Midsemester Project: Make Editing Posts Here!

The topic sheet for this part of the Midsemester Project specifies that you are to make a blog post about the editing choices you made in making a modern edition of your poem for your class. Feel free to make that post here, in the form of a response to this post.

What kinds of choices did you find yourself making in (a) selecting a poem to teach to your classmates, (b) preparing a modern edition of the poem, and (c) writing a short analysis of the poem? Reflect on the process of doing this assignment here.

Reading for Monday: Barber, "Written to My Son..."

Here is the poem that Dustin will be teaching the class on Monday.

Also, I encourage you to start reading Backscheider's chapter, "Friendship Poems" (Chapter 5, p. 175 - 132) in preparation for discussion on Wednesday and Friday (in addition to the poems that Liz and Kristen will be teaching).

Reading for Friday: Blamire, "Oh Donald Ye Are Just the Man"

Here is the poem that Dhara will be teaching in class on Friday.

For Credit: Love, Desire, and Marriage

Here are three short poems that follow up on some of the themes that Ez introduced in class today on Monday with reference to Seward's "To Time Past" and that Dhara further amplified in class discussion on Blamire's "Oh Donald Ye Are Just the Man." How much room is there in C18 poetry for women to express sexual desire, discuss sexual desire between women, question heterosexual desire, critique the institution of marriage? How do these issues bleed into one another and how do they get isolated?

The first poem is one of the most frank expressions of homoerotic desire to be found in C18 literature, Aphra Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman." (Written in 1688, the poem belongs to the "long eighteenth century" rather than the 1700s.) The second is a peculiar little piece that...well what is it saying exactly? Does this poem reflect desire for another woman, or simply a rejection of men? And is it men's sexuality that's being rejected here, or male power generally? Finally, there's another, longer, anonymous poem, which doesn't address same-sex desire necessarily, but it does question the "normalcy" of heterosexuality, particularly sexual desire between married people.

How do these poems illuminate, amplify, or contextualize the possibility of same-sex desire that may or may not be expressed in Seward's "To Time Past"? How do these poems illuminate, amplify, or contextualize the critique of marriage that may or may not be expressed in Blamire's "Oh Donald"? Offer your reflections here.

Alternatively, respond to the question that was asked in class today: are there C18 woman-authored poems that unambiguously express or describe heterosexual lust, longing, or love? Are all C18 men dogs?

No particular deadline here--it may take us a while to work our way through that handout of three poems. Likewise, since we haven't had a chance yet to finish with Greville's "Prayer for Indifference," feel free to reflect on its connections to the Jo Dee Messina video in the post below--I've removed the deadline on that one as well.

Reading for Wednesday: Anna Seward, "To Time Past"

Here is the poem that Ez will be teaching in class on Wednesday.

For Credit: The Power of Indifference

We ended class today by looking at Frances Greville's highly popular poem, "A Prayer for Indifference."

The question we didn't get to: In what way is this poem a "retirement poem"? Is it in fact a retirement poem? What insight does Backscheider's taxonomy give us into how to read the poem and make sense of it?

On a different, but related issue: How can we make sense of the tremendous popularity of this poem?

Sometimes, measuring the assumptions of the past against those of the present can make their particular contours more apparent to us. "Indifference" was a common theme for C18 women writers; in what way is "indifference" as characterized in this poem different from (or similar to) the attitude expressed in the song embedded below?




Feel free, too, to make your own post about Greville, Finch, "retirement poetry" or any related issues.

For Credit: "A Pyramid of Cans in the Pale Moonlight"

YAY! Dustin threw down!

For purposes of comparison, let me give some examples of what I had in mind as the pastoral theme in country music. These country music stars don't seem to let people embed their YouTube videos, so in several cases what you're watching is an amateur homage to the original song. And, like Dustin, I'm not making any claims about the literary or musical merit of this body of work. But here's the Man in Black himself:



A more recent variation on the pastoral theme:



Pastoral poetry is often subdivided into two further categories: pastoral (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Eclogues, which are all about shepherds playing their lutes and singing love songs on idealized hillsides) and georgic (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Georgics, which tell you how to farm and deal more closely with the gritty realities of rural life and making a living from the land. In that sense, Stephen Duck's "Thresher's Labour" is more georgic than pastoral, and so is this song:



(Finally, this isn't exactly pastoral, but click here to find out what happens when the Alexander Pope of Nashville imagines an encounter with a Stephen Duck on the road.)

What do you think?

Offer your reflections here on how pastoral poetry finds its way into contemporary music/verse/poetry (or feel free to make a post of your own making the case for other voices that are worthy of these laurels).

Pastoral Imagery in Contemporary Music

Since no one has yet taken advantage of authoring a post on the blog, I'll take the initiative with a reference to our discussion in class yesterday. Prof. Wilcox said in passing that country music is the sole purveyor of pastoral imagery in modern music, and I hold a bit of contention with that statement. Over the past few years, there have been a slew of independent releases by folk/rock musicians that embrace the pastoral while framing it within a C20 perspective. I'll provide a couple of examples here for the purpose of comparing and contrasting the lyrical content with some of the images we've already encountered, mainly in the Gray, Collier, and Duck. Note: YouTube cuts are provided if you're interested, not to debate whether or not so-and-so constitutes "good music."

Joanna Newsom - "Sadie" (From 2004's The Milk Eyed Mender)


Sadie, white coat,
carry me home.
Bury this bone,
take this pinecone.

Bury this bone
to gnaw on it later; gnaw on the telephone.
'Till then, we pray & suspend
the notion that these lives do never end.

And all day long we talk about mercy:
lead me to water lord, I sure am thirsty.
Down in the ditch where I nearly served you,
up in the clouds where he almost heard you

And all that we built,
and all that we breathed,
and all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds
is piled up in back;
it burns irrevocably.
(we spoke up in turns,
'till the silence crept over me)

Bless you
and I deeply do
no longer resolute
and I call to you

But the water go so cold,
and you do lose
what you don't hold.

This is an old song,
these are old blues.
This is not my tune,
but it's mine to use.
And the seabirds
where the fear once grew
will flock with a fury,
and they will bury what'd come for you

Down where I darn with the milk-eyed mender
you and I, and a love so tender,
is stretched-on the hoop where I stitch-this adage:
"Bless this house and its heart so savage."

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.
(and all that I know is blowing
like tumbleweed)

And the mealy worms
in the brine will burn
in a salty pyre,
among the fauns and ferns.

And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never grow cold
only taciturn.

And I'll tell you tomorrow.
Sadie, go on home now.
Bless those who've sickened below;
bless us who've chosen so.

And all that I've got
and all that I need
I tie in a knot
that I lay at your feet.
I have not forgot,
but a silence crept over me.
(So dig up your bone,
exhume your pinecone, my sadie)

Fleet Foxes - "Ragged Wood" (From 2008's Fleet Foxes)

Come down from the mountain, you have been gone too long
The spring is upon us, follow my only song
Settle down with me by the fire of my yearning
You should come back home, back on your own now

The world is alive now, in and outside our home
You run through the forest, settle before the sun
Darling, I can barely remember you beside me
You should come back home, back on your own now

In the evening light, when the woman of the woods came by
To give to you the word of the old man
In the morning tide, when the sparrow and the seagull fly
And Johnathan and Evelyn get tired

Lie to me if you will at the top of Beringer Hill
Tell me anything you want, any old lie will do
Call me back to you

Thought's? Comments? Do you think these constitute proper pastoral imagery, or a sort of pastiche-throwback stylistic cribbing?

-Dustin Chabert

For Credit: Phillis Wheatley, "To Maecenas"

You can find the PDF of this poem here and in the sidebar. Since the poem is the first in the volume, I also threw in the fascinating front-matter to Wheatley's volume: the "Mezzo-Tint," the Dedication, the Preface, John Wheatley's letter, and the affadavit that was deemed necessary. If you have time to look at any of that stuff, it offers interesting insights into the stakes in play for Wheatley's readers. They key thing we'll be discussing, though, is the poem itself--so go ahead and skip straight to it if you're short on time.

It's a difficult poem to parse, and there's little critical agreement on precisely what Wheatley is saying. What do you think?

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: Frameworks and Taxonomies

So it became clear in class today that a plan that was concocted with a full complement of 24 students in mind is not going to work as effectively with only a third of that number in play.

The plan: Students would present annotated poems from their chosen poets that fit one of Backscheider's three categories of important secular women's poetry (retirement poems, friendship poems, elegies). We would use these case studies to illustrate and test Backscheider's conclusions about the ubiquity and significance of these kinds of poems.

The goal (behind the curtain): To draw on students' growing interpretive skills by having them "teach" the poems in question, to get students to engage critically with Backscheider's ideas, to explore the question of just what constitutes "representative" or "characteristic literature."

The problem: a sampling of 24 poets will probably yield a significant number of "friendship," "retirement," or "elegiac" poems--enough that a handful of poems that don't quite fit the bill will lead to an interesting side-discussion. A sampling of 8 poets may well present a different situation: a fascinating array of poems that make for interesting conversation but together offer little critical purchase either on Backscheider or the broader problems of finding a coherent way to examine "C18 Women's Poetry" as a literary entity.

What do you suggest? Would it be better to:

• Let everyone present the particular poem(s) by their poets that they find most interesting and find some other way to connect the poems to Backscheider's critical frameworks (and if so--how might we do that?)
• Require everyone to consult again the volumes published by their poets and locate something--anything--that fits into one of those categories, at the risk of sacrificing the interest of individual poems to the larger critical project?
• Develop an alternative critical taxonomy to Backscheider's--some other way of grouping woman-authored poems of this period--so that we can use the reading of individual poems to arrive at useful insights about this poetry as a whole? If so, what might that alternative taxonomy look like?

Or to put the question another way: how can Backscheider help us (or not!) to get a handle on a universe that includes, in addition to the poem's we've read thus far, Isabella Kelly's epitaph for her tame chicken, Mary Barber's advice to her son on wearing pants, and Susanna Blamire's Scottish-dialect verses on...well, we're not really sure what a "siller" is. What new plan can help us meet the goals specified above? Or should we stick with the old plan?

???

Respond here with your thoughts. Or start a post of your own if that's more conducive to your ideas.

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: 500 pounds/year and a room of one's own

In her famous essay, "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf claimed that, to suceed as an artist, a woman needed a room of her own and an income of 500 pounds/year (that is, enough to allow one to live in independently). She argued that women writers have historically failed to flourish for want of these two things.

Thomas Gray (unlike the other authors we've read in the course of thinking about poetic vocation) had both of these things. At the age of 19, his aunt died, leaving him a small but comfortable inheritance, and so Gray was able to devote himself to the quiet life of the mind and the cultivation of his poetic talents, without regard to whether or not his works would make money. Leapor, Jones, Pope, and Wheatley did not have this advantage. (Neither did Collier or Duck, for that matter.)

Do these material circumstances make a difference as to how we read Gray's representation of the poetic vocation in the Elegy? Is a disinterested, dispassionate commitment to writing excellent poetry the consequence of a strong poetic gift--or of life circumstances that offer few obstacles to one's vocation?

Discuss. Cite evidence to support your claims.

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: The Speaker in Gray's Elegy

After elegizing the poor who lie buried in the churchyard (as opposed to the local landed gentry, who are buried under the church floor and memorialized with marble slabs and monuments lining the church walls), the speaker imagines how he will be spoken of after his death. He considers, first, the way a rural laborer ("some hoary-headed Swain," l. 97) would speak of him, and second, the epitaph on his gravestone (the final three stanzas of the poem).

Two questions (feel free to answer either):

How does the depiction of the poet in this poem differ from the depiction offered up by the Jones, Leapor, and Pope poems that we've read?

How would you characterize the poet's attitude toward those buried in the country churchyard?

Deadline: Wednesday (2/18), noon.

Happy Valenstein Day!

That's how my six-year-old has been consistently mispronouncing the holiday. Depending on the state of your love-life at the moment, it may be appropriate. Whatever the situation, may today involve chocolate.

See you Monday.

For Credit: Nocturnal Reverie (Which We Still Haven't Discussed!) Redux, Now UPDATED AND BUMPED

Liz wrote in response to my earlier "Nocturnal Reverie" post:

Unlike...previous poems [read in this course] "Reverie" is pastoral in nature and simply recounts the state in which the poet gathers his or her best inspiration: during the quiet and peaceful night....The poem's thorough description of the nighttime scene as well as its use of simple language...herald in the beginning of the Romantic age in a way that none of the other poetry...has done yet.

