Assignment #3: three questions

1. What is a child?
2. What is a book?
3. What is nature?

bring hard copy to class Monday, Oct 5
post to blog

READ THIS Literature and Arts Conference 2008

MSU, The University of the Yellowstone's
Literature and Arts Conference 2008
Germinate and Cultivate
November 14 - 16, 2008
Montana State University ~ Bozeman

READ THIS Montana State University's Literature and Arts Publication is now accepting papers for its inaugural undergraduate academic conference. We are accepting critical essays, creative non-fiction, original poetry, fiction, drama/screenplays, or panel proposals. Our theme for the conference is "Germinate and Cultivate," a subject of origins and developments. Please submit your papers, approximately 3,000 maximum words, by October 20, 2008, with a $50 registration fee per person.

Our conference kick off will be a session Friday evening, November 14, with jazz, hors d'oeuvres, and introductions. See below for a tentative schedule.


Tentative Outline of Conference Schedule

Friday 11/14/08 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Welcome Session on campus with live jazz, hors d'oeuvres, and introductions

Saturday 11/15/08 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Check-in continues
Panel presentations on the MSU Campus
12 p.m. to 2 p.m. — Lunch workshop, lunch provided
2 p.m. to 6 p.m. — Panels/workshops on the MSU Campus
6 p.m. to 9 p.m. — Evening banquet with open mic, music

Sunday 11/16/08 Closing Ceremonies

MSU TOP 100 BOOKS 2001

O the mind,
mind has mountains;
cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer
no-man fathomed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "No Worst There is None"

Mountains & Minds
Montana State University
TOP 100 BOOKS 2001

1. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
2. THE BIBLE
3. DON QUIXOTE, Miguel de Cervantes
4. ILIAD/ ODYSSEY, Homer
5. METAMORPHOSES, Ovid
6. FINNEGANS WAKE, James Joyce
7. ORESTEIAN TRILOGY, Aeschylus
8. TAO TE CHING, Lao Tzu
9. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Lewis Carroll
11. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf
12. ULYSSES, James Joyce
13. PALE FIRE, Vladimir Nabokov
14. DIVINE COMEDY, Dante Alighieri
15. COLLECTED POEMS, Wallace Stevens
16. ARABIAN NIGHTS, Anonymous
17. WAR AND PEACE, Leo Tolstoy
18. BELOVED, Toni Morrison
19. COLLECTED FICTIONS, Jorge Luis Borges
20. CANTERBURY TALES, Geoffrey Chaucer
21. ANECDOTES OF DESTINY, Isak Dinesen
22. THEBAN TRILOGY, Sophocles
23. MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND
HARMONY, Roberto Calasso
24. KATHASARITSAGARA, Somadeva
25. SHORT STORIES, Anton Chekov
26. BHAGAVAD GITA, Anonymous
27. 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez
28. GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES
29. INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison
30. ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, William Faulkner
31. WOMEN IN LOVE, D.H. Lawrence
32. LOLITA, Vladimir Nabokov
33. DIALOGUES, Plato
34. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, Marcel Proust
35. THE TIN DRUM, Günter Grass
36. COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, Flannery O'Connor
37. GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens
38. THREE NOVELS, Samuel Beckett
39. THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, Sigmund Freud
40. HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad
41. FOUR QUARTETS, T.S. Eliot
42. MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert
43. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN, Salman Rushdie
44. TRISTRAM SHANDY, Laurence Sterne
45. COLLECTED POEMS, W.B. Yeats
46. THE GOLDEN BOUGH, James G. Frazer
47. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING
EARNEST, Oscar Wilde
48. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Jane Austen
49. THE BLACK PRINCE, Iris Murdoch
50. THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN
SARAGOSSA, Jan Potaki
51. THE BACCHAE, Euripides
52. VANITY FAIR, William Thackeray
53. METAMORPHOSIS, Franz Kafka
54. THE AENEID, Vergil
55. TRISTAN AND ISEULT, Anonymous
56. COLLECTED POEMS, William Blake
57. THE GREAT GATSBY, F. Scott Fitzgerald
58. ENDGAME/ WAITING FOR GODOT, Samuel Beckett
59. COLLECTED POEMS, Emily Dickinson
60. MOBY DICK, Herman Melville
61. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE, Willliam James
62. MY ANTONIA, Willa Cather
63. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, J.D. Salinger
64. FATHERS AND CHILDREN, Ivan Turgenev
65. LIVES OF A CELL, Lewis Thomas
66. A DOLL'S HOUSE, Henrik Ibsen
67. THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, Kenneth Grahame
68. A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway
69. CHARLOTTE'S WEB, E.B. White
70. HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Mark Twain
71. LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman
72. IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A
TRAVELER, Italo Calvino
73. JANE EYRE, Charlotte Brontë
74. THE STORYTELLER, Mario Vargas Llosa
75. EPIC OF GILGAMESH, Anonymous
76. THE IDIOT, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
77. CATCH 22, Joseph Heller
78. WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë
79. TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES,Thomas Hardy
80. THE MAGUS, John Fowles
81. CEREMONY, Leslie Silko
82. WALDEN, Henry David Thoreau
83. NATIVE SON, Richard Wright
84. NATURE, Ralph Waldo Emerson
85. FAUST, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
86. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee
87. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin
88. PARADISE LOST, John Milton
89. TOM JONES, Henry Fielding
90. THE GOLDEN ASS, Apuleius
91. THE ART OF MEMORY, Francis Yeats
92. MIDDLEMARCH, George Eliot
93. AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, Peter Matthiessen
94. INNER CHAPTERS, Chuang Tzu
95. CANDIDE, Voltaire
96. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, Friedrich Nietzsche
97. PASSAGE TO INDIA, E.M. Forster
98. THE SEA, THE SEA, Iris Murdoch
99. TRISTES TROPIQUES, Claude Lévi-Strauss
100. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, Zora Neale Hurston

