Your grade will be based on the following:
At least one of 3 and 4 above must be a hypertext. Specific assignments will be made available on the main web site as the term progresses.
All work will be graded on a 100-point scale, in which 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 0-59 = F. The highest three numbers in a range are equivalent to a plus grade (e.g. 87-89 = B+), the lowest three to a minus (e.g. 90-92 = A-).
Attendance is required. I will decide penalties for excessive absences on a case by case basis, but normally you should expect that more than four absences for any reason, including illness and university-sponsored activities, will lower your final grade by as much as a third of a grade (3 points out of 100) for each absence beyond the three allowed.
Late work will be penalized as follows. Your grade on a paper or will be lowered by 3 points (e.g. 92 to 89) for every calendar day it (or any part of it--e.g. topic, draft, etc.) is late, up to a maximum of 20 points (e.g. 95 to 75). I very rarely grant extensions on papers, but you're welcome to ask. Because an F at 50 is much less destructive to a grade than an F at 0, it is nearly always worthwhile to make up late work.
Participation in discussion is important in this class. Although there is no separate grade rubric for participation, active and thoughtful participation in class will raise a borderline grade, while passive or disruptive participation will lower one.
Plagiarism will affect your grade in one of two ways. If you turn in a paper which is plagiarized in minor or unintentional ways (e.g. you use the language of a source you are writing about without quotes, but in only a brief passage and clearly without any intention to represent someone else's work as your own), the paper will receive an 0, and we will discuss plagiarism until it is clear that you understand what it is and how to avoid it. You may be able to rewrite such a paper for a higher grade if there is enough time left in the term. However, if you turn in a paper which, in my judgment, plagiarizes blatantly, either at length or with apparent intent to deceive, you will receive an F in the course, regardless of any other grades you have received, and I will file an Academic Dishonesty Report with the Associate Provost.
The listserv is designed to give you the opportunity to discuss the texts and issues of the class at your own pace and in your own way.
You should subscribe to the listserv as soon as possible, preferably within the first week of classes. To subscribe, send an email message to
listproc@titan.iwu.edu
with a blank subject heading and the single line
subscribe efiction Your Name
in the body of the message. "Your Name" here means your real name, not your user id or address.
To post to the listserv, send an email message to efiction@titan.iwu.edu with whatever subject heading and message text you like. The traffic on the list is likely to be fairly high, so please use subject headings which describe clearly what your posting is about. The list will only accept postings from registered list members, so if you use more than one email address you'll need to subscribe from each address.
To give you as much flexibility and freedom as possible, I will grade your listserv contributions by a contract system.
To get a B or higher, you must fulfill your listserv contract:
To get an A, you must fulfill your listserv contract, as specified above, and your contributions to the listserv, taken as a whole, must
Borderline grades (A-, B+) are possible.
If you write more than 15 postings, I won't automatically raise your grade, but I will base my assessment of the quality of your contribution on your best 15 postings.
From these two baseline grades, I will make three kinds of deductions, if necessary:
Argument is encouraged; harassment and "flaming" are prohibited.
In grading this first paper, I will be especially attentive to the basics of academic writing: thesis and structure, argumentation, and interpretation. Be sure that you have a specific thesis that is fully supported by the whole paper, that you provide evidence from the text for every claim you make (usually direct quotes; paraphrase or summary when events and not language are important), and that your interpretation of the text's meaning is sophisticated, original, and thoroughly grounded in a understanding of all relevant aspects of the text.
Choose one of the following:
1. Test ONE of Bolter's claims in Writing Space to either "Life in the Chocolate Mountains" or King of Space. Be sure to use your application of the claim to make a point of your own, rather than (e.g.) merely showing the Bolter's claim is right or wrong. The point you can make can be either critical or theoretical; that is, you can use Bolter's idea to help explain the meaning of the fiction (in which case you're writing criticism) or you can use the applicability or inapplicability of Bolter's claim to the fiction to speculate on the nature of hypertext fiction in general (in which case you're writing theory).
