 Hello and welcome to English 2332 Literature of the Western World from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance online for fall 2017. I'm your professor, Dr. Eric Luttrell. We're off to an unusual start this semester to save the least. The beginning of the semester has been postponed for a week by Hurricane Harvey, the center of which passed just 30 miles to the east of us. Here in Corpus Christi we were lucky to escape with just some wind damage, but I know that many of you come from the east of us in the coastal Bend region and the Houston area and you've had to deal with a lot more catastrophic weather and flooding, and you're probably still dealing with it, helping family, friends and neighbors clean up in the aftermath. So the storm coinciding with the beginning of the academic year has put an extra burden on all of us. If you have questions about things like campus housing, registration, admissions, student resources, financial aid, anything like that, the university has set up a help center that you can call or email, and there's a frequently asked questions page if you're wondering what your status is and if you need a little extra help getting the semester off to a good start while dealing with all this other stuff. So you should also contact me if you're going to need some extra time to get started with this class this semester. The schedule for this class is going to be more flexible than normal in a semester in order to allow people to get their personal and family lives and property together while still beginning to tackle the assignments we have in the academic semester. Try not to get behind if you can avoid it, but if you have to start late, if you have to deal with some other things before you can get started with this class, you will be able to catch up with a little bit of extra work throughout the semester. Like many of you, my wife and I watch the storm escalate pretty quickly from a tropical depression to a category 4 hurricane. And at first we thought we'd just sit tight and ride the storm out, but as the magnitude of the storm increased we made the decision to evacuate. And I'm from Louisiana and I remember Hurricane Katrina and the effect it had on friends and family who were down in South Louisiana. So I knew as soon as it became a category 2 or 3 and then eventually 4 hurricane that it was time to evacuate. But that's not an easy decision, just leaving everything behind. When you evacuate you're faced with a lot of decisions about what preparations to make before you go. What should you take with you? What can you do to protect your house and everything you own from the wind and the rain and the possibility of flooding. And the whole time the clock is ticking. The storm is getting closer, the evacuation routes are getting crowded with traffic. You may remember that when Hurricane Rita hit shortly after Katrina in 2005 the city of Houston tried to evacuate, but that just caused such a huge traffic jam that people got stuck on the freeway for days. So it's a lot to think about and it's pretty stressful. But something gave me a little bit of comfort while I was trying to do whatever last minute preparations I could do to get the house ready before leaving. And that was a line of text from a narrative that we're going to read in this class. A guy named Atrahasis is given a similar warning about an impending storm and flood. And he has to face that same decision. What about my stuff? Can I take it with me? But his storm warning came with a bit of advice. He was told to leave property behind, dismantle your house, build a boat, leave property, preserve living things, forget possessions, save lives. So when Harvey was on the way and I looked around the house and realized how much we'd lose if it flooded, these lines helped me keep things in perspective. They made my decision making process a little bit easier. And they also reminded me that these sorts of events have tested human priorities, as well as ingenuity and resolve for all of recorded civilization. And I do mean all of recorded civilization. Those lines come from the oldest written narrative, the Tale of Atrahasis, which was inscribed in clay tablets around the year 1700 BCE. That's 3700 years ago. The story about Atrahasis and the flood was told and retold before. It was written down on these clay tablets and it was copied to other clay tablets and retold over the next thousand years. Eventually it made its way into the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is something else we're going to read in this class. And then a few centuries after that it was adapted again for another text you may already be familiar with. And that's where we're going to start our exploration of the last 4000 years of western literature. With a flood on the other side of the world at the eastern edge of that ambiguous region we call the West. We'll examine these narratives and many others like them starting in the Middle East and going all the way to Iceland. We're going to start in the Bronze Age and go all the way to Shakespeare's time, the early modern era. So we're starting here in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, which is modern-day Iraq. The narratives that preserved the stories of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh were written in cuneiform, an ancient language written on clay tablets, which allowed them to survive for thousands of years, but they survived in broken, crumbling fragments. That means that there are words and lines missing here and there, and that leaves gaps