From an earlier Syllabus he notes about Classroom Discussion:
Anybody gets to ask any question about any fiction-related subject she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to study, a stupid-seeming question can end up being valuable, even profound. I am deadly serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning, or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of the class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.
Steven Gould (Jumper, 7th Sigma) let me pester him into an interview - it's up over here.
x-posted with GWW.
Wow- David Foster Wallace must not have had to have his syllabi approved by a curriculum committee!
I just realized that I've been conflating David Foster Wallace and Daniel Wallace. Oopsies.
I'm torn between thinking those were the best suggestions ever, and thinking those were the high standards that made him too good for this world.
and thinking those were the high standards that made him too good for this world.
I was definitely thinking that too. I don't know if I'd say "too good for this world" but so sensitive and constantly self-conscious that he couldn't last long in this world.
Ok, "too good for this world," is a bit of a maudlin flourish, but you feel me, right?
Part of what I learned in college is to believe that my ideas were strong enough to stand up past Jerkoff Hands(TM)
It was only a partial process then, that the internet has helped me complete, and it would have seemed like a blessing to the shy, blush-prone undergraduate that I was then if my instructor had been so fiercely anti-JOH, but I learned to persevere past them, which I think has greater real-life implications.
Excellent Game of Thrones poster.
I often wished to include things like "If you plagiarize any of your papers, partial or whole, I will KNOW...and I will CUT you. Caveat. Fear me."
But I didn't. So I think those are made of awesome.
