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| Spring 2017 PASSPORT ENGL 301: The Psychological Novel Naked I/Eyes & Psychedelic Mirrors A Description of How Your Work Will Be Evaluated William A. Nericcio | memo@sdsu.edu
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| Course Rules This page documents how your work will be evaluated this Spring 2017 Semester. Here you will find all the little gates, cages, all locks, all the meager statutes, ordinances, edicts, and formulas that allow our innovative psychology-obsessed literary collective to thrive. Let me underscore that you have absolute intellectual freedom in our seminar, BUT to receive these awesome rights, you must also follow the reasonable responsibilities outlined on this page. After all, we want to have a great time, be the best psychology/ literature/film studies class on the West Coast even (take that USC! Eat my dust Stanford!) But to do that, we need room for intellectual play--a safe asylum within which to forge our "naked", literature-filled wanderlust, to heighten our lucid literary and cinematic mirrors. So, then, read these laws carefully and thoroughly, so when you walk into Hepner Hall 221, aka Casa Freud, you will know what to do and what not to do! PASSPORT RULE 1
BOOKS_BOOKS_BOOKS BUY THE
BOOKS AND READ THEM--DON'T COME TO SEMINAR WITHOUT
YOUR BOOK! Though
we very much adore living in the 21st century, we will use ANALOG,
printed books in this class. Please do not come up and ask me if
you can use a kindle or your laptop or your smartphone--see rules 3 and
4 below. PASSPORT RULE 2 READ_READ_READ! When you enter this room for class you will
have completed
the reading that appears on the
day-to-day
class calendar! Please
note the word "finished" (not "started," not "skimmed," not "glanced,"
and most decidedly NOT "but I read the Cliffs/Sparks Notes!) Coming to a university
literature/film/cultural studies class without
doing the reading is like a gardener trying to raise
roses without getting her/his hands filthy with shit,
a surgeon trying to operate without a scalpel, a
fireman without an ax, a prostitute without, er,
well, I better stop there. Do the readings. Do
them twice if you can MAKE the time! I know, you are saying to yourself, "they
don't make me read in my other classes" or some other
sort of nonsense... well here, you must! Please think twice about joining us if you
have not finished the readings--the quality of our
class depends
upon your dedicated work and your relentless and
independent curiosity. Without your periodic
intellectual donations, the class is likely to evolve
into a boring, even painful waste of time.
Have you noticed how anytime a student uses
a laptop in an auditorium there is a "cone of distraction" alongside
and behind the student using a computer? This is usually due to said student surfing
the web via wi-fi perusing erotic delights or god
knows what. I was recently at
a cool (ok, it was slightly boring, I confess) lecture
by a noted writer--as I tried to listen to her, in
front of me, a diverted student--attending the lecture, no doubt, for
extra-credit--was perusing sites like these
(nsfw or school). So, laptops are GREAT for entering your
notes AFTER class, but they will not be allowed in
our lecture hall. If you have an issue with this,
schedule a meeting with me during office hours the
first week of class. PASSPORT RULE 4 PARALYZE THE SMARTPHONE!
PASSPORT RULE 5 Charlie-Delta_Thief:
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| Major Course Requirements GRADING INFORMATION
ESSAY You will be asked to write ONE 5-8 page
essay (also know as THE IMAGINATION CHALLENGE) during the course of the
term. Please note that you will never be compelled to write about
something you absolutely hate. Though I will provide you with a list of
prompts, please feel free to see me at any time over the course of the
semester during office hours to pitch/brainstorm essay ideas. FINAL EXAMINATION There will be an Imagination Challenge
In-Class Festival (aka, the
FINAL EXAM) on the last regularly scheduled
day of class: Thursday, May 4 2017 at 11am in HH 221. Your
final is absolutely comprehensive; it assumes you have
read all the books and screened all the movies that
are part of our required work. If you do the work, the
final is a breeze--even "fun" if you can believe it.
If you slack off, you will find the Imagination Challenge In-Class Festival as enjoyable as
being the waiter for the Here
Comes Honey Boo-Boo clan! QUIZZES, ATTENDANCE, and cineTREKS©... During the semester, you can expect several In-class Panic-Inducing Challenges otherwise known as CHECK-YOU-DID-THE-READING QUIZZES. You can expect these miserable quizzes from time to time, the number of quizzes depending on how many of you are nostalgic for high school. In other words, if everyone acts like a talented university student, we will enjoy FEW if any quizzes during our semester.
If you miss MORE than
three classes during the term and your grade will
decay in an ugly way. EXAMPLES: your hard-earned A-
will morph into a B-; your "gentleman's C" will
appear on the webportal as a "D." Ditching this class too
often will be as fun as a case of flesh-eating
virus. Do you receive any second chances in this class on the off chance you miss a quiz, blow an assignment, or generally screwup altogether? Luckily, your eccentric Professor is a recovering Catholic, and believes in the wonders of absolution--from time to time we will have out-of-class cineTREK© assignments, aka EXTRA-CREDIT OPPORTUNITIES; these can be used to atone for an extra-absence, a missed quiz, or some other class-impacting catastrophe you may experience during the term.
DO NOT CONFUSE YOUR EXTRA-CREDIT, cineTREKS™ with these FIVE postings! What you are expected to share via social media are things you run across that relate to our class experiences--you do not HAVE TO WRITE a long essay with your postings... a couple of pointed, pithy, well-crafted sentences will do, enough to give me and your classmates a sense of a connection to ideas developed during the semester in our class. OFFICE HOURS
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Your beloved magnificent iPhone, your
cherished Galaxy, your fetishized Pixel, or even 
Yes, the trauma of that delayed text,
yes, the horror of that missed hook-up call, yes, the
loss of the buzz of that random Tinder swipe will no
doubt doom you to years and years on an
psychoanalyst's couch, but we, the rest of us, will
gain some silence, a kind of sanctuary without which
ideas wither on the vine. We are NOT joking about this
unthinkable edict! Don't end up like this former student from
another Engl 301 I taught back in the day: 