in the text that we have to deal with when we interpret, when we translate. Most popular translations into English that you get today as you go to the bookstore and find Stephen Mitchell's translation and others, they take some creative license in filling in those gaps saying, well, what probably happened here was this. But the translation we're going to use in this class, and this is the only book you're actually required to get this edition of, is a translation by Stephanie Dolly, which doesn't fill in those gaps. She leaves those gaps present, usually with ellipses like dot, dot, dot, or sometimes it just says that there are 16 lines missing here, and that leaves a lot of work for us to do as readers. That means you have to fill in the gaps, but what we're going to see is that even once we get to more complete text, we still have to fill in a lot of gaps. Any given narrative just gives us a little bit to sort of cue our assumptions, but the assumptions we bring to any text are not always something that the original author of that text may have been thinking of when he or she wrote that text. And so this is why it's very important that we start with Dolly's edition of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, and these are included in her book, The Myth from Mesopotamia. After Gilgamesh, we're going to read the biblical book of Genesis, a book that most of us probably feel we know, we feel this is something kind of familiar, but you may find that that familiarity is a bit deceptive when you come back and examine it the way a literary scholar reads a text. We're going to read Genesis the way that biblical scholars read it. We're going to find that Genesis also requires us to fill in gaps just like Atrahasis and just like Gilgamesh do. Fill in gaps with assumptions that originate outside the text and outside of that text's historical context. Assumptions that come from the last 2,000 years rather than from the time that the text was written. We then move from the Levant to the world of ancient Greece, and we're going to study three works by two authors about one character, the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. We're going to read the Theogony or the Origins of the Gods, as well as Works and Days by the Poet Hesiod. Then we'll read the play Prometheus Bound by the playwright, Estulus. This will also be where we introduce the genre of theater alongside epic poetry and prose narrative. We'll read selections from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and I expect that many of you have already read the Odyssey or at least parts of it, and you'll probably remember Odysseus's adventures with the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters and Calypso and that sort of thing. But what many people don't notice, however, is that in the Odyssey, it is Odysseus himself that is narrating those adventures. A narrative within a narrative. So instead of focusing on his adventures, we're going to be focusing on Homer's portrayal of Odysseus as a storyteller, and the events that lead him to tell his own story to the Phaetians. As we move a few centuries ahead and read Virgil's Iliad, we'll see that Virgil borrowed some obvious story elements from Homer, but that he put them in a distinctly Roman narrative. Achilles' rage and Odysseus's trickery made them interesting characters in Homer's day, but the Romans wanted a hero that put duty first. The Latin word Virgil uses his Piatas, fulfilling your duty to fate or to the gods, to your nation, even in the face of furor, the Latin word for passion, such as the passionate affair that he has with Daito, that tempts Aeneas to settle down rather than fulfilling his destiny. Then after the midterm, we're going to do something I haven't done before in a class that an online class allows me to do and our compressed semester kind of requires me to do, and that is instead of assigning every single thing you read, I'm going to give you a bunch of options, and I'm going to give you lectures to go with those readings, but you get to choose between these readings. So everybody in the class is going to read Beowulf and Chaucer's, Canterbury-Tales, General Pro-Lock, but in addition to that, you're going to need to choose four or five other texts coming from Old Norse literature or Celtic and Arthurian literature or English or Spanish literature from the Middle Ages, and you're going to pick what you read according to what you want to do research on and what you want to write your second essay on, and so I'm going to give you a list of potential essay topics, and then you're going to select your readings according to that. I'm going to list you that you want to develop further, compare certain texts, choose those texts, and you're also going to take quizzes on those texts and focus on your final exam on those texts and be able to leave other texts out and still make 100% of the grade. So after the midterm, we're going to go from the ancient world to the Middle Ages with the Old English poem Beowulf. This was a poem that was written by the invading peoples of the island of Britain about their home country, modern-day nations of Denmark and northern Germany and southern Sweden and Norway. And it's a poem written at a time when England had been converted to Christianity for centuries, but at the same time they're telling stories about their pagan ancestors, their polytheistic ancestors. That means that the narrator of Beowulf, the poet, has to use a lot of syncretism that is combining different world views, telling a story about one world