Created by students in Literary Criticism Spring 1999, under the direction of Michael Sexson. Revised Spring 2001.

Assignment #2: Group WOZ

Each group will create a response (graphic novel +/- other technologies beyond print if so desired) to "The Wizard of Oz."

Presentations to begin the week following Thanksgiving break (Dec 1).

Do not tell us what we already know. Provide a deeper, more piercing enjoyment of the original text. Bridge the chasm.

CAUTION!
KEEP IT SECRET!!
DO NOT LEAK!!!

"I love to be surprised." MS

in the news...

happy belated birthday Maurice Sendak!
NY Times: Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are


"Maurice Sendak’s 80th year — which ended with his birthday earlier this summer and is being celebrated on Monday night with a benefit at the 92nd Street Y — was a tough one. He has been gripped by grief since the death of his longtime partner; a recent triple-bypass has temporarily left him too weak to work or take long walks with his dog; and he is plagued by Norman Rockwell."

Slate.com has a slide show Where the Wild Things Came From: How children's books evolved from morals to madcap fun

Dates

Fri Sep 19 assignment #1 (post to blog AFTER you present it in class)
Wed Oct 1 Cocteau "Beauty and the Beast"
--------- READ THIS deadline
Mon Oct 13 Quiz #1
Thu Oct 23 film at Emerson: "My Book & Heart"
Oct 29 - Nov 10 Wonderland/Sunderland
Wed Nov 12 Quiz #2
Mon Nov 17 Corona boxes
Nov 14 - Nov 24 Dark Materials
Nov 26 - Dec 3 Term Paper Presentations (Z to A)
Dec 5 - Dec 10 Group Presentations
Mon Dec 15 Final 8 am

World Premiere!

"My Book and Heart Shall Never Part"
at the Emerson
Thursday Oct. 23

"A 50-minute film about early children's books that was written and directed by Lynda Sexson and produced by Michael Sexson, professors at Montana State University, will premiere at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, at the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman.

"My Book and Heart Shall Never Part," derived from a line from the "New England Primer," explores children's chapbooks, primers and toy books from the 19th century as they relate to the world today. It is the first film written by Lynda Sexson, who has published three books and is an award-winning professor of humanities at MSU and a nationally recognized expert on the field of text and image in American culture. Michael Sexson, an English professor at MSU, produced the film. Colin McWilliams is the cinematographer. Other contributors include art direction by local artist Linda Knox and an original score by Stuart Weber. The project is partially funded by a grant from Humanities Montana. The film is free and open to the public. However, tickets are necessary for the premiere and may be obtained at the AskUs Desk in the MSU Strand Union Building. For more information, contact Lynda Sexson at 994-5200 or Michael Sexson at 994-5189.
Contact: Lynda Sexson (406) 994-5200, uhils@montana.edu

Read This

Read This meeting
SUB 7 pm Thursday Sept. 11

Norton

Norton Anthology of Children's Literature
Annotated Web links
Public Domain Illustrations

from Sexson's library...

Alice in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll, Norton Critical Edition
The Classic Fairy Tales -- Iona and Peter Opie
Don't Tell the Grown-ups -- Alison Lurie
Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to EB White -- Roger Sale
The Feminine in Fairy Tales -- Marie-Louise von Franz
From the Beast to The Blonde -- Marina Warner
The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales -- Maria Tatar:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces -- Joseph Campbell
The Hidden Adult -- Perry Nodelman
Imaginary Landscapes -- William Irwin Thompson
The Juniper Tree and Other Stories from Grimm --Maurice Sendak, illustrator, Lore Segal,Randall Jarrell, translators
Kathasaritsagara: The ocean of the streams of stories
Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook -- Alan Dundes
Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked -- Catherine Orenstein
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy tales -- Kate Bernheimer,ed.
Pipers at the Gate -- Jonathan Cott
Subversive Children's Literature -- Alison Lurie
Transformations -- Anne Sexton

Assignment #1: retelling

select one and retell (displace in direction of realism,specific rather than generic)
    Beauty and the Beast
    Bluebeard
    Cinderella
    East of the Sun, West of the Moon
    Hansel & Gretel
    Little Mermaid
    Little Red Riding Hood
    Rapunzel
    Sleeping Beauty
    Snow White

One page single-spaced
Ready to present in class by Friday Sept. 19
Post it to your blog AFTER you present it in class

Retellings: the stories behind the story, fairy tales as degenerative/deteriorative myths

Syllabus

English 304 Children’s Literature
Fall semester, 2008
Instructor: Michael Sexson Office: 2-183 Willson Hours: MWF 3-5

Texts: From the Bookstore: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales – Maria Tatar (Norton) (Norton); Alice in Sunderland- Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse); His Dark Materials-Philip Pullman (Knopf). Other texts: Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass-Lewis Carroll; The Wizard of Oz-L. Frank Baum and MGM film.


MYTH AND DISPLACEMENT

This course will be devoted to an engagement with what is typically termed “children’s and young adult’s literature.” While the course intends to look at the broad area of concern implied by these terms, it will be necessary to develop a specific focus, in this instance, the ways in which texts typically associated with the term “children’s literature” open backwards into myth and are displaced forward into realism. Such a focus helps us understand that children’s literature, in its literary incarnations, from crude alphabet books and didactic pamphlets to highbrow classics, and through its oral and ritual elements (such as nursery rhymes and schoolyard chants) amounts to a crucial and not incidental dimension of literary study.

Only three of the course’s texts will be available from the university bookstore. The other central texts must be purchased independently or located and downloaded electronically. While much of what is considered canonical children’s literature is available in comprehensive (and massive) anthologies, the instructor would like to point students in the direction of the internet for a great many primary texts and ancillary commentary. This way, the burden of research is placed directly on the student, making discoveries more relevant and valuable.

In order to ensure a rich engagement with the topics and issues of the class, we will create a system of exams, group and individual projects, papers, blogs, and other activities which will arise from the peculiar collective identity of the class. Quizzes are worth 100 points apiece, the final 50. Term paper: 100; Blog: 150. Presentations, Attendance, Participation: 100. Total: 600 points.

This initial handout is intended simply to cover what is necessary for the first few days of class. Subsequent material will come principally through emails messages and attachments. The list serve for this class is ENGL30401 and subscriptions/list reviews may be seen by emailing the list serve address followed by listserv&listserv.montana.edu. Since crucial information will be coming your way electronically, it is important that you update your “MYINFO” or “MYPORTAL” site at the MSU website and maintain an active and working email address.

Here are the items it important to know for the first few days of class:

1) Purchase texts at the MSU Bookstore. If you use other texts, please make sure the editions are the same as those required. Begin reading the Tatar book as well as the Alice books.

2) Begin an online blog for this class. The blog, which shall consist of evidence of a deep and thorough engagement with the texts and issues of the class, can be constructed with the assistance of those in our class who have done this before, or those who are especially skilled in such matters. There should be as many entries as there are classes. You should make every effort to capitalize upon the visual components of the internet as well as its informational content. Make sure your blog is easy to navigate. You should bookmark the site of each of your peers. Once your blog is up and running, email the address to sexson@english.montana.edu and your site will be send to the general listserve for this class. Additional assignments concerning the blog will be made as the class progresses. Do not wait to be told what to research electronically. If there are terms or themes or issues you find provocative, get busy with your online research. Your completed blog should be a rich and compelling set of observations, insights, information, helpful links, and images.

3) Some samples of previous blogs:English 304: http://firebird2004.blogspot.com/; English 300: http://www.geocities.com/nikoledidier/.

blogger.com, wordpress.org