I come from an ancient time when the first day of school brought a notebook (the kind made of cardstock, not the kind that boots up and makes you look very with-it at the coffee shop) full of syllabi fresh off the mimeograph machine. If you were lucky, your instructor was the absent-minded sort, and asked the secretary in the humanities office to run off a fresh batch just minutes before he dragged his rumpled self up to the front of the classroom. These fresh syllabi were still warm, still damp, and carried that intoxicating smell of purple ink settling into the curled paper. Oh such, such were the joys . . .
Now, of course, that syllabus is on-line, hooked-in, RSS-enabled, and attached to a rolicking class blog. The cool kids don’t print the syllabus–it’s already on their Blackberries and iPhones; they Twitter the syllabus instead (because blogging is so 2005 . . .). They deal in clean bits and bytes, not blurry paper that leaves blue stains on your fingertips.
Here’s a sampling of the syllabi available on-line that show that cool as kids are, they still have to do a little time with the Belle of Amherst; if you have a mimeograph machine humming in your basement and would like to spin out a few, go right ahead . . .
- Materials of American Literature: American Literature 1 from Jon Miller, Associate Professor of English, The University of Akron
- English Class – General syllabus for 11th grade English from Chris Harris at Hall High, Little Rock, AR
- SYLLABUS: AMERICAN LITERATURE from Catherine Kuhn, Salina Central, Salina, KS
- English 11A: American Literature prior to 1900 from Heather Whiteside, Hollywood High School, Hollywood, CA
- AP English Literature and Composition from Mr. J. Cook, Gloucester High School, Gloucester, MA
- Introduction to Literary Research from Dr. Deborah Gussman, Stockton College (the most wired of them all: it includes a LitResearch Weblog and an assignment to “to locate one or two articles on Emily Dickinson’s work and to place helpful annotations of each article on WebCaucus”)
- English 427: Topics in the Romantic Period: Romantic Apocalypse from Michelle Levy at Simon Fraser University
- INGL 6058: Beyond the Anthology: Poetry and its Contexts from Prof. Leonardo Flores, Universidad de Puerto Rico (this is the course I’d most like to take: “This course explores contexts that can inform the analysis, interpretation, and teaching of poetry. The contexts to be explored are the anthology, literary theories, poetic traditions (types, and forms), poetic periods and schools of poetry, types of print publication (manuscript, magazine, book, anthology), and publication in other types of media (sound and video recordings, computers and the Internet)”, and covers quite a range of poets: William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gary Snyder, Stephanie Strickland, Dylan Thomas, the Def Poetry Jam poets, Linda Rodriguez, Jim Andrews, Megan Sapnar, Ingrid Ankerson, Willie Perdomo, Ursula Rucker, and many others.
I’m suddenly in the mood to buy fresh blue books, #2 pencils, and a batch of college-rule spiral notebooks.