view and maybe even adapting a story from another world view, but then putting it into a narrative that accords with his own ideology and belief system. And then you'll have the option to read the Old Norse stories of Amleth, which is a forerunner of the Shakespeare's Hamlet. But this is a much earlier, very different version, a very Viking version of Hamlet. Or you can read the saga of Hroth Krocky, or at least part of the saga of Hroth Krocky. Hroth Krocky's Saga is one that has a lot of parallels with Beowulf. So both of these texts have parallels with more familiar works of English literature, that is Amleth's Revenge has parallels with Hamlet, and Hroth Krocky's Saga is going to have a lot of parallels with Beowulf, which you can explore in your second essay if you choose to do so. You'll then have several options to choose from from Celtic literature and Arthurian literature, starting with ancient Irish literature such as Bricrius Feast, which has a lot of parallels with the more famous English poem Gowen and the Green Night. There's also the romance of Gowen and Dame Ragnel, which has a lot of parallels with Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. There's Marie de France's Arthurian Tale of Sir Lanval. And then there's a very interesting story of an African knight named Sir Morien, who is the son of a knight of the Round Table from Britain and an African Queen. All of these texts will have tie-ins with other works of literature. Arthurian literature is sort of making a comeback thanks to the recent Guy Ritchie movie, so I'm excited to be able to add these texts to our reading list. After that, we'll move down to Spain and a time when it is divided between the Muslim kingdoms from North Africa of Al-Andalus, as well as the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe. In the Song of the Sid, we'll meet Rodrigo Diaz, who is a Christian who fights against Muslims, but also with Muslims and Christians against other Christians and Muslims. His Muslim troops respected him enough to call him Said, which means Lord or Commander. And this leads the rest of his men to call him El-Sid, or Mio-Sid, my commander. And El-Sid was not a noble. He's the first of the heroes we'll read about, who's not from the upper class, but he becomes one of the most powerful people in Spain through his victories on the battlefield. In medieval Europe, before El-Sid, if you weren't born a noble, you didn't matter, but El-Sid is going to change all of that, and this poem tells us how. We'll move back up to England for the High Middle Ages, and we'll read the general prologue to Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and you'll have the option of reading and writing about the Wife of Bath's Tale. Just like the Song of the Sid, Chaucer gives voice to the commoners, and the Wife of Bath speaks up for women in a time when women were usually portrayed as the objects of men's affections. But we're going to read the Wife of Bath's Tale remembering that this is a man's story about a woman. In fact, it's a man's story about a woman telling a story about a man who's trying to understand women. And we'll conclude the semester with your choice of Shakespeare plays. You can either read Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or you can read Othello, the Moor of Venice. Both of these plays adapt previous narratives, other sources that Shakespeare had, so he's not creating these stories out of whole cloth, but he is adapting older stories that could have been told in a conventional way, but he's adding a very modern angle to these otherwise heroic characters. With Shakespeare, we start to see some of the vulnerabilities that had not typically been portrayed in heroic figures, and we're going to see that both with Hamlet and with Othello, as well as the people around them. The conventional heroes may not have what it takes to survive in the modern world, the early modern era that Shakespeare is exposing to us through his plays. So from roughly 1700 BCE to about 1600 AD, that's about 3,000 years, 3,300 years of literature, 3,300 years of insight into how the world works, how people think, what matters. There's a lot to learn from the content of these texts, but there's also a lot to learn from the act of reading them. Some types of classes focus on information content. You learn the facts and the formulas because they're the things that you need to know when you leave the classroom. Some types of classes teach skills. In those cases, the information you learn in that class may become obsolete, but the skills that you learn can still be used when the world has changed. This class, we try to do both. We'll deal with the content because it's valuable for its own sake, but it also helps us to sharpen the skills that we need in the real world. And the real world may not be something that you typically associate with a literature class or with the act of reading. So what kind of skills am I talking about? Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently begun to study empirically how reading affects the way that we think and interact in the real world. And what they found may be surprising. Many people presume that reading is just a form of entertainment at best, and entertainment is usually assumed to be either a waste of time or worse to make it lazy. Physically as well as mentally. But studies like this one from Emory University have found that reading a novel causes developments at the neuro level that are similar to learning from actual direct real world experience. Another study found that reading difficult literature made people better able to deal with ambiguous situations in the real world. It improved mental flexibility and the ability to think ahead when confronted with uncertainty. They state that quote, exposure to literary texts can support a more fluid and flexible representation of meaning in order to allow for multiple potential truths to be weighted with similar levels of curiosity. Noticed more easily and updated as new information becomes available. The figurative language in literature and as devices like metaphor, irony, and new ways of describing familiar things can also improve our real world thinking. Understanding metaphors requires us to keep two conceptualizations in mind at the same time. And reading irony requires us to add a social dimension to that in order to distinguish between the ways things are and the ways that the characters think 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 model the physical world and understanding how those people understand each other. Narrative fiction is a sort of virtual reality simulator that we enter into in order to practice one of the most difficult things our brains do on a day-to-day basis, and that is understand other people. According to psychologist Raymond Marr and Keith Oatley, quote, narrative fiction creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction, literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference. And for the journal Science, psychologist David Kidd, who by the way is a native of South Texas, not far from here, tested people's ability to figure out other people's ambiguous emotional states after reading either a scientific work or a fictional literary text. And he found that social intelligence has improved more from the difficult literary fiction than from nonfiction. He and his co-author write that our contention is that literary fiction uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters' subjective experiences. Just as in real life, the worlds of literary fiction are replete with complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration. 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 more flexible, interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters. That is, they must engage in theory of mind processes. Now I'll come back to that term theory of mind in a later lecture, but you can think of it as the ability to think about what other people are thinking and about what they think other people think and what they think I think they think and that sort of thing. So this research tends to center around three aspects of real-world thinking that are developed when we read literature. And they are, first of all, number one, narrative framing. That is the way we frame the real-world data in a narrative form. Number two is conceptualization and diction, you know, the words we use, the use of figurative language such as metaphors to represent the world. Usually to understand complex and abstract phenomena in terms of simpler concrete concepts. And then number three is the use of theory of mind or social intelligence to understand how other people think. And I'll develop each of these three elements later in later lectures and then we'll apply them to the text that we're reading. To develop these skills we have to go beyond what most people do when they read for pleasure. Most of us, most of the time, read a text in order to find out what happens, to find the plot. But if we just look at the narrative to see what happens or to get the plot, we fail to notice how we are getting that information and what might be oversimplified, what might be left out, how our assumptions are being shaped by the words that are used, the concepts that are invoked and the way cause and effect are represented as having a purpose, even when they may not have a purpose at all or maybe the purpose that the author implies. So if we think of a text like an iceberg, 90% of an iceberg's mass is floating beneath the water. We don't notice it. We notice only that 10% that's sticking up. And this is like the 90% of a text that we don't really pay that much attention to because we're in a hurry to figure out the plot. And if you only focus on what happens on the plot and you're only attending to 10% of what's going on in that narrative, you wouldn't even be able to see that 10% without the 90% that holds it up for your attention. And so in this class, we're going to do the difficult work of mapping out the narration processes, things like framing, language choice, social imagination, or theory of mind. Okay, so how is this going to work practically? What are the basics? As an online class, there's always going to be a lot to keep in mind. And here's how the class itself is actually going to function. First of all, there are the videos. Obviously, if you've gotten this far, you've found your way to that. But if you're watching this video embedded in Blackboard, I recommend that you watch it and the rest of the videos directly on YouTube. You should see the link to the video directly below the embedded video within Blackboard. And you can also type in the address you see at the bottom left of your screen to get the entire playlist for the semester. There will be some videos added a little later on that I haven't shot yet, but the ones that are already there are already available for you. And I'll update this playlist as I add more videos to the class. This will be especially helpful later in the semester when you need to go back and review past lectures, when you've forgotten things I've said about metaphor and narrative and that sort of thing. Another advantage of watching directly on YouTube is that you can speed me up. If I start to get boring, you want to sort of get through the lecture a little bit faster. As long as you're able to keep up with the content, you can actually, it should be below the red arrow there, you should see this gear icon, and you should be able to click on that and adjust things like the resolution of the picture. If you can't read the text, especially on a map or something like that, you don't want to raise the definition, the number of pixels to at least 720p, maybe 1080p. This is, almost all of these videos are recorded in 1920 by 1080 pixels. But you can also speed up, choose the playback speed by choosing normal or 1.25 or 1.5 or something like that. But whether or not you speed up the lectures, you should always stay focused just like you're in a classroom listening to a lecture face-to-face. Because that's what this is. This is a lecture. Don't confuse it with other YouTube clips that you would watch for fun. My purpose is not to entertain you, my purpose is to inform you. And as part of that, you want to sort of clear your time, you don't want to watch these videos while you're engaged in something else, and you want to sit in front of the screen and be able to take notes. So I highly recommend actual written notes. Get a paper notebook with a pencil or pen and write out the notes as we go. Multiple studies have shown that when people, even in a classroom, when one group of people is given a laptop and told to take notes digitally, they can take notes a lot faster. And obviously you can take screenshots of any of this and feel like you have that information. But if you're just taking a screenshot, if you're just copying, pasting text, or even if you're just typing text, you can type a lot faster than you write. And so you can get a lot more of the information saved, but it's still not in your head. It's still just on your computer. The Germans have a great worry that we don't have in English, which is Vorhandenheit. That's having a tool is one thing if you have it in your toolbox, but having it in your hand and knowing how to use it is something very different. That's what Vorhandenheit is. So if you have that information stored on your computer, you don't really have that information ready to use yet, ready to do something with. So you want to have that information ready to use and you do that by writing. Even though it takes more time to write by hand, that means your brain has to actually process the information first and then decide what you can write down in the time you have. Now obviously this is on a video. You can press pause anytime if you need to get caught up. You can back up if you need to. Something you can't do in a face-to-face class. But don't assume just because you have access to the internet and you can watch these videos over and over again that you have that information. You only have that information if it's in your head and your notes are there to kind of make you use the information enough. Write it down so that you can guide your memory. The notebook isn't there to have the information there in the notebook. The notebook is there as part of an exercise. And of course I recommend you don't just do this in this class, but even in your face-to-face classes. Write down your notes rather than typing them out by computer. And I'm going to try to make your note taking a lot easier. I'm going to put certain letters in red. Certain words are going to be in red, especially those that are on note cards. If you remember note cards, these little index cards that have key concepts on them. So later you're going to see these cards again, the ones with things like story and narrative with particular definitions. I want you to know those. Write them down in your notebook, but don't just leave them there. Also learn those terms well enough to know what I mean when I use them in describing particular texts. Also you're going to see long quotations that are going to fill the screen up with text and be kind of intimidating. But I'll try to focus your attention with those by using red letters on the most important parts of that passage. But the thing is if you just write down those red letter parts of the quote, it may not make much sense on its own. That's why the entire quotation is there. Now as an online class, most of this is going to be through Blackboard. You can watch a lot on YouTube. Obviously you're going to be reading the books. But a lot of our interaction, especially your test taking and training in essays and things like that is going to happen on Blackboard. And just like with any other class you take in college, the first thing you want to look at is the syllabus. The syllabus contains all the information about how your grade is calculated, what your assignments are going to be, what texts you're going to need. And here you see at the very top of the syllabus I put my information, although I've left this information out of the video because it's going to be on YouTube. But if you go to Blackboard you'll see my contact information, my office hours, that sort of thing. I highly encourage you to come by any time during those office hours if you want help sort of figuring out what's going on in the class and that sort of thing. You can also call during those hours. But I recommend you only call during those hours because I'll be here and I'll be able to answer questions. If you leave a message, you'll probably be better able to sort of articulate