January 22: Paige, “’Epic and Novel’: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”
February 6: Carlina, “The Theory of the Novel”
February 6: Mason, “The Phenomenology of Reading”
March 5: Juli, Theories of Narrative
March 19: Dave, Long Novels, Status, Commodification
April 2: Valeria, Reading in an Age of Distraction
April 2: Eliana, Reading alongside AI
Students in RMST 520 are asked to produce a twenty-minute presentation in class on resources available to think about some of our key themes. They will summarize or present 2–4 chapters or articles, some of which may be taken from the theoretical and ancillary texts proposed for the course. They will pick the text(s) and undertake this presentation in consultation with the instructor.
This is a research exercise. Though students present only on 2–4 chapters, the assumption is that they will have consulted and read more than this. In research, you would obviously not pick the first thing you came across.
This should all sync well with your training as a graduate student, in that this is precisely the kind of activity that you would need to undertake in writing papers and a thesis etc. It will give you further fundamental practice in the practice of research, which you can then use also elsewhere.
Your job is to read this material and synthesize and summarize it for the class, telling us about and explaining his key concepts, and emphasizing what seems to you particularly important and relevant for the themes and topics we are studying, which we laid out at the beginning of the semester, and which we have been working our way through since then.
Let me also emphasize that you should aim to provide a clear, succinct, useful summary of what you have read, drawing out key concepts. Remember that the rest of the class have not read what you have read. Don’t get too lost in the details. Above all, we want concepts and ideas that we can put to use in reading and thinking about long books.
Again, for this assignment in principle you may want to use AI tools (such as ChatGPT) to help you: in theory at least, AI is indeed potentially good at summary and synthesis. But a) this is no substitute for reading the text(s) yourself (so that you can check your reading against what AI provides) and b) you should document and report (to me, if not necessarily to the class) how you have used AI.