UPDATED 1/12/08

E 375L, Victorian

Literature

35290

Instructor: Jerome Bump; <mailto:bump@mail.utexas.edu>; Office: PAR 132 Office phone: 471-8747

Computer-Assisted Instruction Substantial Writing Component

TTH 2:00 PM- 3:30 PM PAR 104; office hours: TT 9:45-10:45, 1:15-1:45 and by appointment. Course web site:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E375L08/

To understand the Victorians we will explore their architecture on campus and in downtown Austin. Our reading and writing about Victorian literature will focus on leadership, respect for diversity, and compassion for others and other species.

First of all, tracing the leadership motif in Victorian literature will reveal the purposes of universities, the liberal arts, and the English major. Reading Hardy and Carroll, we will compare the life of Victorian college students with that of students now.

Then we will discover that "pattern of conversion" from egoism to a higher purpose that characterizes so many leaders, now as well as then. We will focus on those who led the movement for compassion for animals in Victorian England, and faced the ensuing conflicts both with Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" and with Victorian imperialism. We will focus especially on the failure of many Victorians in India to acknowledge the more compassionate treatment of animals by Jains and Hindus.

Students should be prepared to think for themselves, for careful reading, and a lot of informal writing. Inspired by Victorian and university role models, formal writing projects may be devoted to a personal leadership vision. In any case, all students will begin with road maps of their lives. Then they will write papers, with illustrations, and save them in web format. Initial comments on the projects will be made by other students in the SWORD peer editing system, with the instructor then focusing on polishing subsequent hard copies for coherence, word choice, punctuation, etc.

Grades. About 50% of the final grade will be determined by the formal writing projects (500 points), 14% by the final electronic portfolio (140 points); 24% by informal writing (240 points); 12-24% by class participation (240 points). 1000 points are required for an A-; 900 for a B-; 800 for a C-; 700 for a D-. However, more than 1000 points will be available so that students can emphasize formal over informal writing or vice versa, class participation more than the portfolio, etc. At the end of the course, students will receive exactly the grade recorded in the online gradebook in Blackboard, even if it is one point short of the next higher grade.

Class participation consists of showing up in class on time, having read the material assigned for that day, and being prepared to talk about it. Students are encouraged to post entries in a Facebook discussion board about the readings assigned for that day before class starts. In any case, it is important to share in class: one of the goals of the course is better spoken as well as written communication, and learning to listen when others are speaking.

Print Literacy. Students will need before the first day a collection of xeroxed materials from Jenn's, 2000 Guadalupe (basement of the Church of Scientology at 22nd) , 473-8669. Also required are The Little Penguin Handbook by Lester Faigley (Longman); Carroll’s The Annotated Alice (W. W. Norton); Anna Sewell's Black Beauty; Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; Rudyard Kipling's Kim and the Jungle Books; and Ritvo's The Animal Estate.

Digital Literacy. Because two of the "Five Characteristics of a Successful Student at U.T." are "Good computer skills" and "Strong writing skills" this course emphasizes digital literacy as well as writing ability. In other words, to prepare ourselves for the twenty-first century, we will practice the New Literacies as well as the old. Hence students should be familiar with keyboarding, operating systems, word processing, electronic mail, and web-browsing. Students will be expected to maintain the correct email address in the U.T. Direct system and to check frequently their email, the course discussion boards and the online gradebook (courses.utexas.edu). Students are encouraged to download pictures from our class web site and add multimedia to all the writing requirements.

You may do most of your writing in Word and save your documents as web pages and then upload them to U.T.'s Webspace or a similar system. Or you may do most of your writing at blogger.com or livejournal.com or a similar site. In any case, you will then submit the URL of your writing documents to a Facebook Discussion Board or to a collaborative writing site called SWORD. Finally, each student will produce an electronic portfolio of their work in the course for the course website.

The portfolio will include some of the materials you uploaded to Facebook, where we will have a closed group "to help students develop a small community within the larger whole"(Carnegie's Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities ).

If students believe they will need more training in digital literacy, they are encouraged to sign up as soon as possible for some of the free classes and workshops offered by ACITS, TeamWeb, or the General Libraries. See

http://www.utexas.edu/computer/classes/

http://www.utexas.edu/cc/training/handouts/tutorials.html#internet

About the Professor

Jerome Bump has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. He was awarded the Jeanne Holloway Award for undergraduate teaching, the Dad's Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship, the Rhodes Centennial Teaching Fellowship for directing the Computer Writing and Research Laboratory, and chosen as a Mortar Board Preferred Professor. He is the author of Gerard Manley Hopkins and sixty chapters and articles, primarily on Victorian literature. For more information about him, his publications, his teaching philosophy, or his courses see http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/

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