Well, we have now reached a milestone: we at least "officially" know each other's names.

At the beginning of class the final three students listed the names of everyone else in the class (we are hoping that, unlike Alice, they remember their own names and identities). We then discussed the evaluations that were posted here, taking special note of complaints of self-editing and the interface of Serendip.

Our discussion turned to reactions to Wai-Chee's visit. A few students noted that they had been surprised by her definitions (either finding her definitions too narrow on some points, to wide for others).

Instead of buying a hard copy Alice in Wonderland, I found the full text online. I know that the point of reading the work was to actually 'read a novel' and get back to books, so is what I did in some way "against" what the point was? If the story was obviously taken from "a novel" and just posted onto a separate medium, does that actually change what it is? This reflects back to the Walt Whitman Archive, but I still can't quite get my mind around it. Is my Alice in Wonderland now different from those of the book-readers, just because I read it off of a computer screen?

Class started out with a brief discussion about spring break, and surprisingly no one had thought about genre during the vacation.

Then our thoughts turned to Wai Chee Dimock, a Yale English professor taking the generic world by storm through thoughtfully-written essays (one of which we read in the beginning of the semester) and a growing Facebook group called "Rethinking World Literature."  ShaynaS asked Dimock about her decison to delve into/question genre, to which Dimock replied that she is a "close reader" and genre analysis allows her to stay close to the text while "reaching outward" and bringing many interesting, popular texts into the foreground.

The article "Algebra in Wonderland" makes sense of lot of the strange sequences in Alice in Wonderland.  If they really were intended as metaphors for mathematical concepts, then the book seems a lot less "dreamlike."  Alice's confusion in the new world she encounters could be similar to Lewis Carroll's skepticism about the "new math."  Plenty of mathematical concepts like imaginary numbers do seem absurd at first. 

I wanted to say this in class, and yet the idea of contradicting Professor Dimmock wasn't appealing to me. I really enjoyed her visit.

Last semester, I took a class, creatively entitled "the novel," in which, among many other topics, we discussed what it is that actually makes a novel a novel. After reading several thigns that had no plot, no narrative, no coherent characters, and perhaps no artistic merit, we were forced to conclude that a novel is really defined based on it's length. A novel is just a prose (or even a poetry) piece of a reasonable number of chapters. Feel free to disagree with me on that score, but that seems to be how publishers and bookstores are choosing to define it.

i just realised that this post never showed up -- i guess it got lost?

tim burkes visit to class was an interesting one, not because of anything he said, but because of the way he went about doing so. it seemed like he was a breathing version of his blog - a monologue. he seemed so caught up in what he was saying and how relevant it was that a lot of the actual substance behind his words seemed to get lost. there were moments in which he threw in a joke or a random comment, and those honestly were the only times my mind snapped awake and i remember what he was saying.. maybe its just the way i function, but having someone speak to you and not just in front of you seems to make all the difference to the amount you absorb from what they are saying.