Course Info & Policies

Required Materials

It is very important that we all read and work from the same editions of the below novels. We will often read passages together in class, and it is *essential* to the culture of our class that we all reference the same editions with the same paginations. I therefore ask that you please obtain the PRINT editions of the below books. I have ordered all of the below books through the Cornell bookstore and they should be available to you via CAMP. Digital editions of the below books should be used as a temporary stop gap or as a last resort only.

You may also check the below books out from our library and/or using Borrow Direct. Additionally, I also have limited numbers of each text available to lend to students. Please talk to me if you encounter difficulties with or have questions about accessing these texts in print; I will help you find a solution.

Please bring the assigned reading with you every day to class.

Course Requirements

Participation and Weekly Free Writes (30%)

You are expected to come to class having completed the reading listed for each day and prepared to write about and discuss it. Your successful participation in class depends on your preparation. Be sure to complete the reading and other assignments for each class session.

In addition to doing the reading for each week’s class and participating actively in class discussion, you will also submit a brief response to the week’s assigned reading in the form of a free write. These free writes will be written in response to a prompt I provide at the beginning of each class (sometimes you will have a choice between prompts). You will write them by hand during the first ~15 minutes of each class and submit them that day. You will be able to access the day’s reading while you write them, and they will be graded on completion. Throughout the semester, there will be 12 opportunities to turn in a free write; you must complete 10 of them to receive full credit in this area. Any additional free writes you complete beyond 10 are extra credit.

Reception Analysis (20%)

5-page essay analyzing the reception history of a literary text of your choosing.

Final Project (50%)

This course meets weekly for two-and-a-half hours (150 minutes). This would normally constitute a 3-credit course; for the additional 1 credit (making this course a total of 4 credits), you will complete an additional research component, culminating in a final research paper of 18-20 pages. You will write on a topic of your choosing, but this topic must be connected in some way to this course. Completing this project will involve completing a number of small preliminary assignments, including:

  • At least one meeting with me in which we discuss your preliminary ideas;
  • 1-2 page proposal;
  • 3 page research synthesis with associated bibliography;
  • Detailed final project outline;
  • 7-8 minute final project presentation

All of the above preliminary assignments will be graded on completion, though their overall quality will be considered when I assign your grade for the final project.

Policies and Information

Language, Power, and Difficulty

This class takes seriously the need to examine rather than censor or look away from the messiness, complexity, and, often, ugliness of history and the present. At the same time, our classroom is a contingent community and I treat it as such: we must be accountable to and respectful of each other as we collectively create a space for discussing difficult, and at times uncomfortable, issues.

In that spirit, I want to make explicit that some of the texts we will study this semester use the n-word and other slurs. We will not repeat these words aloud in class. While these words have a complex history of reclamation and resignification, they are not appropriate for casual classroom use.

Furthermore, throughout the semester we will read about events that are upsetting, to say the least. Our course texts concern forms of institutionalized oppression, personal and structural violence, and abuses of human rights such as sexual assault. Several of our course texts also include sexually explicit scenes and scenes involving domestic violence or drug use. Please approach our readings and class discussions with maturity, thoughtfulness, and care for yourself and for others in the class.

Technological Failures Are Not Emergencies

Technological failures and mishaps – file corruption, computer crashes, wifi connection problems, uploading the wrong file to Canvas – are predictable facts of twenty-first century life. They happen all the time and are thus NOT emergencies. You therefore need to develop strategies that take such failures into account. Start your work early, save it often, and save it to an external hard drive or in the cloud using services like Dropbox and Google drive. Technological failure or mishap – including uploading the wrong file to Canvas – is not an excuse for late or unfinished work.

Please note that I will read and respond to whatever you upload to Canvas for grading. It is your responsibility to turn in the correct version of your assignments.

Course Digital Infrastructure

We will make use of multiple online systems and programs in this course: a course site, a Canvas site, and Zoom.

  • Course site: We will use our course site to manage course information and our schedule. You will find an online version of our course calendar there (including the most up-to-date version of reading assignments and due dates), as well as an online version of our course syllabus. You will also find all course assignment sheets there, as well as links to online materials.

  • Canvas: Most of our course readings will be available via our Canvas site (excluding online-only material or print books). You will also submit assignments other than the weekly responses via Canvas, and I will use Canvas’s Gradebook to record your grades. You will also be able to access our individual meeting Zoom link (see below) via Canvas.

  • Zoom: I will hold office hours in person, but for meetings outside of office hours, I can meet with you either in person or on Zoom. If we meet on Zoom, we will utilize a standing Zoom link for our meeting. You can find this link via our Canvas site. To meet with me on Zoom:

    1. From our Canvas site, click on “Zoom” in the left menu.
    2. This will take you to a page where you will see our standing class Zoom link (which is titled “ENGL 4771 Social Media and Contemporary Literature (2025SP)”). Click “Join” to join the meeting.
    3. These meetings will not be recorded. I have enabled a waiting room for these meetings, which you will enter first when signing on. I will then let you into the Zoom room. If I do not let you in right away, this means I am meeting with another student.

