 Hello, and welcome to English 2332, Literature of the Western World from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance, for the summer semester of 2018 here at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. I'm Dr. Eric Luttrell, and I'll be your professor for the next five weeks. We're going to begin the class with some of the oldest literature in the world, literature that was written down 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the part of the world we refer to as the Middle East, but as we're going to see, the literature and other elements of culture that originated here would travel over the centuries, influencing literature of ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, and of course Israel, Greece, and Rome would greatly influence the culture and literature of Britain, Ireland, Spain, and eventually us here in the New World. Of course, that doesn't mean that everything in Western literature originated in Mesopotamia. When a story travels across different cultures, it loses some elements and picks up others, and it's constantly reworked and reimagined according to the customs and worldviews of the people who hear and retell it. That phenomenon, that reiteration of narrative is something we're going to pay special attention to in this class. But that's where we're starting. We're going to start with the flood narrative of Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both of these texts have early versions that were written down by 1600 BCE, so about 3,600 years ago, and they continue to be revised for the next thousand years. The narratives that preserve the stories of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh were written in cuneiform on ancient clay tablets, which allowed them to survive for thousands of years, but they only survived in fragments. These these tablets are broken. There are words and lines missing here and there and that leaves gaps in the text that have come down to us today. Now, most popular translations of, especially Gilgamesh, fill in those gaps. They say, well, we don't know exactly what was here, but we'll we'll imagine what was here. But the version I've asked you to buy and to read for this class, both Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from Stephanie Dally's translation in her book Myths from Mesopotamia. And in this translation, she doesn't fill in the gaps. She shows you where a line breaks off and there's just a dot dot dot or their brackets saying that certain words are missing here and very often their entire lines missing. And what we're going to do is look at how we go about the process of filling in the gaps in a narrative. So this is the only book that's actually required for the class. In other things we read in here, you're going to have options as to which edition, which translation you use. But for this, these texts for Atrahasis and for Gilgamesh, we're going to have to use this version. It's available in the campus bookstore. It's also, I believe there are a couple of copies at least at half price books. After Gilgamesh, we're going to read the biblical book of Genesis. And this is a book most of us feel like we know quite well. But you may find that familiarity can be deceptive. We're going to read Genesis the way the biblical scholars read it, except that we're going to read it in English rather than Greek or Hebrew. But we're going to read it the way scholars do. And we're going to see that even Genesis requires us to fill in a certain gaps. And we're going to try to examine where we get the information that we use to fill in those gaps in that text. Now, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, and Genesis are all going to comprise the first unit that we're going to do in the first week and a couple of days. After that, you're going to have some options. Now the summer session is only five weeks, as opposed to the 15 week semester we typically have in the spring and fall. And every course is supposed to give you the exact same requirements. Expect from you the exact same work that you would do in a regular semester. But I realize for a lot of people, especially those of you who are working and taking other classes, that's just not going to be possible. It's not going to be possible to do the amount of reading in five weeks that you would be able to do in 15 weeks. And because of that, I'm going to give you some options. After the first unit, which includes Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Genesis, you're going to choose three other units to do for the second, third, and fourth unit. And I've divided those units up this way. One of those units is Greek works about the Titan Prometheus. This is the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. And in this unit, we'll read the Theogony or the Origins of the Gods by the poet Hesiod, as well as his works and days. And then we're going to read Prometheus Bown, a play by the Athenian playwright, Escalus. That's going to be optional unit A. Optional unit B will be Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, just excerpts, not the whole thing. We'll read some sections from both of these. And I expect that many of you have already read at least parts of the Odyssey. But you probably remember Odysseus's adventures with the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters and Calypso and that sort of thing. But what most people don't realize is those adventures that Odysseus goes through, we only know about those because Odysseus, the character himself, tells that story. When he's stranded on the island of the Phaetians, he narrates his own adventures. And we're going to look at the build up to that and how he comes to the point where he begins to tell his story. And we're going to read it as a narration of events rather than the story itself. Another unit option is Virgil's Aeneid. And this is something that works very well with the Iliad and the Odyssey because Virgil is picking up some of the same story material, but he's writing from a very different perspective. His hero, Aeneas, has very different qualities from Achilles or Diomedes or Odysseus in Homer's works. He's writing, he's putting Roman virtues in these characters from past Greek literature. And we're going