I ask that during the semester you maintain a written record of your responses to our course materials and concerns in the form of an ongoing reading notebook. I will collect these from you at several points during the semester, about every three or four weeks, and I will return them to you at the next class meeting with my own brief responses to your notes, including any suggestions I may have about ways to improve or otherwise modify them. At semester’s end these notes will become part of your overall coursework and will constitute approximately 20% of your overall course grade.
Because we cover a considerable amount of literary, historical, and cultural material during the semester, it is important that you keep up-to-date notes and comments on the reading and thinking you are doing with the assigned materials, both on their own and in relation to our work together as a class. The reading notebook is intended to help you to think creatively and systematically about these matters, and to help you develop a coherent view of the literary and cultural history of Great Britain during the nineteenth century.
These notes will also provide a good source of preliminary material for the course research portfolio that you will assemble as the semester proceeds. Indeed, you will probably find that the reading notebook and the portfolio will actually begin to evolve into a sort of “dialogue” with one another and with the required reading for our course.
Be sure to keep current on the reading notebook; don’t skip days and days with the intention of “catching up” later on multiple days for which you wrote no entries. You need to keep you reading notebook up to date, if only because it’s easy for me to spot hastily or inconsistently prepared entries when I review the notebooks from time to time. The more time and effort you invest in your reading notebook, the better study guide you will find that you have when it comes time for exams and for the research portfolio. It’s all part of a single large “package” that I am encouraging you to construct with the materials and issues that we will study over the course of the next several months.
I ask that you maintain (and submit) your reading notes in some sort of notebook form. Either a standard spiral notebook (for those who prefer handwriting) or a loose-leaf binder will do; if you work with a computer and print out your notes, the latter is the obvious choice. I suggest that you set your notes up in a double-page format, as follows.
On the left side of the double page, makes notes on the daily reading assignments. These notes should include your responses to any or all of the assigned readings for the day. You are not required to write in detail about everything assigned for the day, so long as your comments about what you choose to react to and write about are thoughtful and substantial, and not merely a description or summary. You may wish to record your initial reactions to and interpretations of the readings themselves, for instance, as well as any thoughts about them that may have occurred to you on subsequent re-readings. Or you may wish to speculate in your notes about how any or all of these readings relate to subjects, themes, and other considerations we have been exploring in the course. Or you may wish to write some about how they relate to your own personal and professional interests and skills. In any case, I expect that your notes will be primarily critical and interpretive, and not just a collection of superficial and impressionistic comments about whether or not you “like” particular works.
On the right side of your double-page, make notes about how any or all of the assigned readings relate to (1) any outside reading you may be doing for this course (including your plans and research for the portfolio) and/or (2) to any other framework that is relevant to your personal and professional work (connections to things you are reading for other majors, for instance, or for your individual personal development). The emphasis in these right-hand-page notes should be on the “big picture” you are developing about nineteenth-century British literature in relation to other historical, cultural, critical, and theoretical contexts: how it all begins to “fit together” for you, in other words. This would be the place to write, for instance, about how your other reading or interests or activities help you make greater sense of the materials you are reading for this course, or about how your reading in this course helps to illuminate any work you are doing in other courses or personal pursuits.
There is no set format for these notes, nor is there any particular “right” way to do them. Let me be clear that I do not expect that you will write about every assigned reading every day. Nor do I require that your reading notes be “long”: certainly you don’t need to feel you have to go beyond one single left-hand-and-right-hand pair of pages per entry. Nevertheless, I do expect your notes to demonstrate a serious and systematic investment of time and intellectual energy appropriate to a course at this level.
Feel free to ask questions at any time, whether about what to put into your notes or how to format the notes; let me help in any way I can.