I have created a listserv for the class. A listserv is an e-mail reflector, a way you can send an e-mail to a single address so that everyone in the class receives it. When used properly, a listserv is a great way to converse with your classmates, test ideas, ask questions, and generally work with the material and each other in productive ways.

A message to the listserv is called a post. You are in one of four groups: A, B, C, or D. Everybody in the class always receives every post sent to the list. For each class, one group will have a Reading Post due, and once per week one group will have a Synthesis Post due. Here is what you should do for each type of assignment:

Reading Posts — A reading post is your opportunity to record whatever thoughts, questions, and emotional or aesthetic reactions you have as you read. For every reading assignment, I will post possible issues or questions to consider on the Reading Prompts pages, which are linked from the Class Calendar. When your group has a reading post due, you should pick one of them and respond to it as best you can. Because these responses represent the early stages of your thinking about the readings, you should feel free to use them to test out ideas, ask questions, and admit confusion; indeed, summary judgments and easy answers aren’t much use to me or your classmates, whereas confusion, when clearly expressed, can be stimulating. On the other hand, I admire students who are willing to venture an opinion and back it up. What is important is that your response demonstrates your engagement with these works.

The key to reading posts is to keep them focused by quoting specific passages — you must support your argument with textual evidence by quoting and citing the reading for that day at least once during your post — and commenting on those quotations in order to support a point. Do not simply quote and expect us to see what you see in the passage; explain. That means you should never begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. Start by establishing a point you want to make or an issue you want to explore. Quote (do not paraphrase) the text to provide evidence for what you are saying. Then, comment on the quotation: never assume that your peers or I will see what you see in the passage you quote, let alone see it the same way. Quotations provide evidence; they do not make your case for you.

Do not do research for posts. They are your responses to the readings; not a test of your ability to Google.

Your audience for these posts is people in the class. You should therefore assume everyone reading your post has also read the assignment to which it responds; do not engage in plot summary or waste time presenting background information we all know. Call your readers’ attention to specific elements of the text (characters, scenes, plot points, and so on) and quote textual evidence, but do not summarize as if you are writing for people who have not read the work in question.

Note that you can use the prompts as you see fit: do not feel as if you need to address every point a prompt brings up. Also, if you have a particular question or idea that is not covered by a prompt and about which you want to post, go ahead. In most cases, though, the prompts will focus your thoughts and help you do a better job on this assignment.

Reading posts should be between 300 and 350 words long, not including the quotations, and they are due by midnight the night before class. This means posts for Monday are due Sunday night, and posts for Wednesday are due Tuesday night; the time of your post is automatically recorded by the Mason computer system. Note that longer does not mean better: if you send me 500 words for a reading post I will not be happy, because I do not want reading all the posts to be burdensome for your peers or correcting them to be burdensome for me. If you find yourself going over 375 words of your own writing, cut something; you can always bring up additional points in class.

Synthesis Posts — A synthesis post asks you to pull together some of the readings and discussions from the prior week. In each synthesis post, you must quote and respond to at least two reading posts by your classmates that have come in since the prior synthesis post. Whenever quoting a passage from another post, do not include the whole original message in your post: always cut everything except the passage you want to quote. You should also quote from the readings from the prior week at least once, and the quotation should not be the same as one that your peers whom you have quoted took for their reading posts. Your goal is to make use of the class lectures and discussions to answer questions and respond to points people had made in their reading posts — whether that means building on their ideas to support your own, slightly modifying the original idea, or rebutting it — and to draw some tentative conclusions. Synthesis posts should be between 500 and 600 words long, not including quotations, and they are due by midnight on Saturday (in other words, at the end of the day). Note that synthesis posts do not have prompts, and again, excessive length is a detriment, not a sign of superior effort.

As with reading posts, the key to synthesis posts is working effectively with quotations. Do not begin a paragraph (let alone the whole post) by quoting a peer. That’s like being a tennis player who refuses to serve. If you start out a paragraph with something like “Ashley says,” you surrender both your initiative and your authority. Again, start by establishing a point you want to make or an issue you want to explore. Then, quote the text and your peers in any way that helps you make your point. Always set up and comment on quotations, which means you should never present two quotations back-to-back. Also, do not quote your peer quoting the text: quote peers for their ideas, not their evidence.

Before class, everyone must read the reading posts and (if applicable) synthesis posts for that day.

To make everyone’s life easier, always put your name at the bottom of your post. Also, please use the subject line in the e-mail to identify your post. As the course goes on, we will begin to accumulate a lot of them, and this makes it easier to sort through them later. Identify the assignment number by group letter and post number, the text (by author name or title) and the general subject, for example: “A1 Manguel: The Arbitrary Nature of Genre” or “C3: Dramatic Dialogue in Hayden.”  Always label a synthesis post as a synthesis, then add a general description of your topic, for example: “B2 Synthesis: Trusting the teller of the tale.”

You post messages simply by sending an e-mail to the listserv address, ENGH305-L@listserv.gmu.edu. I suggest you store the address in your address book and simply insert it from there; the most common reason a post does not go through is that a student has mistyped the address. Note that if you normally use more than one e-mail account, or if you have your GMU e-mail forwarded to another account, you still must send your message from your Masonlive account. The listserv recognizes addresses, not people.

Type your post in the body of the message; do not send it as an attachment. This list does not allow attachments to be distributed through the server.

When your classmates send their posts, you will receive them, usually within a few minutes (though sometimes the system — like all systems — slows down). You are responsible for reading your classmates’ posts before class. Our class discussions will often build on posts sent the previous night, and I will assume each of you has been paying attention to what the others have had to say.

Technology notes:

1) The Mason e-mail system (Masonlive) will sometimes cut off messages in which a single paragraph is longer than six or seven hundred characters (keystrokes). You will not have a problem with this if you break your paragraphs properly.

2) When you copy and paste something (a quotation, for example, or if you try to compose your post in a word processing program like Word) into your post, formatting can go haywire. You will not see it, but when other people try to read the post, they will find wild changes in the font, and some punctuation marks (especially apostrophes and quotation marks) may not transfer correctly, which makes your post hard to read. For this reason, after you type any post, a good habit is to select the entire text (you can do that by hitting Control A on a PC, or Command A on a Mac) and then select a single font and font-size. Please do this.

Honor code rules are in effect for this assignment, as indeed they are for all assignments. On occasion, students have submitted material gathered from essays available online or web-sites such as SparkNotes as their reactions to a reading. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of the Reading Posts, which is to get your initial reactions to these works. My policy is simple: plagiarize on any work for the course, and I will report an Honor Code violation and request failure of the course as a penalty. (The Honor Committee has never rejected my request.) The reality is that if I catch someone cheating, I cannot judge his or her work fairly from that point on because I will always wonder if the work I am reading is authentic.

Keep it simple: do not do any outside research for your posts. Looking up other people’s opinions is not the point; reading closely and thinking diligently is. Besides, I am assigning you plenty of reading as it is. Plus, the emphasis for this assignment is on thinking and expressing your thoughts clearly, not on offering a correct interpretation. Given that you cannot earn less than a B on a Reading Post if you follow the instructions, cheating on one is not only immoral but reflects a poor understanding of the concept of risk-reward ratio.

The purpose of quoting and citing is to support your own argument. To do it effectively, you must set up quotations in a substantive way that connects them to your own point, and then comment on them in order to make your point persuasive. Literary analysis is much like law: evidence supports an argument; it doesn’t make your case for you. A lawyer doesn’t hold up a piece of evidence, say “This proves my case,” drop it on a table in front of the jury, and then sit down. He or she knows that the opposing council will make a different claim for what that piece of evidence means. Instead, a lawyer constructs a narrative — he or she tells a story, in other words — that gives meaning to that piece of evidence. You are in the same position. In practical terms, this means beginning or ending a paragraph with a quotation is usually a bad idea in academic writing.

You can find further guidelines on using quotations effectively, including explanations of how to format and cite them, here at the Quotation and Citation Guidelines page. Until you get used to them, I recommend keeping that document open while writing your post.