to see that his goal in the way he narrates this story is very different than Homer's was. In another unit, you can choose to read the Old English poem Beowulf alongside two analogous works in Old Norse. Those are the Saga of Rolf Krocky and Greta Saga. Both of these were written in Iceland and they record stories about heroes that are very similar to Beowulf. And in some cases, the Saga of Rolf Krocky take place at the same place in Denmark. And people are often surprised when they read Beowulf closely, as well as these Old Norse epics. They may expect to find barbarians or Vikings who just hack and slash and that constitutes the whole story. But all of these, especially Beowulf, depict heroes with a level of social intelligence that is nearly always overlooked by readers the first time they read through these. These works depict heroes who were obviously very physically capable of fighting, but also they bear a sort of social strategic intelligence that is usually overlooked. And these poems also have to deal with a problem that was new in the Middle Ages, and that is how to integrate the Old Pagan stories into literature after their conversion to Christianity. Another reading option is the Song of the Sid. This is a medieval epic about the Spanish hero Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar. This epic takes place at a time when Spain is divided between Muslim kingdoms from North Africa and Christian kingdoms from elsewhere in Western Europe. And in the Song of the Sid, we read about Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar, who was a Christian who fights against Muslims, but also alongside Muslims and Christians against other Christians and Muslims. And his Muslim soldiers respected him enough to call him Said, which means Lord or Commander. And this leaves the rest of his men to call him El-Sid, or Mio-Sid, My-Sid, Commander. And El-Sid is not a noble, and that's something new in this epic. He's born a commoner, but it's through his victories on the battlefield that he becomes a person of some importance. But at this time, society doesn't want to recognize virtue from a commoner, and so that's going to bring him into conflict with other aristocrats in his own kingdom. Another reading option is Arthurian literature. There will be three videos that go through a lot of background material about the history of King Arthur and then the development of the different elements of King Arthur's legend, the legend of the Holy Grail, the sword x caliber and that sort of thing. The text that you're going to read for this is called Morian. It's an excerpt from a much longer work called the Lancelot compilation, but it's about an African knight who travels to Britain to find his father, and he ends up going on a quest alongside Sir Gowen and Sir Lancelot. There's a unit on Chaucer, in which you'll read the general prologue to Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and then read the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale. Besides being one of the most modern characters of the Canterbury Tales, we'll see that the Wife of Bath knows the power of storytelling. Just like Elsie gives voice to the commoners, the Wife of Bath is going to speak up for women at a time when women were usually portrayed as merely the objects of men's affections. But when we read the Wife of Bath's tale, we have to remember that this isn't a woman speaking, this is a woman created by a male author. In fact, it's a man's story about a woman telling a story about a man who's trying to understand women. And two of your options are plays by William Shakespeare. The first is Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and you'll read that alongside medieval Norse work called The History of the Danes, specifically a chapter about a figure named Amleth. Saxo's story about this sort of Viking Hamlet named Amleth has clear similarities, enough clear similarities to show that this is an early version of what would become Shakespeare's Hamlet. But you're going to see a story that ends very differently and a character that is portrayed very differently. And part of the reason for the difference in portrayal isn't just Shakespeare's genius, which of course there's plenty of that, but it's the fact that in one version, the early version, the author is able to tell us exactly what everyone is thinking. But in a play, the only way you can find out what other people are thinking is from what they say, and oftentimes what they say is intended to mislead. So that has led to centuries of debate over whether Hamlet was actually insane or why he did or didn't do what he does or doesn't do in the play. And the other Shakespeare option is Othello, The Moor of Venice. And you'll read this alongside Cynthia's short story, The Moorish Captain. That is an early version of the story of this African captain who comes to Venice, but is duped into mistrusting his own wife and the people around him by this conniving Iago figure. When you read this alongside of Shakespeare's Othello, you'll see that, okay, the story is very similar, perhaps the same, but Shakespeare's version really gets into the heads of all the characters involved. So we see this thing sort of unfolding slowly, gradually, and we start to understand exactly how the characters shape the world through narrative even within the play. And it leads us to question how much of the way we see the world is actually determined by the way other people present it to us. So like I said, you're going to have three of these optional units to choose for units two, three, and four. Unit one will be comprised of Atrahasas, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis. Unit two is whatever you want it to be out of that list from A to I. Then you'll choose another one for unit three and another one for unit four. And you can make up your mind as you go. If you don't know all three right away, you can go ahead and pick one for unit two on June 6 when we finish unit one. As long as you're able to complete one of these units. Now each of these units is going to consist of the readings, video lectures, and you're going to take a quiz on whichever one you choose. And this is the calendar we're going to go by. So everyone's going to be doing the same