Course Materials: English 165EW

Life After the End of the World: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives and Thoughts of the Unthinkable

Course syllabus. Covers general guidelines for participating in course; explains basic expectations; explains basis for course grade.

GauchoSpace login. Optional reading materials for the course (aside from the Douglas Adams selections) can be found here.

Twitter stream for the course. Contains reminders about upcoming events, links to articles and other content about related topics, and pointers to electronic copies of documents distributed in lecture. Don't want to sign up for Twitter? Add this RSS feed to Google Reader, My Yahoo!, or your favorite feed reader/aggregator, and keep up with the course announcements using services you already use.

Extra-Credit Rubric. Explains how I assign a grade to an extra-credit presentation.

How Your Grade Is Calculated (in Excruciating Detail). A document that attempts to exhaustively describe how I calculate your total grade for the quarter.

Make-Up quiz. Due at 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, 19 March. Read the directions carefully before beginning to work on this assignment.

Paper-Writing Resources

Grading Rubric. Explains how I grade papers. Very detailed.

Sample MLA-Compliant Paper. A sample paper that is formatted correctly according to the MLA guidelines, with notes on areas in which students often make errors.

Topics for Paper One. This assignment is due at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 6 February. You may also want to take a look at my grading rubric.

Topics for Paper Two. This assignment is due at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 March. You may also want to take a look at my grading rubric.

Lecture slide shows

Though these are not a substitute for coming to lecture, they may be helpful in preparing for the final.

• Lecture 1: Introduction (7 January 2013). No slideshow, just a brief discussion of the major parts of the syllabus and the beginning of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
• Lecture 2 (9 January): No lecture at all, just a continuation of our viewing of Dawn of the Dead.
• Lecture 3: The End, and Afterwards (14 January) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 4: The Abject Zombie (16 January) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 5: The Day the World Went Away (23 January) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 6: My vegetable love should grow/​Vaster than empires (28 January). (Also on Slideshare.)
  • Lecture 6 began with an extra-credit presentation by Ben Craske.
• Lecture 7: The Wor(l)dliness of the World (30 January). (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 8: the walking dead in a horror film (4 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 9: There’s not a lot of good news on the road. In times like these. (6 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 10: Okay (11 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 11: Guest lecture by Steven Pokornowski on 28 Days Later (13 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Optional lecture A: First discussion of selections from Douglas Adams (15 February)
  • The lecture slide show is here.
  • My own lecture notes are also available.
• Lecture 12: Blindness in An Essay on Blindness (20 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 13: Endless quantities of the Real (25 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 14: The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning (27 February) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 15: Who Counts as Human? Whose Lives Count as Lives? (4 March) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 16: if separate species we be (6 March) (Also on Slideshare.)
• Lecture 17: Some Thoughts on Education (11 March). (Also on Slideshare.)
  • Lecture 17 began with an extra-credit presentation by Ansel Rosenberg.
• Lecture 18: Du mußt dein Leben ändern (13 March). (Also on Slideshare.)
  • Lecture 18 began with an extra-credit presentation by Katey Dager.

Scheduling Surveys

Scheduling Survey for Second Douglas Adams discussion. This discussion will take place after 5 pm, sometime between 11 March and 14 March.

Scheduling Survey for 28 Days Later. These screenings took place at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday 6 February and Thursday 7 February. Both screenings were in South Hall 2635.

Scheduling Survey for first Douglas Adams discussion. This discussion (which is entirely optional) took place at 4pm on Friday, 15 February, in South Hall 1415.