You should be arriving with an annotated copy of the course introduction. If you're not -- either because you weren't here last time or didn't do it -- you should get a copy, along with the prompt from last time, and go away and read and annotate it. When you've done that, come back and we'll fit you in.

I'll set up some groups of four or five. Here's what you should do. Read through the annotations of everyone in the group, and as a group prepare a page on which you list, preferably in order of importance, questions, comments or responses that you think I (and everybody else) should know about and discuss. Write out your list. Sign it. We'll take about a half hour for that; when everyone's done, we'll go around the groups and see what issues need clarification or discussion right now. I'll collect the lists and see what else needs to be addressed.

Digging in

One of the things that's clear from reading the inksheds people wrote at the beginning of class last time is that not many people know much about the eighteenth century. If you were trying to begin finding out, where would you start? Well, you might sign up for a course, in which the all-knowing professor would tell you . . . but if it were up to you, and the all-knowing professor said the best way to find out was to go start with the public resources available, you'd probably begin with some general reference works like encyclopedias, and maybe some general reference works about the history of English literature (at this point, the more general the better: if you're trying to size up the territory, you want a large-scale map: you don't want a description of one really big tree). To help you, I've created a list of resources available in the library (it's not exhaustive; there are lots of others). I may find a way to put some of the anthologies on reserve later in the term, but in general I think the strategy by which you can learn most is simply to spend some time in the stacks looking at and exploring what's there. So let's start there.

(An aside: my experience suggests that students are almost never put in the position of deciding what to read by assessing a source first and seeing how likely it is to be useful to them. Usually people are told, read chapter two, or that novel, or this story. The ability to size up and make choices, though, is an important skill, and one you learn by experience. Here's your chance to start.)

So, go down to the library and use the list as a starting point (it's linked from the main course Web page -- if you're in the library, you can access it on line from any computer by going to the course Web site (remember:  people.stu.ca/~hunt/33361112 ). Or you can print it out and take it with you.

(Another aside: students in general think of the library -- when they think of it at all -- as a place where you retrieve a book, or a stack of them, and take them home to work with. This is a very poor, and inefficient, way to work -- for one thing, on closer inspection most of the books you truck back to your room will turn out to be useless, and the trucking back and forth a waste of effort. Also, people often think, oh, you can find this all out on line. What you find, and what you learn, on line is very different. This assignment is about the physical presence of books and their arrangement in the library.)

Plan on spending a couple of hours in the library. Find some books and see what's near them on the shelf. Look through the listed books, and others that look likely, looking especially for the ones that give an overview of the period and its literature rather than exploring it at great depth.  I've restricted the list to books that don't go into great detail -- either general literary histories with a section on the eighteenth century, or anthologies -- collections of readings -- which might give a short introduction to the period at the beginning. There are other books which will do this, too, but avoid the ones focused entirely on the period; almost always, they'll assume you already have an overview.

Choose one, or maybe two, to spend an hour with. Write, for the rest of the class, a report on what you learn from it, or them, about the period -- focusing on what you think most important, and most likely to be useful to others. Remember, we're all (well, except for me) new at this, and need the basic information. You might end with some questions working with the text has raised for you, and which you think others might be interested in as well.

Format your report with your name at the top, the book, or books, you're reporting on next (use the format they're listed under in the reference list), and then enter your report.  It should look rather like this:
 

In all, you should spend three or four hours at this task; an hour or so searching out a resource to work with, another couple of hours reading; another hour writing. Don't expect that you're going to cover everything, or that it's going to be particularly well organized or brilliantly written -- do make it as useful to others as you can, because that's what we're going to be doing next time: using the reports.

Save it as a file (you'll probably be using Word, but really it doesn't matter at this point, as long as you continue to have access to it). Print a copy out, and bring it with you to class Monday afternoon.