Here’s the original youtube clip of Susan Boyle on the talent show:

(This clip has links to her other performances if you want to follow up.)

Here’s an analysis by Charlie Booker on Newswipe.

There’s some nice discussion and analysis by Slate’s culture gabfest.

For comparison, here’s Paul Potts on the same show 2 years earlier.

Is this reality, or a carefully crafted argument?

Margy’s delicious site with lots of awesome links.

Youtube has clips of the UK Media analysis/comedy show Newswipe.

Australian news media analysis show Media Watch, including clips and other resources.

Don’t forget to make yourself an igoogle account so you have somewhere to send your google news alerts and rss feeds. It’s great stuff!

online citation assignment

We are reading Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male/Female Roles.”

The Emily Martin article is available through the databases MRC has paid for. Getting the reading is an exercise in using the article databases.
Go to the library’s website (protip: type “library” into the address bar of any computer on campus), http://library.mtroyal.ca/

From there, choose “Articles” from the left-hand menu.

Scroll down the page to the green links.

Click “JSTOR” – this will take you to the JSTOR database. If you are doing this from home, you will be asked for your student ID and password, which is the same one you use to log in on campus.

In the search field, enter: “emily martin” and egg and sperm
exactly like that, with the quotes.

The article we are reading comes up as #3 with this search. Click on the title to get the full text of the article, or PDF to get a more easily printable version.

If you lose your course outline, you can get a copy here: course-outline-1101.

The English Department Standard of Documentation is here: sor-2008-fall.

Remember to keep your eye on the blog for news and links.

A “new” portrait of Shakespeare was discovered in an Irish house. There is some debate about whether this is a picture painted from life, or during Shakespeare’s lifetime. All the other portraits we have are copies painted after he died.

What do you think? Is he hot?

I was just looking at the video for this application, and it looks kick-ass for essay writing. It’s called zotero, and it is a plug-in for Firefox (which you should all be using, rather than Internet Exploder), that keeps track of your research and lets you take notes while you read articles online.

Here are the Minimum Standard of Correctness and the Standard of Referencing for English 1113. You will need to download and print these for yourself.

Standard of Referencing: sor-2008-fall
Minimum Standard of Correctness: msc-2008-fall

Here are the electronic versions of all my course outlines for this semester, in case you lose yours. Make sure you grab the right one!

English 0212-o1: course-outline-0212
English 1113-01 (TR class): tr-course-outline
Enlglish 1113-03 (MW class): mw-course-outline

Here are a couple of sample exam questions. You are asked to write an answer that is 2-3 paragraphs long (say a page, in an exam booklet).

There will be questions on each of the texts we studied, and you will be asked to answer 8 of them.

1. Is race important in “Everyday Use”? Why/Why not?
2. What is the effect of the shifting points of view in “Mrs Turner Cutting the Grass?
3. How does the fragmentary and interwoven structure of Everything is Illuminated affect your experience as a reader?
4. Pick a theme from The Great Gatsby; give 3 examples of how this theme is represented in the novel.
5. Give 2 examples of the use of irony in Weldon’s story “Ind Aff…” How does this irony affect your experience as a reader?

If you still need Reading Responses, you go look at the Collected Works of Saki (HH Munro) – the full text is available in google books. You may write one or two responses on any of his stories.

For the MWF class, these responses are due on Monday November 24, for the Thursday class, they are due Thursday November 27.