readings for the next week and a couple of days. And you can do the readings for unit one on the days that I have them listed here on the calendar, but you don't have to. It is possible to put everything off until maybe June 4th, but I wouldn't recommend it. This is a lot of reading. I mean it's a literature class. I've compressed the class as much as I can for the five-week summer course, but it's still a lot of reading. So be sure to pace yourself. But there are going to be three quizzes from this first unit. They're all due on June 6th. And then after that point, you're going to start the second unit, which is your choice. So all of this is going to be done through Blackboard. Now hopefully you've either already got it or you're about to get Stephanie Dolly's textbook. I have recommended paper copies of other works if you choose them, but most of the other readings and all of the assignments are going to be done through Blackboard. So the first thing to do on Blackboard is read over the syllabus. In the syllabus, I break down the specifics of your grade, where your grade comes from. 25% of that is going to come from the discussion forum. I'll go over that in more detail. The quizzes you're going to get with each unit. So there are going to be three quizzes that are part of the first unit and then three more, one per unit. So there's going to be six quizzes total. You're going to write an essay at the end of the semester and you're going to take a final exam at the end of the semester, which will function very similar to the quizzes, but also contain a short answer section. It's up to you how you allot your time as long as you meet these due dates, but you'll see that our units conclude on Wednesdays and then begin on the following Thursday for the next one. Starting June 6th, if you miss a Wednesday, you won't be able to go back and finish the work for that unit. So it's very important that you complete something every week. You're not going to be able to wait to the very end of the semester and do all four units. Now, you'll notice on Blackboard, I have divided the first unit up into three sections. That's just to sort of make it easier. Each of those three subsections has its own quiz and that's why I divided it up just to make it easier to sort of put these assignments into manageable chunks. Unit 1A focuses on Atrahasas, but also includes a lot of conceptual material. Again, you're going to have to have Stephanie Daly's miss from Mesopotamia. The book is available at the TAMUCC bookstore as well as half price books on South Padre Allen Boulevard. Very important that you get that edition. But first, what you're going to do is watch some of the introductory videos where I go over the different concepts that are going to be important in the class. Things like the difference between a story and a narrative, the difference between historical and personal context. After you watch those videos, then you'll start with Atrahasas and I'll put things in order like this to recommend that you watch this video before you watch this video and then you read this section after watching this video but before watching this video. So for example, in the Atrahasas section, I recommend that you watch the introduction to Atrahasas first where I talk about ancient Mesopotamia and early writing, then watch the War of the Ghost lecture. Now that refers to an assignment that I'm not requiring you to do. It's an assignment that I normally have my students do in a 15 week semester but we don't really have time for that sort of thing. So don't worry if I'm talking about the War of the Ghost assignment that's not something that you're required to do. You'll then watch the video lecture on metaphor and then some of the background material in part two of Atrahasas and then I want you to read Atrahasas. That's probably the best time now. You can read Atrahasas before watching any of these videos but you'll at least need to read Atrahasas before you watch the third Atrahasas lecture. In this and other units, I also include suggested readings or videos or other resources. For example, this is a Nova episode about an archaeologist that I'll mention when we talk about Atrahasas and early writing. These resources are optional and I will say optional or suggested in each of those sections. They're not required. They're just there that if you're interested in the things we talk about and in particular if you decide to write your essay on something in that unit, this would be a resource that would help get you thinking about what there is to explore. Then down at the bottom of every unit or subunit in this case, you're going to see that there's a quiz. Look for this icon. Each quiz is something you're going to take online. It's just multiple choice questions. There are going to be 10 questions in each quiz. You're going to have 10 minutes to take the quiz. You can wait as long as you want up until that deadline but once you begin the quiz, you'll have to complete all 10 questions then. You won't be able to start it and stop it. That's why it's very important that you have a secure internet connection. If you don't have good reception wherever you are, then go on the campus or go somewhere where you can find a computer lab or borrow someone else's computer or go to someone else's place that has a better connection because once you start a quiz, it doesn't matter if you get cut off, if you close your computer or whatever, the timer is still going and after 10 minutes from the time you start a quiz, it will automatically submit whatever you've done so far and if you didn't complete it, then you'll get those questions wrong. So very important you have a secure internet connection when you're taking your quiz. So after you've taken the quiz on Atrahasis and the introductory concepts, then you'll move on to the Epic of Gilgamesh and this is one where it's very important that you have Stephanie Dolly's translation and you won't be reading it just sequentially. You'll read certain sections from the standard Babylonian version of Gilgamesh, then you'll switch over to the old Babylonian version, then you'll watch a video, then you'll go back and read more of the standard Babylonian version. That will make more sense once you actually get to