Spring,1998, WWW Section
Palo Alto College
Department of English
English 2322 World Wide Web
British Literature I
Spring,1998, WWW Section
Michael S. Seiferth
Faculty Office Building, 131
Telephone: 921-5049 (Office)
Telephone: 824-4136 (Home)
Telephone: 824-1564 (FAX)
Internet Addresses
(If you have access to an on-line service or are registered on the District e-mail server, you may write to me with your inquiries, and I shall respond as quickly as possible. If you have access to the World Wide Web, you will find many of the course documents available for reading or downloading.)
http://lonestar.texas.net/~mseifert/
mseifert@texas.net
mseifert@accdvm.accd.edu
OFFICE HOURS (INCLUDING OPEN COMPUTER LAB)
Schedule for Spring 1998 Including Office Hours
The Palo Alto College Teaching Center, funded in part through Title III, has made it possible for me to develop cogent and centrally significant materials, which will help my students conceive of literature in terms of the aesthetic, the historical, and philosophical dimensions which inform the periods and the works of the men and women writing in and about America beginning in the late eighth century through the late eighteenth century. I am grateful for the opportunity not only to expand central texts and, thus, understanding, but also to study the use of electronic media in developing a WWW Home Page for English courses. During the Fall of 1996, Palo Alto College will "go on line" with English 2322; students studying from a distance as well as on-campus students are now able to take full advantage of the resources on the NET! Further, I received scholarships to attend the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Annual Colonial Williamsburg History Forum, Americans on Approval: Immigrants Encounter the Land of Opportunity, November 2-4, 1995; the movement of people from England to the Americas is a study of the social, political, religious, and economic causes which informed the literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both in England and America. I have included many references to this Forum in English 2322. On November 6-10, 1966, I attended the Tenth Annual Colonial Williamsburg History Forum, "The First Amendment Reconsidered,B and the questions concerning the freedom of the press echoed John Milton's Areopagitica. The Eleventh Annual Williamsburg Forum , had as its subject The American Family That Never Was. By studying the social order and customs of the family and of the legal systems of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I received insights into the historical allusions found in large number of texts both in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British and American Literatures. These new resources can be found in the background information for this course and in the www assignments for this and other courses I teach. Finally, I am grateful to the NEH for its grant given to me during the summer of 1994, where I spent a delightful semester at LSU, Baton Rouge. It is here that I learned the nature of tragedy and comedy, both ideas, of course, which inform and generate the power of Shakespeare's King Lear and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The epic journeys taken by Beowulf and Gawain, as well as Adam and Eve, not only tell us of intrinsic values of the cultures they represent, but also of the vision of the British people at various times in their history. These epic works move towards a redefinition of laws and government informed by the divine, but in the hands of a hero whose works often move the race towards extending the boundaries of the tribe to include a new connection with the deity. The result is a harmony, a ,kosmos, reflecting the new society, ably represented in our course by Beowulf and Sir Gawain and Adam and Eve This new culture, of course, forms the foundation of our understanding of the literature written between the eighth century and the late eighteenth century, the scope of our course. Through a release-time grant offered by the Palo Alto College Teaching Center, ably administrated by Susan Hammond, I was offered the luxury of time to reflect, synthesize, and develop the course materials for English 2322, British Literature I. Finally, I thank my students enrolled in the first and second classes on the WWW who served as part of this experiment. Lori Seiler designed the first page as part of the Requirements for English 2322. You are invited to visit her page on King Lear.
Other students offered annotated versions of the key essays on the epic and on comedy. You are invited to visit their pages which are linked from the main index found at Student WWW Projects.You can go directly to the projects by clicking on the links, below: