Hi All, 

After our Thursday start, we enter our first full week of classes. I hope you are having a smooth transition into the spring I semester and that all of your classes promise to be fulfilling. 

First, a few reminders:

1. You should have created a CUNY Commons account. If you haven’t done this yet, please do so today.
2. You won’t be able to write to the course blog until you send me your username and I send you an invitation to the site. You need to officially accept this invitation through the Commons. Once you do this, you will be able to create blogs. (If you took my ENG 101 class, you should have permissions–looking at you Jonathan and Yakub)
3. Please answer blogs as I lay out in the video tutorial under “resources” on the site. Some of you have posted your responses as comments to my post. Please don’t do this. If you have already done this, please cut and paste your response into a blog entry. 
4. This week, please read the Jonathan Culler chapter and answer these questions. You can also find this link on the syllabus. 

The chapter from Jonathan Culler’s book A Very short introduction to literary theory that you read for this week and last week asks the question, “What is literature and does it matter?”

He provides several approaches and answers to these questions but his overall focus-and what I want you to pay attention to this semester—concerns what language does—how it is shaped and structured to produce various effects and meanings. 

Culler asserts that the answer to his question “What is literature” does not ask for a definition that will mark strict boundaries between what counts as literature and what does not. Instead “literature” describes the act of analysis. In other words treating something as literature is to continue to ask questions about what it means and how it produces this meaning.

The first question I would like you to ask yourselves this semester is “what is interesting about the way a given author uses language? What strikes you as strange or clever about the piece of writing you’re reading? What works? What doesn’t?Who is being addressed and how? Is the author being illogical or does he or she make good points? 

Asking these questions will help you understand and have fun with the literature in this class as well as the literature you encounter throughout your lives. But it will also give you insight into other kinds of writing you will encounter in your professions.