the material but I've given you sort of a list of, you know, read this first, then switch to this page and read this, then read this, then watch this, then read this. If you have any questions, email me but hopefully you'll be able to figure it out once you get there. Then you'll take the quiz on the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then you'll move on to the Book of Genesis and I know almost all of us probably have at least one Bible at home, whichever translation it might be, but I really want you to read from the PDF that I've included here. The PDF comes from the new Oxford annotated Bible. This is a new revised standard version but it also has two introductory essays that are going to be very important for this unit. So you're going to read those two essays first, then watch the video lecture about Genesis chapters 1 through 11. Then you'll go back and read chapters 12 through 32 and then watch the lecture on chapters 12 through 32. Then you'll take your third quiz from unit 1, which is a quiz on Genesis and after that you'll almost be through with unit 1 but there's one other element to this in every other unit and that is the discussion forum. In the discussion forum you're going to make some observation on your own, some comments, some question, something about some of the literature that we've read that interests you or maybe something you happen to know that maybe other people in the class don't or maybe research that you've done on your own. This is where you contribute that to a group discussion where everyone is talking about, in this case we're going to be talking about the same readings. Now in the subsequent units everybody's reading something different so you'll still be bringing information from whatever you've read to people who may not have read what you've read, in which case you might be suggesting, hey this is really interesting you know if you're into this you might want to read this. I really want to see people talking to each other answering each other's questions or following up what other people say and then once all that's done then I'll come in and answer any questions that have been left unanswered and that kind of thing. So the function of the discussion forum is to make up for the fact that we're not in a classroom where you can each talk to each other. You're going to hear plenty of me talking about a text but this is your opportunity to share something about the text with me and with the rest of the class. And it also should be a relatively easy way to help your grade. Remember that your discussion forum posts are 25% of your grade as long as you put in something substantive, as long as you don't just say something like one sentence long that just says a summary of what you've read, then that's going to be something that should be an easy grade as long as you actually put something into it. So those are the basic components of your grade and the subsequent units or you're going to choose what you do but they're going to go basically the same way. You do the reading, you watch the videos, you take the quiz and you write something in the discussion forum. Now as we get closer to the end of the semester I'm going to talk about the essay. I'm going to go ahead and put up the assignment for the essay but this is an essay where you're going to compare different texts and you're going to look at them from different historical points of view. In your essay this is going to be a comparative essay where you look at how the same story is treated from different historical contextual standpoints. This is very different than saying here's what I think about the story. We're going to be very wary of using our own personal context when interpreting a story. I'll get into that more in the lecture about personal versus historical context but in this essay you're going to try very hard to sort of get out of your own personal sort of 21st century American point of view and look at the text the way the authors and the people that lived at the time that text was written would have read it but then see how another person or another culture adapts that story and makes a different narrative out of it. And in the next couple of weeks I'm going to publish a video trying to help talk about how and how not to write a paper, an interpretive paper about literature. And the final thing you can do is the final exam. The final exam is going to have elements of your quizzes. Maybe they might be the same questions, they might be different questions that will be in multiple choice format. Those are randomly assigned but whichever readings, whichever optional units you chose as well as the first unit you're going to see those again. You're also going to have a short answer section where you choose to write a short paragraph answering one of the questions I ask about what you read. After June 27th, after the last unit of quizzes is due, I'll show you all the answers from your previous quizzes but it will only tell you if you got it right or wrong and if you got it right it'll tell you what the answer was but if you got it wrong it won't tell you what the answer is. A lot of people ask me can you please make available the answers to those quiz questions and I'm not going to do that because for one thing the exact same question might end up on your final exam but the the whole purpose of that is if you see that you got a question wrong then go back to the readings and try to find the right answer because most likely that means there's not just sort of one answer that you're missing. There's a particular section of that text or of the historical context that I discussed or maybe the theoretical concepts that are missing so the quiz the reason I show you what you did or didn't do on the quiz isn't necessarily to prepare you for the final exam it's to show you what areas you may have missed out on the first time you read something so go back and try to fill in your own gaps figure out what it is you still haven't quite gotten about that text then you'll be better prepared for the final exam but of course like in any other class the point of the class isn't to take a final exam and do well on it the point of the final exam is to see how well you've done in the class so the goal of the class