your thoughts and I'll be better able to respond by email. But after that is the description of the textbooks you're going to need. And notice only one textbook is required. The only textbook you have to get is Myths from Mesopotamia by Stephanie Dolly. This has the story of Atrahasis and it has the epic of Gilgamesh. And I want you to have this edition. This edition is already in the bookstore. There are plenty of copies. There are a few copies, half price books over on SPID. But it's very important that you have this edition because everything's going to depend on the process of making sense of the text as it's represented in that book. For all the other readings, I have recommended editions. If you prefer to have an actual book in front of you, if it's easier to read an actual book, I've made recommendations for which books to get. But I'm also going to make available free online versions. Now, I want to stress something right now. The free online versions are usually free because the work that was put into translating them was done over 100 years ago. So anything published before 1923 is public domain. So you can download it for free. You can usually find it for free and give it to other people for free. You don't have to pay for it. But because it was written so long ago, the language it's written in, and this language is usually deliberately antique. They write these things to sound even older than it was. It will sound like reading the King James Bible, or reading Shakespeare, even though you're reading something that was written in, say, 1910. So before you decide not to buy the textbook, try to read the free version. If you look into the section for each unit, you'll see that I have links to the free online versions, and then I also have the recommended version of that. And if you decide that you want to just go with the free version, try to read the free version first. Try to, you know, at least read a few pages worth, and see how long it takes you. The language might make it hard to read, so click on one of those links and see, is this the kind of language I can read, you know, the equivalent of 100 pages or more of a particular text. And if you can't, I suggest maybe going and buying the paper version. And I have it recommended paper books for all of these readings, so if you prefer to read more recent translations of, say, the Iliad or the Odyssey, you may have a copy of the Odyssey left over from high school or something like that. It will probably work. But be careful that whatever version you get, be sure that it's an unabridged translation, not an abridged translation, not what's frequently called like a storyteller's version, or something like that. But be sure it's got every line of every book of whether it's the Iliad or the Odyssey or whatever. I recommend translations by people like Robert Fagels or Richard Lattimore or Stanley Zimbardo, as long as it's an actual line-by-line translation. And it could be prose, in other words, full of paragraphs rather than poetry. That's fine as long as everything is there, because what we're going to be focusing on in here, especially with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are parts that people don't usually focus on. Sometimes they get left out of abridged versions. But there will be free versions of those as well. They're just going to be an older language. And before you go out and buy all of the recommended versions, keep in mind that later in the semester, you're going to have options. You don't have to read everything. So I have a recommended version of Othello and a recommended version of Hamlet. But you don't have to read both Othello and Hamlet. You'll choose which one you want to focus on and you just want to wait and then read that. You just want to buy that book rather than buying both of them. And you may want to wait until later to decide which of those you really want to focus on. There are going to be other readings that are listed for each unit. And the links to those will be in the unit, the section on the left that is marked for that unit. For example, while we're reading The Epic of Gilgamesh, we're also going to read about a recent tablet that was found over the past 10 or 20 years that fills in some of the gaps that people didn't know about for most of the 20th century. So even since Stephanie Dolly's version of The Epic of Gilgamesh was published, a new fragment of Tablet 5 of The Epic of Gilgamesh was found. So you're going to read from that tablet, but you're also going to read about that tablet through some of the additional readings that are in the Unit 3 Gilgamesh unit on the side of the page on Blackboard. And I know all of this is confusing, so I try to put everything in a chronological list on the schedule of readings so that you just look at, you know, we're in Unit, we're in Week 1 right now, starting September 5th. So the first thing to do is watch this video lecture, what you're watching now. The next thing to do is watch the video lecture titled What is Narrative? And if you go to the schedule of readings on the left on Blackboard, you'll see all of that laid out for you. And then when you start doing the readings, starting with Atrahasis, next week I've got that listed, so, you know, watch the introduction to Atrahasis video first. Then watch a video called War of the Ghosts and then a video about metaphors and then read Atrahasis from Stephanie Dolly's edition. Then you'll see that the first quiz for Atrahasis and Gilgamesh comes a little later in Week 2. Hopefully this should make it easier. This is probably the easiest place to go to find a point-by-point schedule of what to do when. So now you're probably wondering where your grade comes from. That also is covered on the syllabus. 