Overview:
Reading Notes are one of the most important components of this course for grad students. In them, your job is to offer a thorough and detailed close-read of the piece for the rest of the students in the class. Feel free as you go to refer to any other text assigned in the course (or not assigned, for that matter).You should also feel free to read the text you're writing about across another text. (For instance, you might read Landow's chapter on Reconfiguring the Text across Deleuze and Guattari's "Introduction: Rhizome," or you might read Mark Amerika's Hypertextual Consciousness across any other novel or piece of criticism you've read.)

Your job is not to present a full-blown argument relevant to the text but to work through the possibilities the text presents, to ask questions (of yourself and us), to make connections among the various works/ideas/issues you'll read in the course. In particular, this semester, you should try to keep issues of the reader, writer, and text (and the relations among them) foremost in your mind. The two main functions of Reading Notes are to encourage active reading and to record a "journal" of your thoughts about a particular work that may spark class discussion.

Specifics:
Reading Notes should be about 3-4 screen-lengths (equivalent to 2-3 single spaced pages)--approximately 2-3 screens of summary and 1-2 screen of commentary.  You should write your notes as you read and then work through them again to get them in shape for posting to the class listserv. They should be posted BEFORE the class period in which the text they address will be discussed. Taken together, your Reading Notes are 20% of your grade, so take them seriously. Occasionally, I will comment on your notes to let you know how you're doing with them. But you should certainly feel free to check with me any time if you're concerned about your performance. At the end of the semester, I'll ask you to upload an HTML version of your Reading Notes and link it to your webfolio. Be sure to keep a hard copy and a disk copy of all of your reading notes, just in case.