is learning not test taking the test is an unfortunate necessity for for you and for me so this is a survey class and we cover literature from over 3000 years and there's a lot that we can learn from this literature but part of the reason that I'm I don't have a real problem by cutting the semester down this way and to making these readings many of these readings optional is because the most important thing you'll learn from the class isn't just something from the texts a lot of people look at canonical literature you know the literature that the recognizable literature from throughout history and think oh if I read that then I'll learn some wisdom some ancient wisdom that I can apply to today and forever and that's sort of true but the problem is these texts as well as other forms of literature and mythology are usually susceptible to projection we can take something we expect to find and we can project it back into a text and one of the probably the greatest skill that I want you to get out of this class isn't sort of matching something you see in literature to something you already think what I want you to get out of this is to see how narrative works how people take old stories and put new meanings into them turn them into new narratives and how literature can take us out of our usual way of thinking this is what I'm going to later call defamiliarization I might go into a text just noticing things that are familiar to me but if I really read it carefully if I read it critically then I start to notice that the things I expected to find aren't really what's there or something might look familiar but if I look at it more closely and if I look at it in its historical context I noticed that it's much different than I thought it was on first reading and it's that process that skill that we want to develop most in this class what the texts have to say is great but what you do the action the skill that you bring to reading that's the the thing we really want to develop psychologists and neuroscientists have recently begun to study empirically how reading affects the way we think and interact in the real world and what they found might be surprising people presume that reading is just a form of entertainment entertainment is usually assumed to be either a waste of time or to make us lazy both physically and mentally but studies like this one from emory university have found that reading a novel actually causes developments at the neural level that is the neurons the cells that make up your brain and the changes that happen at the neural level are the same sorts of changes that happen when you actually do something in the physical world another study found that difficult literature literature that defamiliarizes the way we look at the world made people better able to deal with ambiguous situations in the real world it improved middle flexibility the ability to think ahead when confronted with uncertainty these researchers said that exposure to literary texts can support more fluid and flexible representations of meaning in order to allow for multiple potential truths to be weighed with similar levels of curiosity noticed more easily and updated as new information becomes available in other words it makes us better at considering multiple possibilities rather than just seeing something and immediately assuming we understand it the figurative language in literature literary devices like metaphor irony new ways of describing familiar things these also improve our real world thinking understanding metaphors requires us to keep two conceptualizations in mind at once reading irony requires us to add social intelligence to that in order to distinguish between the way things are and the way a character thinks they are the implications are not only that we become better at modeling the physical world but we also become better at understanding how other people understand the physical world where they might be inaccurate or where they might know something we don't that's why some other psychologists have said that narrative works as a sort of virtual reality simulator and these simulations in literature help us understand situations that we've never experienced and they help us understand people who are very different than we are people that we might not ever come into contact with in our normal social environment and in the journal science native of south texas david kid and his co-author tested how people think when they read literary fiction and compared it to way people think when they read nonfiction so we might think oh as long as we read science we're actually learning more than we read some something that's mere fiction something that never really happened it's just an imagination but what they found was that when people read fiction literary fiction fiction that takes us out of our conventional understanding those people were after the reading were better able to understand social situations that were presented to them than the people who read scientific literature and they emphasized that it is this defamiliarization property of literary fiction that causes this they say whereas many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and informed by stereotypes those presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations readers of literary fiction must draw a more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters that is they must engage in theory of mind practices and theory of mind is something that's going to become very important for us in this class that is the ability to see the way other people are thinking not just you know are they right or wrong but how did they come to that wrong assumption does this person know what i think he knows does this person know that i know that she doesn't know what she what he thinks she knows these sorts of things can become very complicated in the day to day world but they become much more complicated in fiction than they do arguably most of the time in reality so these skills break down into three basic categories that we're going to focus on that is narrative framing when we take reality or we take a story we have to decide where to begin where to end what to include what to leave out and what causes what do we assign a certain intention to