Syllabus for German 302

Note: Please note that while this syllabus is set up for a course that meets twice a week, this spring the course will be taught once a week. The present syllabus will be gently modified for the once-a-week format. The course works well for students in all fields of literary studies and humanities in general. This course satisfies the medieval certificate 300-level research Colloquium requirement.

REQUIRED TEXT:
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott.

RECOMMENDED DATABASE PROGRAM: Citation by Oberon Development, Ltd.

RECOMMENDED TEXTS:
Chicago Manual of Style, 14th or 15th editions;
for literature students, Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 4th edition (New York: MLA, 1995).
The Craft of Research (for undergraduates, but very good!)
Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students (as above)

Though literary theory may be the greatest challenge to philology today, materiality remains theory's great dilemma. This course explores materiality, but not—in this instance—as a philosophical concept or as theory's imagined 'other'. Rather, the course guides students in finding, describing, and evaluating primary sources, research tools, and secondary literature. Working on research topics in the field of literary studies of their own choosing, students will explore research aides as bibliographies, lexica, manuscript catalogues, dictionaries, encyclopedias, editions, literary histories, book reviews, and the like. Students will develop expertise in finding primary and secondary materials, acquire a set of categories for determining the usefulness and the quality of publications, and become conversant in the history of the intellectual traditions of their field. Establishing good research habits will be encouraged.
Conducted in English, the course is open to graduate students in any field by permission of the instructor. Students of later literary eras as well as those from fields such as history, religion, or art history whose research projects touch upon literary studies will also find the course useful. Students are encouraged to choose topics complementing their exam lists or dissertation research.

Requirements:
(1) weekly participation
(2) keeping a research journal with notes, etc. for this class (upgraded)
(3) two annotated bibliographies
(4) a paper that 'fleshes out' some aspect of one of the annotated bibliographies. This paper can double as a conference talk, research proposal, or a portion of a dissertation chapter or article. Length depends on the genre of paper you are writing.

WK 1 BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
This week’s goals are (1) choosing topics and (2) getting organized. In Tuesday’s class we will discuss our fields, our research interests, and our goals for the class.
ASSIGNMENT:
(1) Decide on your research topic for the first annotated bibliography. Keep topic relatively narrow, and connect it to your current research and study interests. Be prepared to share your topic with the class, and your reasons for choosing it.
(2) Getting organized. BRING TO CLASS your current system for keeping and retrieving secondary and primary literature and notes (database, laptop or printout, notecards, notebook, etc.) Be prepared to give a 5-minute presentation on your system, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it reflects the intellectual categories of your research.
RECOMMENDED DATABASE PROGRAM: Citation by Oberon Development, Ltd.
(3) What STYLE SHEET format are your going to follow for the first annotated bibliography? Make a choice and review how it works. Literature students may want to follow the MLA style or the Chicago Manual of Style, the two most widely used formats in literary disciplines; students from other disciplines should choose their fields’ preferred format.
RECOMMENDED for literature students: Either Chicago Manual of Style or MLA Style Handbook

WK 2 ENCYLOPEDIAS, LEXIKA
(Please note that all assignments will follow this general format!)
We will begin our work with reference tools by using encyclopedias. Find at least FIVE encyclopedias or lexica that have articles on your topic. Scan the articles following the guidelines below, and begin your annotated bibliography. If you wish, you may include one Internet source.
Bring to class your journal, note cards, typed up or handwritten draft, and be prepared to talk about the research process and your findings. Always be ready to name as best you can the methods and disciplines that appear in your research.
The point here is not to absorb what the articles have to say on your topic (one can always return to the articles to do that) but to survey what articles from different reference works have to offer on your topic. Is there a bibliography? How is the article organized and written? What is the focus? Is the article primarily historical, philological, theoretical, interpretive, for example? We are also building awareness of the history of our fields, so be sure to read the title pages of the works you are surveying, take note of the introductions and the first editors’ names. This way you are gathering knowledge about the history of your discipline from the sources, as it were: who, what, when, where, how, why.
If you were unable to find any sources, you must have an intellectual explanation, because the reference materials in our fields are so vast, and the fields themselves are so old that it is implausible to claim that nothing has ever been written on a topic! If you have found that you must modify your topic somewhat, or that the reference works define and contextualize it differently than you have, take notes and report back to us, because that is an interesting intellectual finding.

WK 3 BIBLIOGRAPHIES
ASSIGNMENT: Use at least five different bibliographies to compile a list of fifteen works (articles, monographs, other bibliographies...) on your topic. Use your journals to keep track of the questions that arise as you work with bibliographies.

WK 4 JOURNALS
ASSIGNMENT:
(1) Ask at least four colleagues and/or professors to name, in rank order, the top five journals in your field. Ask them to explain how they arrived at their rankings. Observe and describe the categories they use. If you came up with journals in last week’s assignment that are not named by your informants, ask them about those journals’ standing in the field.
(2) Study current and back issues of at least one top, middle, and low-ranked journal in your field. Add to this mix a journal that is new or that has an unusual focus.
(3) Finally, using the bibliographies, find ten really good and useful journal articles (old or new!) pertaining to your topic.

WK 5 MONOGRAPHS AND EDITIONS
For Tuesday’s assignment, you will have to come up with at least one primary source and two secondary, book-length sources relevant to your topic (the number of pertinent sources will be a function of your topic and field!). Some of you will already have primary sources in mind and wish to explore the question of editions and/or manuscript sources; others may wish to identify new materials on a topic.
The basic assignment is to add to your annotated bibliography at least five new entries on your topic.
On Thursday we will discuss how to find and use book reviews, which can give one an overview of debates in the field.

WK 6 BOOK REVIEWS
Please bring a draft of your bibliography to class, and your questions. Find two pieces of writing on the disciplinary history of your field and add them to your annotated bibliography.

FIRST ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE
Surprise reading to be handed out in class.

WK 7 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION
DISCUSS REQUIRED READING: Clare A. Lees, “Tradition, Literature, History,” chapter one of Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota P, 1999), 19-45; Niles; potentially Marx (18th Brumaire).

WK 8 NEW TOPICS
PLEASE COME TO CLASS WITH NEW TOPICS and new questions.
It is expected that you will work on your second annotated bibliography following the steps we went through in the first half of the course. Some class meetings during the second half of the semester are devoted to exploring topics on reference books of common interest. There will continue to be student reports to the class on problems encountered and solutions found!

WK 9 DICTIONARIES and GRAMMERS
We will work in class with a variety of historical dictionaries of the German language, and with grammars of medieval German. Please bring to class a set of words, terms, or phrases whose meanings you wish to investigate more fully.
Dictionaries
Grammars

WK 10 PRIMARY SOURCES! MANUSCRIPTS, CATALOGS, ARCHIVES
REPORTING IN. Students will briefly report on the status of their second annotated bibliography, on new problems, new sources, etc. We will then examine manuscript catalogues and practice using them to find source materials on our topics.

WK 11 PRIMARY SOURCES! EDITIONS
REPORTING IN. We will follow the same basic format as for week five. Students may wish to find editions of primary sources that they have identified as interesting for their topics by using manuscript catalogues during previous week.

WK 12 PRIMARY SOURCES! Bibliographies for German History
LECTURE BY TOM ROBISHEAUX, meet inside by the front door of Perkins.
Follow-up.

WK 13 LITERARY HISTORIES
Research the life one early scholar whose work was critical in shaping your field, and write a short report about them.

WK 14
REVISIT THE BEGINNING
Reporting in.

SECOND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE

The final paper should be based on one of your annotated bibliographies or some part of one. It can be part of a larger project (part of a dissertation prospectus, piece of a dissertation chapter, part of an article to be published, conference paper), which is being enriched and/or written from the work done in this class. The length of the paper depends on the genre within which you are working.