Pre-course Lecture of "American Novel Since 1945" To learn t

Pre-course Lecture of "American Novel Since 1945"
    Good morning everyone. I am Amy Hungerford. You know, I will open a course named "American Novel Since 1945". So in today’s lecture, I want to go over the requirements of the course that really are required, not the optional piece, so that you understand what my purpose is pedagogically. This course is not only open to English majors, but also open to non-English majors.(1)It’s essentially a reading course. That’s what 1 want you to take away from this: the knowledge of these novels. I want you to read them. 1 want you to think about them. I want you to talk about them. But I don’t expect you to become an English major in order to do that if you’re not already one. However, if you do happen to be an English or a literature major or someone who’s just very serious about reading at that level, you will find plenty to chew on here. Not all of the novels aspire to or have as their purpose that kind of difficulty that sometimes English majors really want. They want to have to work incredibly hard at the formal level. Some of the novels have that, but not all of them.(2)The challenge for you is to figure out: well, what do we do with those novels? What is the aim of a novel that isn’t all about formal innovation? What are those novels doing? Is it just inappropriate to call them literature? Should we think about them in a different way?(3)How should we integrate that kind of novel with novels that have more formal ambitions?
    So the paper length—there are two papers required, and there is a final exam—the paper length is designed to be quite large. It’s two five-to-eight-page papers.(4)Now a five-page paper is very different from an eight-page paper if you’re actually thinking about the words you choose and how you write it.(5)If you just sort of the night before scribble, scribble, scribble until you’ve done, maybe there’s not that much difference between a five-page and an eight-page paper except editing. But substantively, if you’re using every sentence in that paper, you can write a lot more in an eight-page paper, if you’ve used every sentence to say something substantive to move an argument along, than you can in the five-page. That’s for those people who really want to push themselves and want to advance a really significant piece of thinking about a novel.(6)Now I will also say that a five-page paper written well can trump an eight-page paper written poorly any day of the week. So you don’t have to write long papers, but what I’m saying is: the room is there for you to stretch out if you want to do that.
    About the final exam,(7)you should do well if you read, and if you come to lecture, and if you attend section. The process of doing those three things will have allowed you to already have thought quite a bit about these novels. You should remember them. I think they are quite memorable. They are quite distinct from each other, and you should be able to manage with that final exam without undue difficulty. I will say that the reading load is heavy. I have made some adjustments every year. I’m trying to deal with the fact that there are so many novels I love written between, say, 1985 and the present that are over 400 pages apiece. So what do you do with those on a syllabus? Well, I guess it’s the problem that people who teach the eighteenth-century novel always have, or the Victorian novel: the Victorian novel like the triple-decker, the three-volume novel. At least I don’t have those.(8)But what I’ve done is to excerpt some of the texts earlier in the term—and actually there’s a slightly heavier reading before break than there used to be—so that it’s a little bit lighter after break, when we’re doing those long novels.
    Okay. The last thing, well, this course, as you may have noticed from our friends behind us, is being filmed as part of the Yale Open Courses Initiative. It is an initiative funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This is one of eight courses being offered this year that are being videotaped.(9)They will be made available free to the public via the Internet, so this is a way of allowing the world to benefit from what we all do at Yale. That said, what we try to do—what I will try to do, and what I hope you will try to do—is to forget about them. It’s sometimes hard for me, but I trust that you will be able to do that. So forget about that. The point is not to cater to that camera, but to do what we do, and to show the world what it is that we do. Now I like to ask questions in lecture. I really am just not a fan of the sort of zone-out model of lecture audition. So I will ask you questions.(10)The only annoying thing I will have to do is to repeat your answers. So I hope you will not object to that, because you don’t have microphones on you, and it’s very cumbersome to get them back to you, so we’re not going to mike you so that your answers can be heard.
    All right. That’s all about today’s lecture. I hope you will have a better understanding of the course content, the paper length, and the class form of "American Novel Since 1945". Thank you for your attention!