Dustin elaborates on Liz's point:

She invokes imagery of horses, owls, sheep, and curlews....Finch's addition of these woodland critters breathe a quaint vivacity into her simple pastoral language. Although her structure is neither floral nor Latinate, the presence of wildlife animates her words. I almost imagined this poem being the inspiration for some of the expository scenes in Walt Disney's Bambi.
Her language is incredibly sensually appealing, for as Finch speaks of "the torn up forage in his teeth," the reader can literally hear this beautiful beast consuming the delicate night. A parallel position is created where we become one with these animals, immersed into this reverie. We consume alongside the creatures and take in the scene until "a sedate content the spirit feels."

It is often said of C18 poetry that it is difficult to read because all our habits and expectations of reading poetry date from the Romantic era; our post-Romantic assumptions make pre-Romantic poetry seem less appealing or powerful to us.

If Liz and Dustin are right, then is the enduring power of "Nocturnal Reverie" simply quirks of Finch's style and subject matter that lock onto our post-Romantic assumptions about what "good" poetry does and sounds like? Or does "Nocturnal Reverie" function both as a "good" C18 poem (as you are beginning to understand that concept) and as a "good" poem in post-Romantic terms?

Offer your thoughts, informed opinions, reflections here.

Deadline: Monday (2/16), noon.

For Credit: Artimesia's BFF

Mira: more or less sense of artistic agency than Jones? What makes you think so?

In her response to this post below, Emily argues that Jones and Leapor differ in significant ways on the ways that they regard fame. Does that cash out into similar differences in the way they regard their sense of a poetic vocation that they have the power to shape and advance?

Deadline: Monday (2/16), noon.

For Credit: Epistles to Lady Whoozit

Class discussion on Wednesday (centering on Mary Jones's "Epistle to Lady Bowyer") got bogged down in my determination to throw in a certain amount of data on the nature of poetry publishing in the eighteenth-century:

• the significance of Pope
• the importance of the "footman-poet" and printer, Robert Dodsley, who produced the important multi-volume, multi-edition anthology, A Collection of Poems in Several Hands
• the typical features of a C18 volume of poetry (preface, dedication, "Mezzo-Tint," list of subscribers)
• the nature of C18 patronage and court culture

Not all of these things are relevant to all of the poets we will be reading. Subscription publication (which we didn't quite get around to discussing) was starting to become more significant in bringing poets into print. Subscription publication still involved patronage, but patronage of a different sort.

Arguably, Jones's picture of patronage-seeking is something of a "straw man"--that is, a vision of publishing that isn't entirely accurate or realistic, but which gives her something to argue against as she articulates a positive vision of the audience and purpose for which she writes. Aristocratic/royal patronage looms large in Jones's self-presentation, but the assumption that poetry publication depended on the endorsement and support of a prominent noble was already starting to fade by the time she was writing. Moreover, as a means of bringing a poet's verses to print, it was never available to women writers in quite the way Jones depicts.

One question for you to consider: What, then, does this "straw man" do for Jones's poetic self-presentation? What is the positive view of her vocation that it helps her to advance?

Another issue for you to consider: How does Mary Leapor's depiction of her audience in "Epistle to Artimesia" differ from Jones's? How does Leapor depict her poetic ambitions? Does she differ from Jones in the degree of "agency" (to use Backscheider's term) that she asserts, or are they just articulating the same kind of artistic stance in different ways?

You don't have to answer all these questions! But offer your reflections here. Or create a post of your own to identifies issues that interest you in these two poems.

Deadline: Friday (2/13), noon.

For Credit: Nocturnal Reverie

I put Anne Finch's "Noctural Reverie" in the early lineup for several reasons:

• It's not like anything else we've read thus far.
• It makes no reference to the author's gender, relationships, or social status.
• It is one of the woman-authored C18 poems that Backscheider believes should be part of the canon of Great Poems.
• It is written by one the few C18 woman poets who was never forgotten and who is generally agreed to be deserving of a place in the revised canon of Great Writers.

Offer your reflections on this poem here. Some questions you might consider: What strikes you as interesting or compelling about this poem? What is it about? How does it depict nature differently than Anna Seward's much later "Sonnet" about winter?

Deadline: Friday (2/13), noon.

Useful Resources and More Information

Someone in class today asked about the rules for commas; after class someone else confessed ignorance about split infinitives. An excellent resource for these and other grammar and writing questions is The Tongue Untied (full disclosure: a friend of mine runs the site). Closer to home, UIUC has a similar but less comprehensive Writer's Resources site at the Center for Writing Studies.

As we discussed (in class on Monday) the particular writers each of you is thinking of working on, someone asked about how to find further information about them. In many cases, there simply may not be a lot of information. Of those mentioned in class today, Susannah Centlivre and Ann Yearsley have received a lot of critical attention, the others have received little. For most of you, the research you do in this course, will not be the kind of summary and synthesis of critical/secondary sources that would be necessary if you were writing about a more prominent writer--but that's partly the point! The research you'll be doing is largely primary research: looking at the texts that your writer wrote and using those as the basis of your critical work.

That said, you will need to identify what, if anything, is known about your poet. The index, footnotes, and bibliography to Backscheider are a great place to start. There are also two good print resources: Roger Lonsdale's anthology, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets has carefully researched write-ups of all the women included in the anthology, and Janet Todd's Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660 - 1800 is also an excellent resource.

As some of you have already discovered, a Google search is not particularly helpful, particularly as many of these poets have fairly common names. The UIUC Library site has more to offer: the Literature Resource Center may have information on your poet. The Dictionary of National Biography (online) can help you learn more about figures who get addressed or alluded to in the poems you are reading. There is also the MLA (Modern Language Association) database, which indexes every literary-critical publication. If scholarly journal articles have been published about your poet, they will be in the MLA database, sometimes with a link to the full text.

Finally, by all means avail yourself of the librarians in the English Library on the 3rd floor of the UIUC library. They are smart, kind, and deeply knowledgeable--I have routinely found that asking them for help saves me a lot of time. Among other things, they are very good at shaking information out of MLA. The search engine is sort-of-self-explanatory, but they know lots of tricks for getting it to work more effectively.

I also have things to say about the Rare Book Library--but I'll save them for class.

Feel free to post questions, problems, concerns relating to the research process here.

For Credit: Introducing the Poetic Vocation

For Wednesday, we're reading Mary Jones's "Epistle to Lady Bowyer" (the same Mary Jones who wrote "Holt Water"). This is the first of several poems we'll be reading in which a poet writes about her (or his--we'll be looking at the Pope poem alluded to in the headnote) sense of poetic vocation: her gift, her ambitions, her intentions.
There are several things you can do here:

• identify what you find striking or interesting or puzzling in the way Jones represents her poetic abilities and aspirations, or

• define or identify the view of poetic creation against which Jones appears to be arguing, or

• skim the oeuvre of "your" poet to see if she published a similar sort of poetic credo, and tell us about it, or

• disagree (kindly and collegially, of course) with the remarks of a classmate, offering alternative evidence to support your view.
  

Deadline: Wednesday (2/11), noon.

For Monday: Picking a Poet

As I said in class on Friday, by Monday you'll need to have some idea of the poet you would like to do more work on in this course. Backscheider (the intro. to her book, supplemented with judicious use of the index) may give you some names to start thinking about. I also encourage you to browse on ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

There are many ways to get to ECCO, but they all involve starting with the UIUC Library website. If you start with the English Library site, you can simply type "ECCO" into the upper-right-hand search window and the first hit will take you to the login screen for ECCO. Alternatively, you can look at the left-hand sidebar on the English Library page, and click on "Online Resources in English and Film." If you scroll down past "Indexes" and "Resources," you'll come to "Full-Text Primary Resources," of which ECCO is one. If you are doing this from an off-campus computer, you'll need to log in.

Once you're on the ECCO site, try noodling around a little with the search engine. Keyword searches ("cooking," "beer," "pirates") can be fun. You can also do things like identify every book published in 1756 (for example) with the word "poem" in the title. Or you can try some generic titles for poetry books (a lot of people write books called "Poems on Several Occasions" or "Poems on Various Subjects."

"Some idea of the poet you would like to work on" ideally means a name of a woman poet who has not been published in the C20/C21, who published poetry between 1688 and 1799, and who interests you for a reason that you'll be able to articulate. But for purposes of class on Monday, a short-list of 3 names, or an idea of the particular cultural/aesthetic/historical issues you'd like to be able to explore through your poet are fine, if you're not able to conclusively identify "your" poet.

