other place where apologists for the Confederacy get it grandly wrong: the idea that secession was a legitimately democratic choice made by some Americans in pursuit of their own vision of liberty. I’ve several times been in discussions where apologists asserted that that vast majority of Southerners supported secession, and that therefore it should have been allowed to pass peacefully. “Vast majority” is the misnomer here, for close to half (some 47 or 48%) of all human beings living in the secession states were themselves held in slavery. The choice for secession was made by a much smaller number of people—albeit the ones with political power. Indeed, not even all white Southerners supported secession, and a great deal of effort was made to sell poorer, non-aristocratic Southerners on the big break as the remedy for the coming changes that would force them to treat blacks as their human equals.
And then, the war. In some ways the war saved the Southern cause by giving it a narrative of heroism nicely removed from the narrative of human bondage that stood behind it all. As I said, it’s still possible to admire the courage and the honor shown in that struggle they understood by different lights, and even to understand that the people involved understood it by different lights. What is not possible is to believe that they were actually right.
April 12 is the anniversary of Fort Sumter, with its sesquicentennial next year. In the present political climate, it possible to worry that someone—some new Timothy McVeigh or John Wilkes Booth, some neo-Confederate partisan—is going to take the occasion for something very stupid. I certainly hope not. Among other offenses, it would be a crime against the decency of men 150 years ago who, while wrong, at least did not squander the wisdom of hindsight.
I don’t hate the South. I love it. I'm a Southerner with long roots; my ancestors to a man wore gray. I’ve read my Foote and my D.S. Freeman, and most of the rest. I know the South, and I know the War better than most Southerners. I love the South, and I know the South was wrong.
And it doesn’t matter that they believed they were right. Who doesn’t, after all? We can admire their tenacity and their aplomb, admire their beards even, but we cannot look back longingly and take their valor to excuse the moral stain and physical horrors of slavery. They did believe they were right. They were brave and honorable. Salute them, but don’t forget that we, for all our modern decadence, do know better. No amount of nostalgia can erase the fact of our national sin, and it doesn’t matter that it took a bloody war to win this knowledge. Even had it come with something worse—a harsher war, a longer Reconstruction—we would be fools to pretend to honor the past by willfully forgetting its crimes.
Most of us have a list of books that have somehow changed us. Some of us have lists of books that we ourselves have changed, often with scissors or an open flame. To have been a reader of a whole bunch of books means that any list of the most influential can never be complete, but it can be useful to single out a few for comment. Herewith I offer a brief consideration of some titles that have affected me. These are books that I came to live deep inside, like a basement dweller, just as they came to live inside me, like a parasite.
-----------------------
The SF novel Dune was one of the first. While Herbert’s peculiar brand of Jungian psychohistory is only two or three steps up from Scientology, the novel’s other Big Ideas are definitely heady, invigorating stuff for the young first-time reader. I credit the novel with two central and significant realizations. One of these is the power of language to shape political reality. I don’t mean Frank Herbert’s language, which is notable only for its vast superiority to Brian Herbert’s language. Rather, Dune is a novel where characters themselves are always using language to do that very thing (shape political reality, I mean), mainly by deciphering subtle body language or speaking secret codes known only to two or three other people. It’s like they all majored in semiotics before getting addicted to spice and hatching plans to bring down their particular far-future Byzantio-Caliphate.
The other important takeaway from Dune is a stark and cynical appreciation of the ideological basis and function of religious belief. This is a novel where the faiths of billions are manipulated like so much silly putty—apparently with complete endorsement and approval of the novel’s author, protagonist, and fanbase. It had a significant effect on this adolescent reader, anyway, although this may owe something to the fact that the lead character is a thirteen-year-old boy named Paul who happens to be the Messiah.
I came to crime and detective fiction late, and I believe I may have done it backwards: I started with James Ellroy. American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential opened my eyes to an entirely new mode of fiction that was gritty, violent, amorally ungrammatical, and unabashedly sentence fragmenty. Ellroy’s motto is “America was never innocent,” which I believe must be substantially true, at least if it has been behaving anything like people in a James Ellroy novel. Whatever the case, the patterns of one’s first major writer in a genre shape one’s fundamental expectations to a remarkable degree, and this was definitely true of Ellroy. So much so, in fact, that when I finally got around to classic crime writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, I assumed that it must have been thematically significant when the characters did not actually shoot heroin before fucking.
In a more literary vein, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment affected me very strongly, as I came upon the novel at just the right time. Like the novel’s protagonist, Raskolnikov, I was a morally tortured university student living alone in a tiny room little bigger than my bed. Like him, I was chronically short of funds. Like him, I had only one friend, who was (as in the novel) kind of a dork. Like Raskolnikov, I came to believe that the murder of a Russian pawnbroker was not only ethically defensible but would also make me a lot more like Napoleon. There were differences, of course. I never actually murdered my Russian pawnbroker because I lived in Atlanta, and the only two pawnbrokers I could find were Serbian and from New Orleans, respectively. Also, prostitutes would not date me.
It’s a remarkable fact that the majority of English majors get their start with T.S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land.” Perhaps this is due to the work’s wide range of allusion, running from Homer to scripture to bawdy vaudeville. Perhaps it is the poem’s modernist, experimental style of making language new. Perhaps it is because Eliot’s own footnotes basically write the term paper for you.
It is difficult to overestimate the effect of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom on today’s white Southern reader, particularly if that reader was never asked to read As I Lay Dying in high school. The novel’s densely allusive, poetic, biblical style was both an awakening and a challenge to one’s assumptions about American literature. Here was a novel that complicated the received conventional wisdom of southern race relations. Here was a novel that explored rage and mistrust as positive virtues. Here was a novel that richly rewarded one’s extensive knowledge of Civil War trivia. Yet it all came at the cost of soul-searching guilt. “I don’t hate the South. I don’t!” wails sensitive young Quentin Compson at the novel’s close, a sentiment not shared by many readers after the novel’s 300 densely Faulknerian pages. The only thing that kept me from jumping out of my own window at the end of the book (as the author hints that Quentin does) is the fact that I was not, like that protagonist, attending Harvard at the time. It is one of my favorite novels.
It is my firm conviction that Moby Dick is not only America’s finest and most insightful novel of whale-hunting, but also her finest and most insightful novel of whale-gutting. And it takes a certain gutsy Americanness to launch your whale novel with two hundred pages of anecdotes, parables, allusions, and character building before the first whale is even spotted, let alone caught, flayed, deblubbered, and rendered into those casks of whale oil by which nighttime nineteenth-century readers would be able to see the text of Moby Dick in the first place. You may rest assured that Melville was keenly aware of this irony. By not reading this book by whalelight yourself, you are already missing out on something, um, seminal in the American literary experience.
I cannot recall reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, although it is possible that I am mistakenly remembering not reading Remembrance of Things Past.
I have watched the rise of the memoir over the past decade with great trepidation, for I feel that it can only lead to more writing in which people talk about themselves instead of something interesting. A predominance of memoir puts us all in grave danger of forgetting why novels were invented in the first place: the fact that, while accounts of real life may be uplifting and inspiring, real-life dialogue is nearly always dead boring. Thus it is that novels are to be preferred to memoirs, particularly those with the author photo on the front. (It should be noted that a Nazi-killing exception exists to the rule of superiority, in that memoirs of Nazi-killing are always preferable to novels of the same. This is because scientific criticism has identified a correlation between memoirs of Nazi killing and actual dead Nazis, while no such correlation exists for fiction. This is especially true when the author is an existentialist.)
Like everyone, I eventually went to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in English literature. At the time, post-structuralism seemed important. Very important. Already the first stirrings of post-post-structuralism were beginning, however, and this was also very important. (I never did quite get a handle on what structuralism was or had been, but I assume that it, too, had once been very important.) An education in such things naturally involved consuming a great deal of prose so important as to be nearly unreadable at the time and completely unmemorable now. I do recall a fondness for Michel Foucault, or at least a fondness for reading about Foucault. Of Foucault’s critical generation, now only Harold Bloom is left, and he only talks about Harold Bloom, even when he is talking about Shakespeare. In the end, I narrowly escaped being run over by a laundry truck while leaving an S&M brothel on the way to obscuring my collaboration with Vichy authorities during 1941 and 1942.
My particular field of study was English Renaissance literature; specifically, the seventeenth-century English religious lyric; more specifically, six or seven poems by John Donne. I also put time into Shakespeare (for who doesn’t?) and John Milton (perhaps out of guilt at the brevity of my Donne collection). Let it never be said that studying the literary past in all its literary richness does not lend a new perspective on modern life. I learned a terrific amount about the history of literature, and about how people once did not know that they had psychology in them, and that the world-ending antichrist spoken of in Revelations was in fact (this is proven by the very diligent scholarship of the period) Philip II of Spain.