a character that the author did not specify this is the difference between the story the events that happened and the narrative then there's also conceptualization addiction that means the words that we use to convey what happened not just the direct description but also the metaphors what do we compare things to and finally there's theory of mind there is that ability to think about other people's beliefs their desires their strategies how they might react in a certain situation as opposed to another reaction now it's these sorts of concepts that i'm going to go over in the video lectures and you can access the video lectures as you saw on blackboard but you've also got this link to the whole playlist so if you're just watching it on your phone or on your computer and you don't have access to blackboard at the time or something like that you can access it on youtube now i recommend that you don't watch these on your phone because there's a lot of small text there's maps there's images and things like that to be might be really hard to see on a phone so i recommend you watch this on a full screen on a laptop or desktop maybe a smart tv if you've got one and and that includes not necessarily watching it embedded in blackboard now blackboard has this interface that you know the first time you click it it might just open it up in a little window but you're going to want to expand it so i advise you to go directly to youtube the blackboard link will have a link to youtube it's usually simplest to just go straight to youtube and watch it there now when you watch it on youtube you can speed it up you can watch it at the normal rate that i speak or you can move it up to to the rate of 1.25 you can move it up to 1.5 especially if you're reviewing something this is very helpful just keep in mind whether or not you speed up the lecture it's very important that you take notes now in my face to face classes i allow students to use anything any handwritten notes they have on quizzes and on the final exam and i encourage you to do the same thing now obviously i can't see what you're doing when you're taking the exam i could use one of the exam proctoring services but those end up costing you a lot of money so i'm just going to skip that you're not going to have a lot of time in the quizzes and on the final exam to you know do much if you're not already familiar with all the material so the best way to become familiar with the material is to actually write it down use a pencil or pen write on paper it's very easy to take screenshots of any of these lectures and that sort of thing but if you just do that you're not actually learning anything if you have to write something down you're going to learn it a lot better and a lot of studies over the past few years have shown that people who take notes on a computer don't learn the material nearly as well as people who have to write it down even though you can't write as much on a paper notebook as fast as you can if you were typing it and definitely not as fast if you just took a screenshot the act of writing it down means your brain has to listen to what's said then decide what is the most important what's the point of this how does it fit with everything else and then decide how much to write down so your brain is already actually trying to understand what's happening whereas you can just type everything you hear without even stopping to understand what the meaning of the words is so i can't encourage you strongly enough use a paper notebook write a lot and then use it when you're taking your quizzes and that sort of thing because by the time you've written it down you already kind of understand it and you're going to remember it a lot better you may not even need the notebook now i'm going to cover a lot of material in the lectures more than you're going to need to know for the quiz so i don't want you to be discouraged by the amount of material i don't want you to be bored i want you to have lots to learn you know and so different people are going to be looking for different levels of of information with all these texts different people have different goals when it comes to a class like this so i'm going to put a lot of information out there but what i really want you to know i'm going to put usually in red letters so if i give you a long quotation like the one on the left and i put some of it in red that means i definitely want you to remember the middle of that the part that's written in red when it comes to concepts that i want you to remember i'm going to put those on these little index cards these note cards like the one at the top right or down at the bottom where i give you the the term in red and the definition next to it when you come across these write them down don't just take screenshot actually write down in your notebook the definition of that because i'm going to use that term a lot later so the reason you want to know this isn't just because it's going to be on quizzes it's because i'm going to be using terms like redaction and narrative and you'll need to remember exactly what those mean and then you'll be able to understand how i'm using them and once you hear me using them in reference to literature a lot it's going to make a lot more sense what these are so a lot of times on the quizzes i'm not just going to ask you a definition the way it appears on a note card but if you understand the definition then when i apply it to a particular text you're going to understand how it applies so i hope you're excited about this there's going to be a lot of work to do but i hope it's really rewarding work and i hope uh you like the text that you read and i hope that you learn a lot about the places and times that generated those narratives i hope you learn a lot about uh you know the larger world through this but i especially hope you learn to develop those skills of identifying how stories are shaped how they're told uh how they're retold how our cultures shape the way that we understand the things that we read if you have any questions always feel free to email me also feel free to stop by my office during office hours those will be posted on blackboard and i look forward to reading your responses and hearing from you i hope this is a rewarding experience