My Expectations For Your Performance in Class

Reading Comprehension

This is not high school. My job is not to annotate the text in class (explain meanings of obsolete words, for example) to explain what happened in the story. I expect you to have understood the plot correctly. I expect you to know the meaning of all words used in the literary texts we'll read and films we'll see. If you don't know the meaning of a word, stop, get out a dictionary and look it up, then return to the text or film. One of your aims as an English major ought to be to expand your vocabulary. Reading literature and viewing films will do this if you learn the meanings of new words unfamiliar to you. If you don't already own a dictionary, now is an excellent time to go buy one.

I also expect you to understand all literary references in a given text. If Paradise Lost is mentioned, for example, and you haven't read it, find out what it is. (Just do a seach at www.google.com. ) You should know the author, when it was written, and what it is about.

If you've already read an assigned text before, I expect you to reread it for this class so you can have it fresh in your mind when we discuss it.

Class Discussion

I expect you to bring a copy of the assigned text with you (the edition I ordered) to class and to have it out on your desk before class begins. When I (or a student) mentions a quotation on a given page, I expect you to open your book and turn to the page.