ENGL20023: American Classics

1 x 1500 word essay (40%) and 1 x 2000 word essay (60%) *apparently that last essay was worth 50% and the left over 10% went to a class presentation, but I can't find any record of this - we were never told our scores and the LMS was a ghosttown... more on that below.

Oh English. We've had a good run, but you just keep pushing me and I don't think it's healthy for me to stay in this love-hate relationship.

My experiences with tertiary Lit subjects have been the equivalent of being slowly paper-cut-to-death with an occasional respite where I get to put some bandages on myself before those bandages are then ripped off and the paper-cutting starts again. Or, like, trying to crawl up a downwards moving escalator and trying to grip onto the sides for support but realising those sides are covered in scorpions and now I'm going to die of scorpion poison curled up at the bottom of an escalator. Or, like, being on a rollercoaster that descends underground and then keeps descending, and you tell yourself 'it'll have to go up eventually' but it doesn't, it just sends you straight through the earth's crust into layers of magma and disappointment. Or, like, being made to touch an electric fence again and again because someone promised you that at some stage, you'll touch it and it won't electrify you, but until then you just have to keep putting up with the mild electrocution. Or, like, being in a tutorial full of people who nod sagely when your tutor says 'well obviously The Scarlet Letter can't be a feminist text because it was written by a man.'

Oh wait, that last one wasn't a simile; that's actually what happened. Well, I hope you liked the other similes because I found writing them to be a more enjoyable and intellectually valuable experience than taking this subject.

Let's start with the lectures. THEY AREN'T RECORDED. As someone who's timetable was nothing but clashes this semester, that was kind of frustrating. We were never given a valid explanation aside from the fact that it's "how things are done" with this lecturer (though I remember hearing that lectures were recorded last year, and have been for all my other English subjects...) I have a sneaking suspicion this is to combat dwindling lecture attendance, but when I did ditch my other class and go to this one, the numbers were far from overwhelming. Just purely as a matter of principle, I was already predisposed to dislike this subject when we were told about the lack of recordings, but from a more pragmatic standpoint, this really doesn't make sense given the nature of English assessment - you study around 12 texts per subject, often one per week though sometimes they double-up, and then you get a choice when it comes to essay topics. So, for the first essay due mid-semester, we could cover any of the ~5 texts studied thus far, and then the final essay had to compare any two that we hadn't already written on. I'm starting to realise that it's much smarter if you just choose those texts ahead of time and just do the relevant readings or attend the relevant lectures for those weeks, and ignore everything else. Otherwise, if you don't decide early enough, you end up having to sit around in Week 12 wondering what the hell was covered in Week 3 and with no ability to go back and check. Lecture slides were uploaded sporadically but they were often just visual aids or slides full of slabs of texts. Also, many of the links were for the wrong texts, so it wasn't very dependable. This subject also occasionally did what I'm now assuming is a default English department thing and spent significant portions of lectures analysing paintings, lending further credence to the theory I've been developing since Modernism & Avant Garde last semester. Not all lectures were guilty of this, but it was still frequent enough to be frustrating.

So as much as I'm bemoaning the absence of recordings, I must admit that when I did manage to attend, I realised I wasn't missing much. There was a lot of reading from slides, and way too much unsubstantiated interpretational commentary for my liking.

Content-wise, most of it was geared towards some pretty reductive world views, and it didn't help that half the texts being about slavery seemed to make some lecturers think they had free reign to shoehorn in their own assessments of contemporary political and social issues at the expense of, you know, the texts we were meant to be studying. For me, some of that stuff was interesting, but much like the discussions in Mod & Av. it fell into the chasm of 'yeah-that's-nice-but-I'm-here-for-the-books-so-could-we-please-get-back-on-track-now.' No one else in the lectures seemed remotely frustrated though, so I guess if you're the kind of person who enjoys approaching literature from a sociological perspective, this subject will suit you well. I'm more at home in the realms of close analysis and discussions about style and semantics though, so this just got on my nerves after a while.

Now... onto assessment... it's said that you can characterise an insane person by their tendency to repeat the same action expecting a different result. Well I guess I'm just crazy-town-banana-pants then because I figured that if I asked my tutor about the task requirements and tried to clarify all the contradicting advice I'd compiled thus far, maybe I'd see a noticeable change in my marks. After triple-checking that my tutor wasn't fussed about formal essay structure and cared more about the quality of arguments and analysis, I wrote the first essay and handed it in, only to be told that the only things wrong with my piece were that the introduction and conclusion were too short. This apparently warranted a 78/100, which I pulled up to a H1 average after the second essay, I guess, but I have no way of knowing.

