The Book as Object
ENGL 245
Spring 2018
| Section:
01
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Look at this paragraph. A decade ago, you would have found it flipping through the pages of a printed course catalog, a book marked with your highlights and dogears. Now you scroll through it on Firefox or Chrome; you click through to check the textbooks; you copy and paste the description in an e-mail to a friend; or else you hit the back button and move on to something better. Is this the same paragraph, and are you the same reader?
This course is an exploration of the material forms in which we encounter the written word--from the scroll and the codex to the Word document and the website. Medium matters, and our goal will be to understand how. We will ask how different media technologies shape us as readers and writers; why books have come to mean so much to us as cultural objects; and how moments of media shift (like the rise of the Internet) transform our relation to words. Readings will set essays in the history of the book and media studies alongside literary case studies, and projects will engage with textual materiality through the creation of book-objects of our own. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (ENGL-Literature) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Essays by Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Elizabethan Eisenstein, Roger Chartier, Ann Blair, and others; literary case studies including Shakespeare, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and modernist magazines.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Regular short response papers and a final project that combines analytical and creative approaches to book-objects. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the Theory requirement for the English major. |
| Instructor(s): Fallon,Sam Times: ..T.R.. 10:20AM-11:40AM; Location: 116MTV102; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 3 | | |
| Seats Available: 0 | GRAD: 3 | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 2 | FR: 2 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 10 | 1st Ranked: 1 | 2nd Ranked: 2 | 3rd Ranked: 2 | 4th Ranked: 1 | Unranked: 4 |
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