Remember that we’re not meeting together on Th 12/5 or Mon 12/9. Instead, you will each attend a brief conference. Sign up here if you haven’t:

Pairs Conferences Sign-up

Conferences will last 10 minutes, so please be on time! Here are some tips on how to have a successful conference…

And here’s a tipsheet to help you prepare:

Pairs Conferences Tipsheet copy

Engl 252: Professor Allred Next week, we’ll meet in the usual classroom for ten minutes apiece in pairs: two of you and one of me.

Please be on time! You’re only expected to be in class 10-15 minutes for the next two sessions, so leave time for MTA disasters and the like.

TPS on Annotated Biblio:

What was difficult about the annotated bibliography stage? Was it challenging to “decode” the sources and figure out their main arguments efficiently? Were you able to see a “conversation” of sorts around the “primary text” (the novel by Butler/Ghosh/Offill) on the part of a handful of critics? Do you have a sense of what you want to say and how it relates to what “they say”

Questions on Kruger:

1. What was Kruger’s “research question” (or questions) when she started this research, do you imagine? What did she need to know in order to answer it? How would you describe her methodology? Who is she “in conversation” with in this piece?
2. What is Kruger’s central argument in this essay? Where do we find it, and what do you notice about how she guides readers through the structure of the essay?
3. We’ve talked a good bit about how “Englishy” methodologies put the text at the center and offer readings of the “text” rather than the “world.” But of course lit crit has things to say about the world as well (though the prism, so to speak, of the “text”!). How does Kruger use Offil’s novel and Levy’s memoir to point to aspects of “real life”? How does reading Weather help us understand aspects of the real world we inhabit?
4. By the end of the essay, how do you understand Offill’s novel differently, especially in its differences from Butler’s and Ghosh’s work? How does a focus on the temporality of “milling” and “maintenance” allow us to see what’s distinctive about Offill’s novel and how it relates to the norms that have made novels “tick” for almost 3 centuries?

I wanted to alert you to an opportunity for a needs-based scholarship for ENGL majors/minors. Please apply if you have financial needs: it’s a pretty simple application process!!

The Dorothy Horowitz Scholarship [English Majors + Minors only]

November 22nd – December 6th 

The English Department is now accepting submissions to The Dorothy Horowitz Scholarship, the English Department’s only need-based scholarship. Awards will be made of up to $1000 each.

Eligibility: Open to all undergraduate and graduate students in English. Applicants must be in good academic standing. Priority will be given to students who are experiencing hardship.

To Apply: Submit one copy of a recent transcript and one copy of a 300-word personal essay (.docx, .rtf or .pdf) that outlines the circumstances of financial need and describes how you intend to use the prize. Please use this form for submission

The Department will consider applications to the prize between November 23 – December 6th. Depending on the availability of funds the department will open another application window in the Spring semester.

Please also note: as much as we would like it to be, the Horowitz Prize is not an emergency fund. Even after the award is announced, it may take a few months to be distributed. As we hope you know, there are other emergency resources that the College offers, which are listed here.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the English Department at [email protected].

Discuss in small groups for 15 mins. Designate someone (preferably a “lifeline”) to represent the main points to peers at the end:

1. Weather is a first-person novel, if an unconventional one. The narrative, therefore, issues from an “I.” But who is that “I” addressing? For much of the novel, it feels as if we readers are “overhearing” something private and inner, but starting in Part Five the “you” starts to loom larger. How do you read the pivot towards the second person in the novel, toward us as readers, in effect? How does it change the tone of the novel in the last two sections?
2. The novel form is organized around endings: as with an individual life, we don’t know what the beginning and the middle mean, in some sense, until the end. Lizzie is obsessed with worry about how things will end: her son’s childhood, her marriage, her brother’s mental health, and, well, the state of the entire world. How does the novel negotiate its own ending? How does the ending make you feel? How does the “closure” the novel provides reflect back on its own many references to time and temporality?
3. Religion, or its more informal and secular cousin spirituality, is a theme common to all three texts we’ve read this term. Lizzie approaches religion with a mix of longing and irony throughout the novel, most notably when she and Ben attempt to be Unitarian Universalists. How does religion, or at least a spiritual feeling, return at the end of the novel? What do you think Offill is getting at with the references to sacred feelings and practices as the novel closes?