Perhaps in an attempt to keep some consistency with the outdated refusal to record lectures, this subject also requires hardcopy submissions of essays. Again, as someone who isn't at uni everyday, works a lot, and lives pretty far out, this was really not ideal. We still had to submit a copy of our work through a digital portal (not turnitin, for some reason, which incidentally didn't give us the regular confirmation email that turnitin provides, so that was fun -.-) on the LMS, but the feedback for the first essay was just a few sentences printed on a sheet of paper and handed out in tutes. Because the second essay's due date was after the last class, we never got anything back, not even a score. I can't even extrapolate one based on my overall result because I have no idea what the third assessment (discussed below) was based on, or whether it existed at all. Someone in my tute mentioned that they overheard someone else in this subject mention that we could attach an envelope with our home address along with our essays when we handed it in () if we wanted to get it back, but none of us knew whether that'd include feedback or not. I spoke to my tutor, who also didn't know, and never got back to me. You were lucky to get an email response within a week, but because I'm apparently an abused puppy who keeps going back to its owner to get kicked in the face, I emailed people at the end of semester to try and establish some semblance of contact but that didn't work either.

For the remaining 10% of the assessment, we each had to do a brief presentation on a text at some stage - you got to nominate which text if you were there at the first tute, and there were two spots available each week. Quality varied drastically with some people just reading out a mini-analysis they'd written (including one highlight where a kid was reading out words and ideas far beyond the level of understanding he'd demonstrated in previous tutes, and a quick google of what he was saying turned up an online resource for us to read along with :'D ) but there were others who put real effort in. Part of the task required us to come up with a few key questions pertaining to the text, and some of the ones I heard were really intriguing... not that we ever got to answering them in a meaningful way. This wasn't helped by the fact that every single person's presentation was concluded by the tutor saying 'that was really good' over and over again to the point where it was no longer encouraging and just became hollow and disingenuous. Never anything constructive, and never anything that lead to a more expansive discussion. Maybe it's because that only gave us around 40 minutes each week to discuss each text, but it always felt rather superficial - almost as though each week was a succession of finding the major talking points related to each book, mentioning them, and moving on. But even in other text-per-week English subjects I've done, this hasn't been such an overt issue.

Another quick note on subject coordination, I've posted this elsewhere on the forums, but this is a screenshot of the LMS page:



'Subject home' and 'Subject Information' just took you to a totally different page that just restated info from the handbook and had links to the lecture slides. 'Announcements' was blank. 'Assessment' had that aforementioned weird not-turnitin submissions thing. And there was a link to the SES.
I know there's not a whole lot you can add for a subject that mainly just involves a lot of reading, but I suppose I'm using that mostly blank LMS page as a token of the wider, more inimical problems with the subject's communication as a whole.

In a weird way, I'm almost glad I got such a high score in this subject because it means my qualms with it can't be misattributed as vitriol over a perceived undeserved numerical outcome. I'm still unsatisfied with the result, don't get me wrong, but I'm aware that these comments would be viewed in a vastly different context if I'd been bumped down a few grade points.

The trouble is that I've come away from this subject knowing a few odd facts about the colonial period of American history and some of the people alive at the time, but I've gained nothing in terms of literary criticism or essay writing ability, which is kind of upsetting to acknowledge.

I try to keep a running tally of things throughout the semester that I want to include in the reviews, but for this one, all I've got is that the lecturer we had for the Melville texts - whose name I don't remember and can't check because NO RECORDINGS - in around Week 3 was pretty decent... and that this subject was just 'Art-History-in-disguise continued.' I might come back and add things after having done some more English subjects, but my only general advice is that you shouldn't expect too much in terms of communication and prepare for more peripheral discussions about where Emily Dickinson went to school, or what became of the house Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in.
As stated, if you're interested in studying the historical and social context of the texts in this subject, then you'll probably find it enjoyable. And if you're doing a lot of units that look at issues of race and gender, this'll fit right in, but it's somewhat mendacious in its claims to be an English subject as you'll spend far more time talking about things other than the texts.

No -.- see rant below

umm... fairly certain there was a guy with brown hair at one stage. Elizabeth Maxwell took a couple of lectures and Joe Hughes was there at least once, but they rotated frequently and I was not the most... diligent... of attendees.

No exam for this subject

1 Out of 5

Subject reader is an expensive slab of barely useful information and unless your tutor makes you bring it to class, I'd actually just recommend taking a photo of the table of contents and then looking up that week's readings on Discovery when you can be bothered.

1 x 90 minute lecture and 1 x 1 hour tute per week

2015, Semester 2

H1