Lesson Plan for Week 2: General Thoughts and Notes

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

—Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language

1. Attendance.
2. Does anyone need a section guidelines handout? Does anyone have any questions about that document?
3. Section issues? Crashing? (I will mail out more add codes tonight.)
4. In response to several questions by email this week: remember that the syllabus is in the front of your course reader.
5. Several of you have asked whether Professor Newfield is going to make his PowerPoint slide shows available. He has announced that he will not — he prefers that students take their own notes and participate actively in their own learning. If you miss lecture, you should obtain notes from other students in your writing/research groups.
6. Other administrative issues? Other questions?
7. Reminder: your detection structure assignment is due next week in section.

1. Elsie Cubitt says to her husband, before their wedding, If you take me, Hilton, you will take a woman who has nothing that she need be personally ashamed of; but you will have to be content with my word for it, and allow me to be silent as to all that passed up to the time when I became yours (529). What is it that she is hiding, and why doesn't she want her husband-to-be to know about this part of her life? What does she mean by nothing that she need be personally ashamed of?
2. Hilton Cubitt's promise not to inquire into the details of Elsie's prior life (A promise is a promise, Mr. Holmes, he says on 530) doesn't keep him from hiring a professional investigator to perform a task that may require doing so. What does this say about how Hilton Cubitt understands the nature of his promise?
3. What do we actually know about the Cubitts' marriage? What kinds of presuppositions does the marriage embody? How do the secrets Elsie keeps about her life in America affect their lives together?

• Divide students into writing/research groups. Collect roster for each group.