2. "Life in the Chocolate Mountains" is in part a story about art, in at least two ways. First, the narrator and others create art--collage, specifically--and make claims about what art does or can do. Second, the narrative explicitly points to its hypertextual form (in story 2 part 1 and elsewhere), and implicitly or explicitly makes claims about what hypertext does or can do. How do these two clusters of ideas about art fit together? Do the claims about art in the storyline proper give meaning to the claims about art in the metatextual (i.e. self-referential) sections or vice versa?
3. As noted above, story 2 part 1 of "Life in the Chocolate Mountains" is metatextual--the story comments on its own form at this point. Much of what it has to say has to do with the choices the reader has, choices which are "limited...but not non-existant [sic]." After coming an interpretation of what the text seems to be saying about choice, test the actual limits of reader choice within the fiction. How does our reading of the story change if we read it out of the default order? What are the actual constraints upon the order in which we can read parts of the text? Does the reader's experience of choice in this text match up with what the narrator seems to be implying about reader choice?
4. "King of Space has only one story, a rite of passage--not linear because it happens to several people in several ways, but by no means a story without structure," says the narrator (Narrative 2). Explain what this "one story" is, e.g. by comparing two different narrative lines and demonstrating the underlying structure that they have in common. Then speculate on what Smith is getting at in structuring the text in this way.
5. We have discussed issues of sex and power at length as they pertain to one section of the narrative, but we have hardly touched on other parts of the story. Discuss the issues of sex and power as they are worked out in a wholly different section of the text.
6. Write a paper on a topic of your own choosing in either "Life in the Chocolate Mountains" or King of Space. Be sure that you meet all of the criteria listed at the top of this page.
due 3/11/02
This assignment requires you to construct an argument in hypertextual form. I will still be attentive to the basics of academic writing--providing evidence for claims, offering a subtle and complex interpretation of the text, etc.--but in addition, I will be grading on how well you use the hypertextual form. In general, I will not look kindly on either chaos or a linear paper in hypertextual disguise (or, worse yet, a badly organized linear paper in hypertextual disguise). One of your primary goals, therefore, should be to ensure that the form of your hypertext fits the shape of your idea. I do not necessarily assume that your hypertext will be entirely non-fiction, although it must primarily be ABOUT either afternoon or True North.
You should cite your sources in MLA format. Since it is not possible to provide page numbers, write the name of the node in parentheses after a reference (see question 2 below for an example).
Choose one of the following:
1. Both afternoon and True North invoke, explicitly or implicitly, an ethos in which multiplicity is prized--not least in that they both connect or juxtapose heterogeneous elements (narratives, allusions to other texts, etc.). Pick at least two clusters of narratives or ideas in either one of these texts, and explain how the author's use of multiple elements serves his or her purpose. For example, why does Strickland combine references to the physicist Willard Gibbs with references to the poet Emily Dickinson? Why does Joyce combine an extended back-narrative about Nausicaa's previous life as a prostitute, or Lolly's life as a Southern belle, with Peter's quest to find about his son?
2. "In my mind," writes Joyce in afternoon, "the story, as it has formed, takes on margins. Each margin will yield to the impatient, or wary, reader" ("in my mind"). Assess and interpret this claim. What does he seem to mean by saying that the story has margins that yield, and how is the very concept of a "margin" appropriate to the ideas Joyce is trying to get across?
3. In "Poetry in the Electronic Environment," Strickland notes that one of the major themes of True North (or, as she puts it, image/themes, i.e. themes which are also images) is Embeddedness or Nestedness. Using at least two different examples of this image/theme, explain what Strickland is trying to say about nestedness and explain why this image/theme is important in the poem.
4. Develop your own topic dealing with either afternoon or True North.
Topics will be posted later.
The content and form of the class hypertext is entirely up to you, the students in the class. I recommend that we negotiate the grading criteria for the class hypertext well in advance--possibly before work on the hypertext even begins.
50% of the grade on the hypertext will be assigned by the class in open discussion. I will require you to follow certain procedures in determining the grade (e.g. I will require you to explain your reasoning in giving the grade), but I will not attempt to influence the grade that you give.
I will assign the other 50% of the grade. I reserve the right to give different grades to different people, but if the work seems to have been parcelled out reasonably equally I will probably assign the same grade to all. I also reserve the right to determine my own grading criteria, but if I find the class's grading criteria reasonably I will probably stay close to them.