Feel free to post-for-credit on the blog about the research process. What frustrations have you encountered dealing with ECCO? What kinds of things have you found? What fears or anxieties do you have about approaching this project?

For Credit: Reflections on Backscheider's "Intro"

What surprised you or interested you in Backscheider's large-scale map of C18 women's poetry? What dimensions of this body of literature strike you as most important for your further study?

Deadline: Monday (2/9), noon.

For Credit: Poetry is for GIRLS

We ended class on Wednesday with me suggesting that Duck's invocation of the Muse displaces the labor of writing the poem onto a mythic female figure. He doesn't write the poem; she (the Muse) does.

Is this just Duck being weird and/or trying to play up his muscular manual manly manliness? Or does that moment in the poem tell us something about the prevailing conventions connecting class, gender, and poetry?

Offer your reflections here.

Deadline: Friday (2/6), noon.

Own the Blog!

As promised, I just e-mailed everyone invitations to become authors on the blog. You should accept; it's a course requirement.

Since there are only nine of you, I'll go ahead and pull back the curtain: there's a pedagogical point to having you be authors on the blog. I find that classes work better and students learn more when I build in ways for them to wrestle independently with the course content. Figuring out what kinds of questions to ask, getting curious and following up on that curiosity, measuring ones own insights against the ways other people respond to a text: these are all important skills for reading and writing about literature. One can learn by watching the instructor do all these things, but it's more fun (and more effective) to learn by doing it oneself.

So: in addition to answering the questions I pose on the blog, you can now

• ask questions of your own for your classmates to respond to,
• muse and invite reactions,
• start a conversation about why certain critical frameworks seem troubling,
• expose your ignorance and give your classmates freedom to do the same,
• reveal your erudition and give your classmates helpful background,
• try to nail down answers to interpretive close-reading questions,
• invite discussion of big-picture issues,
• question authority,
• identify useful connections between present-day texts and these poems,
• say what you didn't get to say in class,
• clarify a thought that you fear you expressed poorly in class,
• and so on.

Generally, blog posts that contribute meaningfully to the ongoing semester-long conversation about women and C18 poetry will get blog credit. Recipes, pet photos, random YouTube clips, and the like will not (though we will no doubt find them amusing).

As Mr Garrison of South Park says, "There are no stupid questions, only stupid students." You guys have CLEARLY demonstrated in class discussion that you are not stupid students, so you need not fear the stupid questions. In fact, there's a lot to be said for stupid questions. One of my dissertation advisers was renowned for asking stupid questions that only revealed his abysmal ignorance of critical feminist theory and his complete cluelessness about race and class. I'd roll my eyes at the questions (which usually came in the form of comments on a chapter draft) and then set out to answer them...and a while later I'd still be thinking...and by the time I had actually formulated a response, I'd realize that the stupid questions had led me to some important insights.

If no one writes anything, I'll build some additional carrots and sticks into this course component--but for now I'll just see how it goes.

For Credit: What is Duck Doing?

Reflect here on your reading of Duck's A Thresher's Labour.

Our discussion of Mary Collier's A Woman's Labour started today with several people mentioning how hard it is to read Collier without reading Stephen Duck's Thresher's Labour. Collier refers repeatedly to Duck's poem, which annoyed her so profoundly that she was motivated to write a similar poem of her own.

Some questions to consider: What motivated Duck to write his poem? Are the ideas he wants to communicate to readers the male counterparts of Collier's ideas--or is he pursuing different poetic goals? In class today I suggested a continuum of critical awareness:

1. my life sucks
2. my life sucks because of X
3. my life sucks because of X, and that's not fair
4. my life sucks because of X, and that's not fair, and something needs to change to make it fair.

You might like to consider whether Duck positions himself somewhere along this continuum.

Cite text as necessary to support your claims.

Deadline: Wednesday (2/4), noon.

UPDATE: Assignment due Monday (2/2)

As e-mailed to everyone yesterday:

One thing I forgot to mention in my assignment "fine
print"--the English Dept. has not shelled out for
software to allow us to read ".docx" documents.
 When you e-mail your assignment to me, make sure
it's a ".doc" or ".pdf" file.  If you're not sure
how to do that, use your "save as" command, which
will open a dialog box; one of the options you'll
have is to change the "file extension"--change it to
".doc".  And be sure to bring a hard copy to class!