Agenda for week of 9.13.10

more Swoon, image found at The Brooklyn Museum

The first three days of class will be devoted to your Student Run Discussions of the following essays.  I am interested in Heart of Darkness only in the sense of these essays, which vary widely in ways, or lenses, in how to approach this piece of literature. 

When you are prepping for this discussion, please have moments in the text (either the essays or the novel) which we can look at closely; and please look for the complexity and subtlety of the arguments presented in the essays--you can certainly agree and disagree with points made, but be careful not to read the essays as too simplistic.  Hopefully the essays will be good fodder for discussions and future use.

9.13.10: Day 4. SRD on Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, pps. 336 -349.
9.14.10: Day 3.  SRD on Andrew Michael Roberts’ “Masculinity, Modernity, and Homosexual Desire”, pps. 455 - 462.
9.15.10: Day 2.  SRD on Lissa Schneider’s “Iconography and the Feminine Ideal” pps. 474 - 483.

9.16.10: Day 1, Long Block.  Blog due by class time.  Details to be announced, but it will involve an elaboration on the the previous class discussions, so take notes.  In class I will introduce the “Heart of Darkness Found Poem Assignment” and we will look at some Modernist Poetry--probably “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / (Fighting in the captain's tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.”--that’s a Bob Dylan reference if you didn’t know.  Anyway, I digress.)
9.17.10: Day 7.  Class on Universal Theme and Independent reading set-up.

Overall Objective for the week: There will be a strong emphasis on developing philosophical ideas (about the human condition), as well as making themes more complex and variable for analysis.  

Essential Question: Why do we, as human beings, write?

The week of 9.20.10 will be devoted to the “Heart of Darkness Found Poem Assignment” & “the college essay”.