15% of your grade is going to be the Blackboard Discussion Forum. 15% is going to come from quizzes. There are two essays to write. One is going to be due at midterm and one's going to be due at the very end of the finals week. They're each worth 15%. You're going to have 10% devoted to assignments and then there's going to be a midterm exam and a final exam. Each of those is worth 15 points. The Blackboard Discussion Forum is first. This is my attempt to make up for the fact that we can't have class discussions. You can obviously ask me things through email, but I would like you to ask your colleagues, your classmates, your actual discussions. When one person brings up a question or points out something, maybe somebody else didn't notice. I want everybody in the class to see that. And so, for each unit from 1 through 13, there's going to be a discussion forum for you to discuss something about the text that we're reading. You can ask a question to me or to the whole class. You can offer up an interpretation of some part of the text and see what other people think about it. There's a lot of pages and that sort of thing. You'll need to contribute at least one post that is at least 150 words. And I believe Blackboard has a counter and if it doesn't, you can write these out in a Microsoft Word document or Google Docs or something like that, which is frequently a good idea because if you write something directly into Blackboard, there's a risk that you might hit the back button or refresh the page in which case you lose everything you wrote. So I recommend you write these out in your application and then copy and paste that into Blackboard when you're ready to submit it. And I will respond to these eventually, but what I would like to do first is hang back and see if you ask a question. I'd really like to see if somebody else in the class can answer that and generate discussion that way. And then once the discussion is kind of tapered off, then I'll answer questions that have gone unanswered. But this is really your chance to sort of read your readings, your interpretations of these texts and ask questions and answer questions that other people have. You don't have to be an expert for these. You don't have to have the right answer, quote, unquote. This is an exercise and interpretation. There are going to be quizzes for each unit. Actually, there's going to be a quiz for each unit from one through seven. And then after the midterm at the time when you're able to pick and choose which text you read and which you don't, there's going to be a quiz for each reading. And you don't have to take all the quizzes. The grade book is just going to show a running total and I'll figure up how many quiz questions you have to get right in order to get 100% and I'll post that so you'll be able to sort of, you'll have to, you figure out the percentage on your own as you go because Blackboard doesn't have a way to omit things. Each quiz will have its own due date, but because a lot of people are having to take care of hurricane repair and restoration and may get started late, I'm going to allow for late submissions all of which are going to all quizzes are going to have to be finished by October 23rd at midnight or for Blackboard's midnight, that's 11.59pm. But be careful that you don't let yourself get too far behind. Don't wait and think that you can take all the quizzes at that time because that's also when your first essay is due and also when your midterm exam is due. You've got a lot due on midnight of Monday October 23rd. Don't let yourself get too far behind. The purpose of the quizzes is to, for one thing, encourage you to read and more psychological studies show that when people are encouraged to learn something and there's no quiz involved, they don't learn it as well as when they know there's going to be a quiz. But at the same time I don't want to penalize you for not reading closely enough or for not getting every single fact. The quizzes are intended to be formative as well as summative. Those are two terms for two different motivations of a test. A summative test is to see how much you learned. A formative test is to say, did you notice this? Well, be sure to look for this kind of thing next time. And in order to sort of make it a little bit low stakes, you will be able to take all the quizzes if you choose to. You don't have to get everything right. You can still make 100% even if you don't do well on all the questions. You can take more quizzes than are required to make 100%, which means that if you miss a lot of questions, you could still potentially get 100%. So again, the quizzes are sort of motivation. They're sort of to direct you and direct your reading process, not to punish you for not memorizing the text. There's also the essay section. You can have two essays. The first is going to be due again October 23rd at midnight. The assignment for that is already posted in the essay section if you want to take a look at it. The second essay, the final essay is going to be due the last day of finals week. And in that, I'm going to sort of set up several options for you that are, you're going to want to look at immediately after you finish your first essay, because they're going to direct which text you focus on in the second half of the semester. If you decide that you want to, if you're interested in Shakespeare's