Email

You should check your Cornell email account regularly; I will send course information and announcements through email. I endeavor to respond to all emails that you send me within 24-48 hours during the working week and within 2-3 days over the weekend or breaks, but please do not send me urgent emails regarding your assignments in the day or hours before they are due and expect a reply.

I am happy to answer simple questions about the course via email, but I will recommend that you talk to me in office hours or in a meeting about more involved questions and conversations about course material, assignments, and policies. In fact, the best thing to do in almost any situation that affects your class work is simply to talk to me about it. I am also happy to read and discuss advance drafts of your assignments with you in a one-on-one meeting, but I will not read and comment on drafts of assignments via email before they are due.

Attendance

Attendance is required. Because our class only meets once per week, more than one unexcused absence may affect your overall grade. Please communicate with me about your absences from class, especially if you need to miss more than one class. Please save your absence for when you need it, and please arrive to class on time.

If at any point in the semester you are ill for an extended period of time, or if there is an emergency, please let me know as soon as possible. We will work out a plan to make up the work you will miss in class.

Late Work

Please communicate with me in advance if you will need more time to complete an assignment. Unless arranged ahead of time, assignments submitted more than one week late will not be accepted (late free writes will not be accepted at all unless arranged in advance due to special circumstances). It is your responsibility to keep up with assignments and to submit them properly and on time.

On a personal level, like everyone else, I dislike being lied to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for more time to complete an assignment. You do not need to concoct elaborate stories if requesting an extension on an assignment, or even offer any explanation for this request at all. You can just ask for more time, and we will work it out.

Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools

All students are expected to adhere to the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Please see the Code of Academic Integrity at https://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/dean/academic-integrity/code-of-academic-integrity/. The Code states, “A Cornell student’s submission of work for academic credit indicates that the work is the student’s own. All outside assistance should be acknowledged, and the student’s academic position truthfully reported at all times.” Plagiarism will result in a 0 on the assignment and is also possible grounds for failure of the course or expulsion from the university.

Representing text written by someone else or generated by AI writing or research tools – such as chatGPT, Claude, Primo Research Assistant – or tools – such as Copilot – embedded into Word, Google docs, Grammarly, or other programs as your own writing and thinking is a violation of this policy and will be treated as such.

I include some caveats and explanations in what follows, but the main point is that I would rather you didn’t use AI tools to help you complete assignments for this class. In fact, I want to challenge you not to use them at all. In this class, the goal of writing is not just to produce a paper; it’s to communicate the complexity of your thought about the course material and to showcase your individual and unique engagement with it. I am interested in what YOU make of the course material – not in what chatGPT or other large language models can generate about it. Ideally, I would like you to practice thinking for yourself. I also have a high degree of confidence that your ideas, analyses, and interpretations are more interesting than what a language model can produce, and your grade will depend much more on the complexity and clarity of your ideas than it will on the superficial “polish” of your writing.

If you do choose to use AI tools to assist you in the writing process, you must explicitly label all artificially generated text that appears in your paper, just as you would label any text written by someone other than you. This means that all text generated by AI must appear in quotation marks, and you must cite it just as you would cite any other source. Just as you should not expect to do well if you turn in a paper that consists mainly of quoting other people’s writing, you should not expect to do well if you turn in a paper that consists mainly of text generated by AI tools.

If you use AI tools to help you brainstorm or generate ideas for your assignments, to help you revise your own writing, or to help you discover and/or synthesize scholarly sources, please acknowledge this explicitly in a statement at the end of your paper. Here are some examples of what this statement might look like: “I used chatGPT to brainstorm ideas for this paper…(then go into more detail about what ideas it helped you brainstorm),” or “I used Claude to help me revise for clarity and precision in paragraphs 2, 3, and 5 of this paper,” or “I used Primo Research Assistant to help me find and describe sources related to my topic, and it found the following sources (then list them), and described them in this way (then copy and paste the text it generated)” etc. Please be specific in this statement about which tool(s) and model(s) you used (i.e., the specific version of chatGPT or Claude, AI tools integrated into Google docs or Word or another kind of software, etc.). Finally, include 2-3 sentences concretely describing what you see as the benefits of this tool for your writing or research process.

I don’t want to spend my time with you looking on your work with suspicion, so all of the above will operate on the honor system. I’m choosing to trust you to know why using AI tools, just like any kind of plagiarism, can be destructive to your own learning and I’m choosing to assume you will honor this trust. Writing and researching are like anything: you get better at them with practice. Sometimes this practice can be painful or tedious, but what matters is doing it.

How to Turn Off (or Cite) Some Common AI Writing Tools

Accommodations and Accessibility

It is important to me that you can access this course and its materials and complete its assignments. If you anticipate or experience barriers to actively participating in or completing your work in this class, please let me know so that we can discuss options. Some resources that might be useful include: