Posting
Most of the writing you will do in London will be submitted on the blog. I will not be grading individual blog posts, but I will be tracking your participation. Regarding form, try to strike a balance between the sort of formal prose you write for graded assignments and the casual language you use in texts and emails with friends. You should attend to spelling, grammar, etc. You might find it easiest to write your main posts in Word (or whatever software you use) and then paste them into a comment box on the blog.
Blog posts will fall into two major categories: literary criticism of the texts assigned for the course and site reports documenting your thoughts about what interests you most at the sites we visit. All blog posts should call attention to a specific thing that you notice, an eye-catching passage in a text, a particular object in a museum, etc.
Litcrit Posts are due before the first class on which we are scheduled to discuss a text. Your post should respond to a specific question(s) about the text on the blog. Your initial post should be 250+/- words. And you are also responsible for offering at least one thoughtful response to another student’s post. Those comments should be 100+/- words. The response posts should bring something new to the conversation — for example, a reference to another part of the text that affirms or complicates a point your peer has offered. Ideally I want to see a robust conversation develop about the texts we read. I will give extra credit to anyone who goes beyond the basic requirements.
When you post literary criticism, you will of course make general comments and/or claims about the novel, but it is important to me that you support your points by engaging specific words and phrases from the text. Be sure to interpret/explain/analyze the interesting passages you discover, explaining how this or that phrase produces a particular effect in your mind. (This is what many people call “close reading.”)
On the litcrit page (see the link under the Posting tab on the menu at right), I offer an example to give you a sense of the kind of work I expect to see.
Site Posts should present and discuss a particular information or artifacts that you encounter on a scheduled site visit. Keep an eye out for those specific pieces of evidence that tell us something important about the Gothic tropes we are studying or, more broadly, about the Victorian period and English culture.
I encourage you to present and discuss non-textual material in these posts. Look for striking images that capture what it was like to live in a different place and time. Treat those images just as you would treat a word in a text, finding out what you can about them and speculating on their meanings.
The images that you post and write about might be an image — a painting, etching, print or photograph that you see on display in a museum or exhibit — such as this image of a woman in the late 1880s using a new-fangled invention.
When you present such an image, supply as much factual information as you can collect: who created it and when? where did it originally appear? what exactly does it depict? Then let us know why you think it is especially interesting. Does it illuminate a passage in the literature we are reading? Does it capture some crucial element of the cultural and historical context of those books? Try to describe as carefully as possible what you see and explain in detail why you find it intriguing.
On the Site page page (see the link under the Posting tab on the menu at right), I have posted an initial entry to give you a sense of the kind of work I expect to see.