The Obligatory Welcome Post

Welcome to the official blog of ENGL 345: Critical Reading, Fredonia English's most famed and feared course!  It's going to feature students doing reflective, exploratory, and heuristic writing--using writing as a mode of discovering or figuring out what they think about...well, just about anything they can connect with the course or use to achieve its goals!

What goals?  Simply for them to develop an awareness of their own acts of interpretation in reading and to develop an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to interpretation and criticism.  No big whup.

The two big themes of the course are surveillance and trauma.  On the former, we've been using Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story to help us get a handle on such critical approaches as formalism, structuralism, reader-response criticism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, cultural studies, new historicism, and marxism.  On the latter, we're building up to Steve McQueen's film 12 Years a Slave and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved by exploring feminist theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial theory, and globalization and transnational studies.

I'm hoping that if we start from

• questions we have;
• passages or patterns we're curious about;
• debates we find compelling;
• connections between what we're reading and discussing (in class and in our own online clubhouse) and what's going on that we find interesting or troubling or illuminating or...;
• and student-led team pedagogical projects we can't help but respond to;

we'll end up with a rollicking and rambunctious corner of the public sphere (didn't know they had corners, didja?).  No "4 and done" attitude here!  Right?

So let'sssss get ready to....post!