Hamlet and its origin, the origin of that story in the Saxo-Gromaticus story about Amleph, then you'll want to direct your reading that way. So you're preparing to write your essay from the midterm rather than waiting until the last week. The essays are going to be five-page essays. They're going to be submitted on Blackboard using SAFE Assign, which checks for plagiarism. And any incidence of plagiarism will result into zero for that essay. There's a, that's 15 points, 15% of your final grade. Depending on the severity it may be reported to the Office of Student Affairs and be entered into your student record. So make your own argument and cite all of your sources. You can use other sources other than ones we use in this class. Be sure that you cite them. Be sure that you cite them using APA format and have them listed in the reference list at the end. You can incorporate other people's ideas as long as you're doing something with them. You're adding some interpretive process to this. And then there's going to be an assignments grade composed of everything that's not an essay quiz or exam or discussion post. This is going to start with the War of the Ghost Assignment. It's a peer-reviewed assignment. Now, because these are peer-reviewed assignments, that means other people are in the class are giving you a grade. If they give you a grade that you feel is unfair, you can always contact me. Don't worry too much about the peer grades. I'm going to look over these and adjust the grades as necessary. There's going to be a midterm exam that's going to have a week to complete and it's going to be due October 23rd. And then there's going to be a final exam that's going to be you're going to have the week of finals week to do that. It's going to be very similar to the types of questions you do during the quizzes. So the quizzes will help you prepare for that. But there's also going to be a short answer section where you're actually going to type in the answers. When you take these, as well as when you take the quizzes, because you only get to take them once, you want to be sure that you read the instructions carefully. That you ensure that you have a reliable internet connection. That is, you're not somewhere that you're frequently knocked off line. You can always come into the university if you're within driving distance. Come into the university and use a computer lab here. If not, find internet access if you don't have reliable internet access at home. Find somewhere that you do. And be sure that you're somewhere that you won't be disturbed for whatever the given period of time is. If it's a quiz, you'll have 10 minutes to complete it. Be sure that you have 10 free minutes. But if it's a midterm exam, be sure that for each section you have that time limit free. With the midterm and the final, it's usually two sections. You have an hour to do each one. You don't want to be interrupted there because once the timer starts for these exams, it goes for that length of time and then stops. And that's the only chance you have. You can't restart a test, and then stop it and then restart it a couple hours later or a day later or something like that. You'll only be able to take the test once. So again, all of this is listed, the requirements are listed on the syllabus. The order in which you'll complete each thing, watch each video, read each text, take each quiz is on the schedule of readings on Blackboard. So that's it. If you have any questions, please email me or call me during office hours or come by during office hours. If you find any errors on Blackboard, if there are any broken links, if there are any applications that don't start when they're supposed to, like a quiz or something like that, please let me know as soon as possible. The way Blackboard looks for me as an instructor is different than the way it looks to you, so I may not notice that something doesn't appear on your side that does appear on my side. Any questions, let me know as soon as you can, and I will try to address them as quickly as I can. I can't always answer your emails immediately. If you send me a midnight email, I may not get back to you until the next day. I try to answer all emails within 48 hours. If you have a specific question that I can answer very quickly and easily, then email is the most appropriate way to do that. But if you have a more vague question about adjusting to the types of readings that we're doing or something like that, if you have a more general question about a particular reading, then a visit or a phone call might be a better way because I'll usually have to sort of figure out exactly what you're asking and then the response might take a while. That's something that's very difficult to do in an email. So don't hesitate to come by during office hours or call during office hours. If you can't make it during my office hours, email me and we might be able to arrange a time that I can be up here that you can make it to. So let me know whatever questions you have or whatever points that you'd like to discuss. Don't hesitate to bring them to me. And I hope this is an easy class but an informative class and an interesting class. And I hope that you're able to integrate it with the real world which is something that hit us like a hurricane just this last week. And I hope you're able to adjust and get the semester started right. If it takes a little extra time, we can work with you. The campus as a whole university here at TAMUCC we're ready to work with you to try to integrate your academic experience with the real world.