The most influential book of my life has been the Bible, particularly in the King James Version (also known as the 1611 Authorized Version or the Not Catholic Version). In the American suburban milieu of my youth, of course, we cottoned to more modern and more accurate translations, but none of them approach the King James for sheer literary majesty. Indeed, had the KJV never been produced, most literature in English wouldn’t know what to sound like, and we would have to watch BBC miniseries in which vicars, rectors, and earnest country priests all read from Tyndale instead. Nobody wants that.
And did you know that there is a genuine school of Biblical textual criticism that considers the King James Version to have been actively and uniquely composed by God for accuracy and truth? This is called “double inspiration,” and I think this it is an excellent move on God’s part. Not only does it make Him sound much more Shakespearean, but it ingeniously helps to withhold salvation not just from Hindus and Confucians but from the French and Germans as well.
In my life as a high school teacher, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into a number of classic works, usually by returning to them again and again on a strict timetable, year after year. I have also been given the chance to delve deeply into an endless stream of student exercises and writing assignments about these works. Furthermore, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into classroom management, behavior modification, faculty meetings, and crisis conferences with students and parents. But my love of literature has not wavered, and some of the works I’ve taught eight or nine times still have the power to move me towards enlightenment or the window.
Still, such books are invariably colored by the experience of teaching them to young people. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for instance, is a rich meditation on truth and memory and storytelling. In the classroom, however, it becomes the ground for clarification of such basic concepts as “the draft” and “the Cold War” and “wishing you hadn’t killed people.” Certain readers of Pride and Prejudice have difficulty understanding why four hundred pages are necessary when Keira Knightly can do it in two hours. Cormac McCarthy is a brilliant and sobering excavator of the human soul, but in classroom practice he mainly just scares the children.
And then there is Shakespeare, our greatest writer even after four hundred years. (That’s one full year for every page of Pride and Prejudice!) The challenge of Shakespeare in the classroom is that of inviting students to love the language. Not the plots, not the actors, not even the characters, but the language itself. This is difficult, and there’s no way to force it; most of us begin as far from Shakespeare as we do from Urdu or COBOL, and students bear no blame for this.
But what many young readers fail to understand, and what blocks them I think, is that it’s really best to identify with Shakespeare’s villains rather than his heroes. Villains are the characters he does best, not merely because they get the best lines but because they are the most human. Shakespeare, even more than the Bible, certainly more than Frank Herbert or James Ellroy, understands that what is most interesting about us is our great and miserable sinfulness.
And this is what literature is for, I think. We do not use Shakespeare. Indeed, we do not use any of the books that change us, even the ones we laugh about. Instead, those books use us. They find us, partial and ridiculous, and make of us what they can. They try very hard, they often fail, but even that failure leaves us somewhere other than where we started. One thing I have learned in all this reading is that a good book, whatever its time and place, always mocks us out of precisely where we are.
Welcome to your English course! Together we will explore a full set of complex literary works, each of which stands on its own but also forms part of a larger conversation, as you will see. Or perhaps you won’t. It’s one of those things that’s kind of difficult to pull off, actually.
We will write extensively and in a variety of ways. This is a year to attempt to refine your own voice on paper. I mean this, and I really hope it happens, but I can’t make any promises. You’re going to have to do most of it yourself, and it mostly depends on where you’re starting from. If you’ve been reading all your life, you’re probably going to do fine (which is pretty unfair, I know). If you’ve never been much of a reader, I hope you’ll start. I can give you a list of good books that may annoy your peers and/or parents. I wish I could inspire everyone to read and think and love it, but I’m not exactly Robin Williams here. In this class we will explore how literature makes meaning, and also how we make meaning in our own writing. The idea is that an encounter with really excellent writing could actually spark something for you. It’s all graded, though. Sorry about that.
Junior year is an exciting time, but also a stressful one. You’ll probably develop some awful habits. If you hide them well enough, I might not notice; I have a lot on my mind. Come and talk to me if you have questions, problems, or just want to chat. But I don’t really want to hear about the icky or illegal parts. That’s what your Art teacher is for.
Texts:
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
An alcoholic’s book about boozy, self-destructive drinkers whose lives are imploding because of alcohol. We will use it to talk about bullfighting.
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
An extraordinary account of 1930s Southern gothic girlhood via alcohol.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
A dead body decomposes and talks about it. I’ll bet you ten bucks that Faulkner can’t even remember writing it.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
A minority writer, because sober. I will notice if you merely rent the movie about the bandaged guy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
A fable of obscene wealth, lies, pretensions, and freedom from consequences. Sound familiar? Also, alcohol.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Hamlet is a linguistically challenging and philosophically difficult dramatic study in the superiority of Kenneth Branagh over Mel Gibson.
…as well as a variety of short stories and poems photocopied in violation of somebody’s copyright.
Course Expectations:
Your Notebook and Homework: You must keep a notebook in English. Stop laughing. You should write down everything I say more or less exactly as I say it. This will help you to present it slightly differently in your own essays.
Writing will happen to you throughout the year. There will be written responses to reading, in-class writing practice, short written homework assignments, and longer critical essays. The longest assignment will be something close to five pages, or maybe four with creative margins. Don’t panic. You probably think this is a lot, but have you ever written a one-hundred-ten-page college thesis? Have you? I didn’t think so. Punk.
All writing for this class must be produced on a restored 1930s-era Underwood typewriter, the kind used by the all of the writers on our syllabus, possibly excluding Shakespeare. The Underwood is a sturdy and reliable machine capable of standing up to all manner of author eccentricities, peccadilloes, vices, and obscenities. During the Second World War, the Underwood Typewriter Company made M1 Carbines for the War Department. What did your iMac ever do to kill Nazis?
Reading: I will expect you to do all of the reading for each class before the time it is due. Actually, that’s the last thing I expect. Couldn’t you at least try?
Every sentence you don’t read is a stinging tear I weep for the future.
Speaking and listeningare of utmost importance in your English work and in the world beyond. In class discussions you will practice articulating your ideas while also developing the attentive listening skills. This will allow you in the future to, you know, be proactive or leverage your competencies or think outside the box or something. Whatever.
A Note on Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is defined as the copying of another’s work, the use of a single essay for more than one course, misrepresentation of another’s work as your own, copying and pasting from Wikipedia, copying and pasting from Elizabeth, buying a fifty-dollar paper online the night before the assignment is due, dipping into the essay file at your older brother’s fraternity, having your girlfriend do your homework, copying and pasting from that guy’s website, digging through my recycling bin for discarded papers, having Mom “edit” your final draft, failing to adequately cite your sources, making up imaginary sources, failing to adequately cite your imaginary sources, or similar tricks designed to give the appearance that you wrote, did, or know something you haven’t, didn’t, or couldn’t possibly. In a world of spin, faulty logic, and shoddy attribution, being honest and accurate about your relationship to your sources is more important than ever. You’re not fooling anyone anyway.
Assessment Guide: The Rubric
Grade A (90-100)
Reading:
* Demonstrates a thorough understanding of the complexity of literary texts. Willingness to deal with both (or more) sides of ambiguity. Congratulations! You will never win an election.
* Embarrasses teacher (who didn’t quite do the rereading this year) with recollection of textual facts.
* Can tell the business end of a metaphor.
Writing:
* An A paper can be graded in under ten minutes. This means more to me than you can possibly imagine.
Studentship:
* Active participant in class discussion. Saves classmates trouble.
* May I write you a college recommendation letter? Perhaps a supplemental?
* Popular with faculty. Unpopular with peers.
Grade B (80-89)
Reading:
* Demonstrates coherent and adequate understanding of literary texts.
* Doesn’t always call a memoir a novel.
* Excellent recall of principal characters and their associated reductive themes.
Writing:
* Adequate focus present or nearby.
* Margins not ridiculous.
* Uses SAT-prep words, sometimes appropriately.
* Double-digit sentences.
* Adequately disguises summary as analysis.
Studentship:
* Nods appreciatively.
* Pretty much almost always prepared with book and assignments.
* Knows place.
Grade C (70-79)
Reading:
* Bookmarks SparkNotes.
* Demonstrates a thorough understanding of book cover.
* Confuses main character with that actress in the miniseries.
* Connections are disjointed, irrelevant, fragmented, desperate, indicative, unsupported, and sad.
Writing:
* Broad generalizations drawn from a variety of contexts.
* Wild guesses still within ballpark.
* Regurgitation of other’s points and/or lunch.
* Forgets to save.
Studentship:
* Probably stoned.
Grade D: (60-69)
Reading:
* Possibly a little.
Writing:
* The kind of thing I wish I could help.
* Really I do, but I hardly know where to start.
* Maybe it’s my fault?
Studentship:
* Thank you for playing.
Grade F: (59 and below)
* Believe me, I’m not looking forward to the parent conference any more than you are.
