Throughout this course, you will be reading literature and documenting your responses to it. You'll be forming connections you see within these texts and other humanities artifacts. Be sure you know what disciplines the humanities refers to in this course.

Here's an example of a humanities artifact popping up within a text. In the short story, "The Search Engine," Sherman Alexie writes about a young woman who is speculating about a college student who seems to be hitting on her: "He'd probably tattooed the opening lines of Andrew Marvell's 'To a Coy Mistress' on his chest." That poem is from the 1600s. Here's a link to it.

Here's another one, this humanities artifact appearing in the TV series Mad Men. Don Draper is reading a poetry book by Frank O'Hara:

Photo of Don Draper reading a poetry book by Frank O'Hara-- in Madmen, a TV show.

As you read the texts in this course, you'll make Reading Maps and Reading journals.

A READING MAP is a hand-drawn set of notes on the pages of a book. You might also call them "annotations." On these maps, you will note moments when you:

1) resonate personally with what you are reading;

2) note opportunities to research what else the text may be referring to;

3) point to humanities artifacts and encounters that the text might connect to.

A READING MAP must have at least five entries and might be one page or several.

Here's an example. Here are three short poems by Matsuo Basho, a poet who lived from 1644 - 1694.

Matsuo Basho.pdf

As I read these, I wrote on them. This is a READING MAP.

This is a poem by Matso Bacho.

I'm just getting started. But I can see that I have some humanities possibilities that I can follow:

What about Haiku? Are these three haikus, or something else? How does this poem show up in the history of Japanese history? Is Basho a major poet? How old is this translation?

From this, I can make a READING JOURNAL.

A READING JOURNAL entry is a typed entry that connects and expands what you noticed in a READING MAP. On my Reading Journal entry for Basho's poems, I created is a list of observations of what I've noticed and the questions I have:

Reading Journal for Matsuo Basho.docx

You, too, will do this kind of mapping and journaling. Over time, you'll collect these maps and your journal entries. At times during the course of the class, you will use these to fulfill assignments.