Official Goals for WRIT 510:

• Students will understand this material instead of expecting other people to understand it for them.
• Students will be able to judge the quality, accuracy, timeliness, and authority of materials they find online.
• Students will understand the strengths and weaknesses, the advantages and disadvantages of collectively-authored digital materials.
• Students will become familiar with the major factors driving the digital revolution in literary study, including social, technological, critical, legal, political, economical, and historical factors.
• Students will be able to create multimodal works of literary criticism and understand how these compare (in both strengths and weaknesses) to traditional print works of criticism.
• Students will discuss and critique how digital literary practices may affect traditional standards in the academy, such as copyright, plagiarism, and documentation.
• Students will become familiar with major names and works in digital literary theory ( for instance Landow, Lanham, McGann, O’Donnell, Aarseth, Yellowlees-Douglas, Johnson-Eilola, Baudrillard, Folsom, and others).
• Students will convey their increased understanding of these matters through written, oral, and digital assignments.
• Students will come closer to an understanding of how all these changes will affect their futures in fields related to literary studies. (Not all students are ENGL majors.)
• Students will develop at least average competence in using several basic multimedia techniques for presenting literary information (e.g. web pages, wikis, audio and visual presentations).
• Graduate students, to meet accreditation requirements, will be required to write longer papers and to complete an additional assignment, a critique of a recent monograph on digital literary studies, which they will present both in writing and orally to the class.