English 480 Fall 2023

A few last things to finish up the semester:

Remember, your “Araby Project” is due Tuesday, December 5, by noon.  Just slide it under my office door at HUM 553 by the deadline (along with any other work you may need to surrender).

As you may have heard, SF State administration has chosen to terminate about 150 instructors for Spring 2024.  This means that several hundred class sections will be missing from the Spring 2024 schedule.  Some colleagues have put together this (anonymous) survey to gauge how these massive cuts will affect students.  If you get a moment, please visit the survey here.

I will be on strike on Tuesday, December 5.  I invite you to participate in the festivities at 19th and Holloway.

Comrades, I have so much enjoyed our time together every Tuesday afternoon.  You are a wonderful bunch of students and human beings!  Venceremos!

Due to ongoing labor strife, Tuesday, November 28, will be our last class session.  Remember: your Araby project is due Tuesday, December 5, by noon.  You can drop the project off in my office – – HUM 553.  Let’s get together next Tuesday to chat about the project and to bid fond farewells!

Remember, due to disruptions from the APEC event, we’ll be holding class via Zoom on Tuesday, November 14, at 2 p.m. (Check your email for the Zoom link.)

On Tuesday, we’ll talk about the Araby project.

Actually, laddybuck, we do have a plan!  Read “Araby” from Joyce’s Dubliners. Once you’ve read the whole story, go to this excerpt.

Here’s what you want to do with the excerpt:

• annotate at least three segments of the text – – words or short phrases – – for characterization, labeling each segment with mode (ID/DD; ID: action: “lazy,” etc. etc.) and trait.
• annotate at least three segments of the text – – words or short phrases – – for setting, labeling each segment for scope, scale, and semiotics.

If you see a segment that’s already been coded but you disagree with the coding, simply include your alternative in a reply to the original annotation.

For Thursday, read John Fiske’s semiotic analysis of the beach!

And for Halloween (Tuesday, October 31), read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story: “Young Goodman Brown.”

When we get together on Tuesday, we’ll talk about the semiotics (a la Fiske) of setting in “Young Goodman Brown.”

Last class, I tried to show how “character” – – per Fiske – – may be less about the representation of “real” people and more about the way that narratives try to imagine and work through cultural/social conflicts or tensions.  I.e. might be most illuminating to look at Joyce’s Dubliners as trying to create a character system  – – a matrix of traits (shared among characters)  that actually represents Joyce’s efforts to think through the situation of middle-class life in Dublin, circa 1914.

Let’s keep this idea in mind as we move on to our next category of formal analysis: setting.

For the week ahead, look through this rubric for making sense of setting.  (Sadly, I wish we had more class time to review it.)  After you’ve reviewed it – – return to “A Little Cloud.” Identify as many different settings within the story as you can.  For each setting you identify, use our annotation tool to code or analyze this setting in terms of scope, scale, and semiotics.  Don’t worry if you’re not quite sure if or how this setting checks all the boxes of social, spatial, geographic scope or historical, duration scale, etc.  Just give it a wing and we’ll sort things out on Tuesday.

For Thursday and Tuesday, read Joyce’s “A Little Cloud.” Make at least five characterization codings using our patented rubric.  Before class on Tuesday, review the John Fiske piece on “reading character” if you can.  In class, we’ll try to make sense of Fiske’s approach to character using “A Little Cloud” as our test case.

For Thursday (10/5), review your characterization coding for “An Encounter.”  In light of our discussion/analysis in class last Tuesday, revise the annotations you’ve already made (using our character coding rubric) and add at least two more annotations (for a total of seven annotations).  For Tuesday (10/10), read John Fiske’s very interesting semiotic approach to characterization.  We’ll talk about Fiske in class on Tuesday.

For Thursday, you’ll want to code Joyce’s “Two Gallants” for characterization.  What does this mean?

First, review our notion of “characterization.”  Next, consult this guide to coding for character traits.

Once you feel you’re up to speed on characterization and coding, you’ll have to code the short story by annotating it.  To annotate – – as I did with the first paragraph of “Two Gallants” – – you’ll use hypothesis.  This is a really easy-to-use online annotation tool.  Here are the instructions for how to start annotating. You’ll be making your annotations on the full text of “Two Gallants.”

Make at least five characterization codings on the text of “Two Gallants.”  Don’t double up; if somebody has already coded a piece of text, move on and find something new to code.

Try to finish this up by Saturday (9/30).

For Tuesday (10/3), you’ll want to do the same thing – – made five codings – – on the text of Joyce’s “An Encounter.”

The purpose of this work is to get some practice reading for characterization.  Normally, we’d do a lot of this work in class.  However, since we’re hybrid and we’re falling a bit behind, we’ll have to get some practice online.

If you have questions or concerns or etc. – – reach out to me at lhanley@sfsu.edu.

 

 

Strange days – – the weird power outage at SFSU last week threw my calendaring skills for a loop.  For this Tuesday (assuming the university has paid its PG&E bill etc.), let’s talk about characterization.  Be sure to have read “Two Gallants” from James Joyce’s collection, Dubliners.  And, don’t forget, your “Mystery Text” assignment is due on Tuesday (9/26).