A listserv is a relatively informal means of communication. Therefore, your tone in a reading post can be somewhat relaxed and conversational. For example, contractions and even well-chosen slang are acceptable. I certainly expect that you will use first-person pronouns (I, we, me, us, my, our, and so on) occasionally, though using them too often is a bad habit. However, poor style can inhibit clarity, and reading badly written prose is immensely frustrating. Writing clearly and spelling correctly are matters of courtesy as well as what writers call ethos, your reputation with the reader. People who write about a novel and spell a character’s name wrong aren’t taken seriously, and don’t even get me started on people who write using text-shorthand, as in “‘Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare’ (15-16) is gr8 imagery.”

While reading posts can be somewhat informal, I want you to observe stricter standards for synthesis posts. Consider them more like short essays. First-person usage should be limited or avoided. See the explanation below of how grammar and style will affect your grade on a synthesis post.

It comes down to this: readers can generally detect and will resent a lack of effort. If you cannot be bothered to re-read what you have written before hitting Send to make sure that you are conveying your point clearly, why should anyone else want to read what you have to say? Finally, bad writing habits are hard to break. Writing is a kind of mental muscle memory. Make writing clear and stylish prose a habit even when writing informally and your overall writing ability will improve. Because most of you in this class are English majors, your writing also reflects on your professionalism. You probably wouldn’t trust a doctor who refers to your heart as the “blood-pumpy-thingy”; readers will not trust your judgments on literary topics if you cannot consistently write clear and grammatical sentences.

Create a folder in your personal e-mail account for the listserv. You can call it “ENGH 305” or whatever you like. Save messages from the class to this folder. You need your classmates’ reading posts in order to write your synthesis posts. Posts can also prove useful for the examination and give you ideas for your essays.  

Meanwhile, you should save all of the messages you send to the listserv in the same folder. Moving them from your “Sent” folder only takes a few seconds and makes finding them later much easier.

After providing the initial prompts, I usually will not intrude on your listserv discussions, though I sometimes might offer a brief comment or question. I will read all of the posts, of course, and in class will bring up points that have arisen on the listserv so that we may continue the discussion face-to-face. But generally, this list is for you to communicate with each other. If you want to e-mail me a question, do so directly, not through the listserv.

Reading posts must be of the suggested length, properly titled, submitted on time, and demonstrate thought and basic knowledge of the reading. For each reading post that meets these requirements, I will award you a score of 3 or 4. Posts that are short, fail to quote a text, or are otherwise unsatisfactory will earn a score of 0, 1, or 2. However, I reserve the right to give a post no credit if it reveals little effort or evidence of reading the text. A post that is not titled properly cannot earn higher than a 3. Reading posts that are submitted late but within two hours of the deadline lose one point. Posts submitted more than two hours after the deadline but before class lose two points. Any post not sent by the beginning of class earns no credit (meaning that it counts as a zero). These grades will be converted by the usual formula: 4 = A or 95, 3 = B or 85, 2 = C or 75%, 1 = D or 65%, 0 = F 55% or lower, failing to submit the response before class begins = 0%.

When I comment on your reading posts, I will point out grammatical and stylistic errors. You would be wise to review these corrections carefully and use them to improve your score on synthesis posts and your major writing assignments. You can find explanations of the abbreviations I use on your posts on the Comment Key.

For synthesis posts, the grading system is different. These are longer, and should be more carefully structured and organized, so I strongly advise you to draft and revise them before submitting them. They must be of the suggested length, properly titled, submitted on time, and demonstrate thought and basic knowledge of the reading. In addition, you must also accurately quote and cite the text and two of your peers’ posts from that week of classes and work thoughtfully with these quotations, which requires both setting them up in a substantive way and commenting on them in a meaningful way. I will award these posts two scores: a Content score determined by the quality of your insight and analysis, your use of quotations to support your points, and your organization, and a Style score determined by your clarity, grammatical correctness, directness and concision, proper citation and formatting of quotations, titling, and overall readability and style. The Content score will be between A+ (100%) and F (59% or lower). However, quoting either a text or a peer inaccurately will result in a full grade penalty. If you can’t devote enough attention to your work to copy something correctly, you have wrecked your own credibility. The Style score will be a modifier that can range between +5 for not only correct but concise and graceful writing, and -10 for major problems in clarity, grammar, or quotation and citation rules. See the Style Score Guide document for further explanation. For example, if your synthesis post scores a B+ for Content and a -4 for Style, you would receive a score of 84.5% (B+ = 88.5 – 4 = 84.5). If you submit a synthesis post late but within two hours of the deadline, you will incur a 10% penalty. If you submit it after that but within 24 hours of the deadline, you will incur a 20% penalty. Submitting the post any later than that but before the next class will earn half the credit it would have if you had submitted it on time. Synthesis posts submitted after class begins on Monday earn no credit.

