FALL 2016 ENGL 220 PASSPORT {aka, Mirror Rules} Psychedelic Mirrors Sex, Drugs, & Rock'n'Roll in Literature, Art, Film, & the Web William A. Nericcio | memo@sdsu.edu
|
|
earest
psychedelic/psychotropic (not psychotic!) English
220 Students, Fall 2016 @ SDSU! On this page you
will find the various laws that rule our 21st
century hallucinatory nation; here you will find all
the little gates, cages, locks, and handcuffs, all
the meager statutes, ordinances, edicts, and
principles that allow our experimental collective to
thrive--that stoke our collective electric
imagination! Let me underscore that you have absolute intellectual freedom in our experimental literature-filled seminar, BUT to receive these awesome rights, you must also succumb to the reasonable responsibilities outlined here on this page. After all, we want to have a blast, be the best literature/film studies class on the West Coast, even (take that Stanford! Eat my dust CAL BERKELEY)! But to do that, we need some peace and quiet--a safe asylum within which to forge our mirror-filled intellectual wanderlust, to amplify our lucid literary and cinematic hallucinations. So, then, read these laws carefully and thoroughly, so when you walk into GMCS 333, aka PSYCHEDELIC MIRRORLANDIA, you will know what to do and what not to do! PASSPORT RULE 1.111
BOOKS_BOOKS_BOOKS BUY THE
BOOKS AND READ THEM--DON'T COME TO SEMINAR WITHOUT
YOUR BOOK! PASSPORT RULE 1.111a READ_READ_READ! When you enter this room for class you will
have finished
the reading that appears on the
day-to-day
class calendar! FINISHED (not started, not skimmed, not
glanced)! 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 streetwalker 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. Your laptop will be asleep IN YOUR
BAGS during class--or, better yet, resting in your
dorm room or apartment. 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, there, 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 2.222a: PARALYZE THE SMARTPHONE! 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 220 I taught back in the day: PASSPORT RULE 3.333 Charlie-Delta_Thief: PLAGIARISM is for cads, thieves, and idiots who desire an "F" for the class. Plagiarism comes from the Latin word, "plagiarius" which means kidnapper, plunderer, or (get this!) thief--not a GOOD thing. In the university, plagiarism refers to the art and crime of presenting other people's work under your own signature, aka cutting and pasting copied crap from wikipedia--definitely a BAD thing. While your professor is forbidden by CSU/SDSU code from tattooing the word LOSER on the foreheads of guilty students, he can promise that felonious students will be remanded to the state-authorized SDSU executioners. Read THIS as well--SDSU is SERIOUS about this shit, so don't take any chances! Rely on your own mind and your own precious imagination! |
|
Other Requirements!!!! COURSEKEY REQUIREMENTS CLICK HERE! WRITING AND EXAMINATIONS You will be asked to write TWO Analytical
Imagination Challenges, 3-5 page essays,
during the course of the term. Please note that you
will never be compelled to write about something you
absolutely loathe. Please see me or your amazing GTAs
during office hours as brainstormings essay topics is
totally cool. There will be an Imagination Challenge
In-Class Festival (aka, the
FINAL EXAM) on the last regularly scheduled
day of class: Tuesday December 13, 2016 at 11am in GMCS 333. 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! DIGITAL/VIRTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS One social media site for this class,
Facebook-based, is located here.
If you are a member of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s mad
hallucinatory experiment in digitized, self-mirroring,
then you are expected to post class-related links,
images, videos, articles, etc at least ONCE a month or
5 total for the whole
semester. If you have not bought into
Zuckerberg’s mad experiment and stay away from
Facebook like the plague, you have a second
choice--you can directly submit a posting to the Hallucinating
Mirrors Tumblr page. New for this semester? You can also contribute to our Pinterest page! and, of course, now, there is your own instagram hashtag,
#psychedelicmirrors. Last, but not least, as this version of the class
is affiliated with Arts Alive, SDSU, we will also have a Snapchat-based
assessment assignment. See that page for details. Me and your GTAs will be posting
course-related materials to our Facebook and Tumblr
sites from time to time—feel free to follow the page
and make suggestions for additions/deletions. If
both Facebook and Tumblr remain alien to your
consciousness, you can send your suggested
links/images/videos to me via email to memo@sdsu.edu;
I don’t promise that I will post ALL of your
forwarded materials but I will try, however, to see
that some of them make their way to the fabulous
internets. DO NOT CONFUSE YOUR EXTRA-CREDIT, cineTREKS™ with these FIVE postings! What you are expected to share here 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. 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. Coming to
class for each seminar session is NOT optional--the
whole point of this class is to work together, the
idea being that we creatively and magicly convert
our classroom into a chaotic, unpredictable,
and exciting intellectual laboratory. Missing class, you
miss, as well, the whole point of the adventure. So
please bypass no more than three classes during the
semester--you are responsible for any work/notes you
miss when you are absent and can PRESUME that what you
missed that day was important! If you skip 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.
OFFICE HOURS
Why visit me and your GTAs during 'office hours'? Why not? I expect you to visit me in office
hours at least once
during the semester. Additionally, you are encouraged
and welcome to visit your GTAs. At SDSU, it's easy to
fall through the cracks, to feel that you are nothing
but a Red ID# or some warm pile of sentient flesh
filling a seat. In order to convince you that the
Professor teaching you is occasionally human,
please make a point during the semester to take the
time to introduce yourself in person. My office hours
will be on Tuesday afternoons from 12:30 pm to 3pm in AL
273 (if I am not there, look for me in the SDSU Press
office, AL 283). If these hours are inconvenient, do
not hesitate to call me at 619.594.1524 either to
schedule an appointment or discuss your questions via
telephone. My email address is: memo@sdsu.edu or bnericci@mail.sdsu.edu |
|
|