Starting in Fall 2008, I have been hosting all my teaching websites on a Drupal multisite portal. Some of the pages below are for past courses and are linked here for archival purposes.

Current Classes [Fall 2009]

FSEM 100E3: A Videogame Canon

1: 10:00 - 10:50, MWF

2: 12:00 - 12:50, MWF

What are the most important videogames of all time? In 2007, a committee of videogame scholars and designers submitted a proposal to the Library of Congress asserting that videogames are cultural artifacts worthy of preservation. Included in this report is a list of what this committee considered to be the 10 most important videogames of all time -- effectively endorsing a videogame canon. This seminar will focus a study of videogames around this core group of videogame texts while at the same time interrogating the notion of canonicity as it applies to other cultural genres, including literature and film. By analyzing the specific videogames in this set, this seminar will introduce the field of videogame studies while also asking students to think critically about the political, social, economic, and technical dimensions of media texts. Students will be required to play, study, and write about these games through blogging and class discussion. Major assignments will include an analytical paper, a presentation to the class, and a longer seminar paper or project. In addition, the class will collectively determine (and create a proposal for) an additional list of games to be added to the current canon. No prior knowledge of or experience with videogames is required to participate in this seminar.

Text

Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction Simeon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. ISBN: 0415977215.

The Games

	Spacewar!		Star Raiders
	Zork		Tetris
	SimCity		Super Mario Bros. 3
	Civilization I/II		Doom
	Warcraft		Sensible Soccer

ENGL 376MM New Media: The Virtual and the False

12:30 - 1:45, TR

This course is an exploration of New Media culture, focusing on an interrogation of the subject of world building. Since the 1980s, Virtual Reality has held out the utopian ideal of a better reality. Alternatively, some authors have used VR as a dystopic warning about things to come. More recently, the creative genre of Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) has shifted the question into the very lives of its players -- making for experiences with stories and games that are much more meaningful and, therefore, politically recuperative. This class will explore these ideas by reading texts which build virtual worlds or alternate realities in order to make the case that the real world could be a better place. Students will learn about this phenomenon in order to create and run their own ARG(s) within the course of the semester.

Possible Texts (this is not necessarily the final list)

Films (also not necessarily the final list)

ENGL 251A Forms of Narrative

2:00 - 3:15, TR

Stories are all around us, helping us make sense of the world and communicate that understanding to others. As media change and new expressive forms exploit technological resources in novel ways, the underlying principle of storytelling or narrative provides a useful framework for understanding how these forms work. In this course, we will use narratology (the formal study of narrative) to analyze fictional forms such as short stories, comics, animation, film, videogames, and electronic literature. The successful student will become fluent in the unique vocabulary of narrative analysis and bring those tools to bear on media texts.

Recent Classes [2008 - 2009]

ENGL 375TT: Graphic Novels

In this class, we are going to study stories conveyed through the combination of images with text. The graphic novel will be the primary genre under examination, but other specific forms (comic books, comic strips, and especially webcomics, etc.) will be considered as well. Indeed, the term .graphic novel. will be interrogated for its significance and relevance to specific works, especially in light of the fact that creators of these works often eschew the term. Primary readings will include the works listed below, and these will be supplemented by relevant literary theory and comics-specific theory and criticism. This will include work by such authors as Donald Ault, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Thierry Groensteen, Jan Baetens, Will Eisner, and Scott McCloud. The goal of our study will be to understand the formal structures of comics in the context of a long history of medial shifts. Accordingly, the question we will attempt to answer by the end of the semester is: What do the developments of New Media technology mean for the future of comics?

ENGL 251J: Electronic Literature (two sections)

This class is a survey of the emerging digital field of electronic literature, that which may be the future for literary expression. Within the scope of this class, the specific genres of electronic literature will primarily include hypertext fiction, flash animation, interactive fiction, and videogames. The successful student will gain an appreciation of these forms and technologies, both through careful critical analysis as well as through experimentation with creating works of e-lit.

See also: www.shouldisignupforaclassonelectronicliterature.com.

Fall 2008: Forms of Narrative (251A.1; 251A.2), ENGL 375MM: New Media: The Virtual and the False

Past classes [2002 - 2008]

The links below will take you to the homepages for courses taught at the University of Florida. Most of these classes have been taught in the Networked Writing Environment and relied heavily on the Web and other networking resources like MOOville.

[Note: These links will take you away from the current site to my course pages and syllabi in their original form. This means that they look progressively worse as you move back in time and that some links are probably broken.]

Spring 2008: LIT 3003 Archaologies of Story

Fall 2005: ENG 1131 Writing the Labyrinth

Summer 2004: ENC 1101 Expository and Argumentative Writing

Spring 2004: ENC 2210 Technical Writing

Fall 2003: ENG 1131 Writing The Labyrinth

Summer 2003: ENC 1101 Expository and Argumentative Writing

Spring 2003: ENC 1101 Expository and Argumentative Writing

Fall 2002: ENC 2210 Technical Writing