Review your post while asking yourself the following questions:

Does my post have a clear focus and is everything in the post relevant to it?

What is my point (which is different from a focus)? If a reader walks away from my post with just one sentence in his or her head, what would it be?

Do I support my point well with textual evidence and logical argumentation? In other words, do I quote the text and (if a synthesis post) my peers and engage with the quotations in a productive way, which means consistently setting up the quotations substantively and commenting on them afterwards?

Is my post appropriately paragraphed? Is the writing clear, grammatically correct, and concise?

Is the length appropriate to the assignment?

Did I format and cite all my quotations appropriately?

Did I title my post appropriately in the subject-line?

Did I put my name at the end of the post?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, success is almost guaranteed.

Following is an example of a Reading Post that earned a 4. It is in response to a novel we are not reading this semester, but you can still use it as a model. Note the effective use of quotation. The writer does not quote just because quoting is required but uses the quotations to provide evidence for points she wants to make. Also, note that this post is not overly long: once you subtract the quotations and citations, it is 329 words. It is a 4 because it is thoughtful, perceptive, well-reasoned, and makes good use of quoted passages. It is also both clearly and concisely written:

To: engh305-l@listserv.gmu.edu
From: [address redacted]
Subject: B6, Prokosch: Ursule as memory, as fantasy, and as reality

            We first meet Ursule through de Hahn’s memory, in which she is the lover he hopes to marry someday. He remembers her to maintain hope while in prison. When later she appears, the narrator describes his first glimpse of her in sensual terms; standing outside his rancid hotel room and gazing across at the then-undisclosed Ursule and de Hahn, he says, “I could actually smell her perfume from where I stood” (186). This at least proves that Ursule is real, not a figment of a desperate man’s imagination. When the narrator meets her later, he is surprised by her sophisticated good looks: “She was better than I expected, I’ll confess.  Rather glittering-looking, no rough edges, and a quick, intelligent look in her eyes” (188-89). However, a realistic depiction of the character’s external appearance is not what makes her real to the reader. Our understanding of her character develops in subsequent chapters as she reveals contradictory motivations.

            As is typical when this narrator meets someone new, he feels “uneasy” around Ursule at first (192). Like virtually all the characters in The Asiatics, the narrator’s sense of her is impressionistic and unstable. This puts her on the same plane as the other people he meets, and thus she appears as real as anyone in the novel. Prokosch also offers little background on Ursule’s life, which is normal for his picaresque style. Instead, we glimpse her present longings — her affair with the narrator reveals that she is not truly happy with de Hahn. In moments such as when “she trailed her long red finger tips in the water and glanced up at the Himalayas” (196), her body language suggests that she dreams of a different future. She seems even more vivid to me when she shows this kind of subtle discontent with her circumstances because that is so typically human. She does not pretend to be a goddess or perfect lover; she is fragmented, torn between lust for one man and allegiance to another.

            Her fear of de Hahn when she believes he knows of her infidelity — “she was trembling” (207) — confuses me. Prokosch consistently portrays De Hahn as a benign man who would “forgive you anything” (198). Has the narrator been misreading him? Is Ursule paranoid? Or is the quick, intelligent look in her eyes a sign that she is manipulative?

