ENGL 475: Postmodern Literature (Fall 2004)

My Postmodern Dinner

Walked into the "new" downtown Silver Spring tonight for dinner. Here are some pictures, digital mementos obtained with that suddenly ubiquitous hybrid of instant recollection, the camera phone.

Community space or virtual space? A couple with matching laptops using wifi in the open air. What are they doing? Probably emailing, talking, chatting . . . just not with each other.

The restaurant as theme park . . . the meal is secondary to the experience ("eggsperience"?) which begins with stylized egg-beaters as doorhandles. The concept restaurant caters to the eye more than the palette. (I had a mango burger and fries.)

The lettering on these buildings, a public housing project, identifies them as "The Twin Towers"--their physical ugliness compounded by the grotesque irony of their name, which only now makes them visible to the casual passerby in the afterimage of two other, absent, towers.

Introductions

Please post us an introduction. The usual stuff--name, year, major, where you're from, etc.--but also something interesting aboout yourself or anything else you want us to know.

If you've read any of these books before, or anything else by the authors on this syllabus let us know!

Welcome

Welcome to the class blog for ENGL 475: Postmodern Literature. Please bookmark this address and get into the habit of checking the blog regularly, at least several times per week. I will use the blog to post announcements, assignments, updates to the calendar, and other administrative items. I will also post questions, provocations, and items related to our current reading and discussions. You may respond to these in the comments section of each entry. I will take blog comments into account when evaluating Participation.

New topics will appear most recent first and will remain on the main page for ten days. Sometimes I'll post a general entry topic entitled "The Floor." (As in, "The floor is now open . . .") This is an open thread that you can use to respond to our current readings or anything else that's going on in class. If you hava a request for a particular topic please email me. Any URLs you include in your comments will be automatically auto-linked by the blog software, but do not include other HTML tags.

Let's take a quick look around. Over in the right-hand column you'll find archives of previous postings, as well as a copy of the syllabus (in PDF format) and links of general interest to the course. If you have a blog of your own and would like it listed here just let me know. The Comments link below each entry is where you click to post a comment. (Pretty slick, huh?) The TrackBack link is used by other people with blogs to post their own entries linking back to this one. If you have a blog yourself, feel free to trackback to anything you see here. It's possible, then, that our discussion will spill over into other cyberspaces--that is the nature of the Web.

Please be aware that this blog is a public space, and anything you write here is accessible by visitors from outside the class as well as within. In order to foster a serious and responsible discussion, and as a courtesy to your classmates, please sign your posts with at least your first name; anonymous or nickname posts will be removed, and their IP address may be banned.

Any other questions? Post 'em in the Comments below!

Oh, I almost forgot . . . there's an "Easter egg" here--can you find it?