28 February

If you've read my email or checked SI-Net recently, you'll know that we have a change of lecture venure. It's room 344 in the General Purpose South Building (78), which is here on the map.

23 February 2006      

Welcome to ENGL2420! All of the course guides and handouts will appear on this site, generally before they're handed out in hard copy in classes, so bookmark it and check it out regularly. The site's still incomplete, so don't worry if you find a number of links which don't work: they will in the course of things.

You'll note a slightly unusual arrangement of classes this time through: the two-hour seminar (Mondays 10.00-11.50 in Michie 435) comes before the lecture (Mondays 12.00-12.50 in Goddard 212). This is first of all a matter of timetabling: there's such a shortage of rooms throughout the University that it simply wasn't possible for us to do it the other way round. But (and here's the good news) in this subject it actually doesn't matter at all, as for several years now I've preferred to teach this course so that the lecture is an introduction to the work that's to be read for discussion in next week's tutorial. When a good deal of the material we're dealing with is often unfamiliar and difficult for the first-time reader, this makes good sense. The pattern for each week, then, is a 2-hour seminar discussion, after which we have a brief break and meet again in a small lecture theatre in the building next door, where I'll give an introduction to the work we'll be dealing with in the seminars next week.

That means the first class will be the lecture at 12.00 on Wednesday 1 March. Tutorials will start in week 2.

There's one other feature I'll flag now. Some time later in the semester, we may have one or two common sessions with Rex Butler's course, ARTT2109 (Postmodernist Art and Theory), which has some very similar concerns to this course. I'll keep you posted about this.

All the best for the semester

Tony Thwaites
(co-0rdinator, ENGL2420)