[name redacted]

Again, the post is not particularly long (566 words plus quotations). In this case, note how well the writer weaves together quotations form the text and from peers. Note also that the writer does not merely agree or disagree with what others in the class have written, but builds on the other posts in both cases. Finally, this post is well-written: grammatically correct, of course, but also concise, with some graceful turns of phrase, and correctly formatted quotations:

Subject: C4 Synthesis: Figurative Language and Temporal Subjectivity in The Asiatics

            In The Asiatics, Frederic Prokosch often puts the narrator in uncomfortable and unpredictable situations. The situations themselves, considered abstractly, might be frightening or disturbing on their own, but what makes them particularly effective is Prokosch’s extraordinary felicity with descriptive language. Through metaphors, similes, and other techniques that are both original in conception and striking in execution, he infuses the narrative with an intensity of experience rarely found in literature.

            The narrator’s initial encounter with Feodor Krusnayaskov’s mother is one example. The description of her horrifies us because of the succession of vivid similes and metaphors that depict her as something other than human: “She flowed in all directions like a bowlful of rising dough. There was no stopping that surge of flesh, that flood. Her arms flowed around Feodor: she seemed positively to be swallowing him, like a huge amoeba swallowing its prey” (93). The first image here is that of rising dough. The idea of dough normally suggests happy domesticity, as well as maternal care and effort. The thought of a mother making bread (and of the warm result, perhaps with some butter or jam melting into it) would fill most readers with nostalgia, or perhaps a mild envy. But a mother being like dough perverts that image. The image that follows next is of water, which has no shape, but flows and floods. Prokosch thus identifies the mother with water, and in turn with elemental nature. She is too huge, too overwhelming to resist. [Name redacted] points out the way this figurative language serves a dual purpose: “The language not only describes the woman as extremely overweight, but also conveys the narrator’s shocked reaction” (A6). Thus Prokosch’s imagery here conveys the narrator’s thoughts, even though he certainly attempts to keep such a shocked reaction to himself.

            Prokosch also uses figurative language to convey the subjective nature of the experience of time. Time in the novel cannot be measured by the steady ticking of a clock. It is more like a river, sometimes hurrying over rapids and other times eddying in pools that appear almost stagnant: “Prokosch does not feel bound to tie the narrator’s travels to the calendar or clock. Sometimes uncounted days pass in a sentence or two, while he elaborates particular moments over multiple paragraphs” ([Name redacted] C5). One example of the latter occurs when the narrator is dehydrated after the plane crash and in desperation drinks from a small pool of contaminated water. Instantly he becomes sick. As he sinks into delirium and for a moment believes he has died, his thoughts deepen and he begins to reflect on life in a profoundly impersonal way. This state of feverish hallucination lasts through three lengthy paragraphs, beginning with his memory — Prokosch violates chronology when it serves his purposes, too — of a conversation with Madame de Chamellis: “‘dying and living, living and dying, the two processes growing faster and faster as our world grows older and staler, now almost as indistinguishable as the colors in a revolving wheel, . . . Here’s a living one that’s dead, here’s a dead one still alive, a living one’s dead life slowly dying, a dead one’s living death slowly dying’” (137). Had Prokosch presented this quotation when it occurred chronologically in the novel, it would have seemed just the fretting of an old woman, but here it acts as a trigger for the narrator’s own semi-conscious ruminations, as her simile of the revolving wheel has anticipated his own hallucinatory state. And in this state, he answers her question with an epiphany:

But everything exists forever . . . Each second goes off into space and is held there forever, traveling and spreading with unalterable speed . . . Somewhere now is flashing the sight of Hannibal crossing the Alps, of Xerxes passing into Asia Minor, of the first ape-man rising out of the green twilight of the swamps. And somewhere, I thought, I am still dead. At some point in space a million miles away a flash of light is now carrying me outward, caught in that momentary state of death. And now ten thousand miles farther. And now still farther. Somewhere I am still dead, and I’ll carry the thought of that with me for the rest of my life. (137)

If somewhere he is still dead because he was dead for the briefest of moments, then the inverse must also be true: each moment of his life must also fly out into space infinitely, and somewhere he will still be alive even after all the moments of his life have ended. By aggregating all of these images taken from astronomy and history, Prokosch conveys both the eons that seem to pass while the narrator lies on the brink of death and the utterly subjective nature of temporal experience. Meanwhile, because the memory of his conversation with de Chamellis initiates this metaphysical insight, the reader realizes that all of the narrator’s encounters with people on his journey do affect him deeply, even if they may not seem so at the time.

[name redacted]