Emergency Message


This emergency message last revised Dec. 11th.

Dear English 25 students:

 

As you now know, the Chancellor has rescheduled final exams by extending Fall quarter into the beginning of January (see the Chancellor's announcement and the campus FAQ page about the rescheduling). Our English 25 exam will now be held on Wednesday, January 10th, at 4 pm (see updated UCSB Fall 17 Final Examination Schedule). 

 

In format, the exam will remain as described on my course assignments page and will still be 50 minutes long. However, before the exam starts I will ask you to fill out course evaluations for myself and for TA Giorgina Paiella (for students in her section), which we were not able to do last quarter due to the cancelled last day of classes.

 

Students who are in situations that make it difficult or impossible to take the rescheduled exam (e.g., if you will no longer be at UCSB in Winter quarter) should contact me (with a cc: to your TA) as soon as possible so that we can begin making alternative arrangements.

 

The course Web site will remain online through the completion of the course (and, in fact, I leave all my course sites up permanently). The site is not based on servers at UCSB, and so will not be affected by any power outages in our area. However, a few of the reading materials that the schedule links to are located on UCSB servers and will be inaccessible during power outages. (In this case, please look for them in the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine," where they are archived. You can do so by copying the URL for the original readings into the search box for the Wayback Machine. I have made a page with ready-to-click links to the Internet Archive copies of readings located on UCSB servers for the second half of the course here.)

 

In regard to the readings assigned for the cancelled class on the last Friday of the course (the class with readings on "deformance" and "glitch"), these readings are still assigned and a very few questions will concern them on the final exam. However, since you won't have the benefit of hearing me talk about them, I have asked the TAs to compensate by giving you a freebie of 3 points on the exam. (That is, you get 3 points, or the equivalent of one question, for free.) (Longer explanation: I would really like you to read the last assignments to complete the logical arc of the course. I am also making available until after the exam the Powerpoint slides for my intended last lecture, which includes references to these last readings. Download the Powerpoint here. I recommend that you start at slide #4, since the previous slides will not be meaningful without my explanation. Basically, the lecture reflects on the relation between "literature" and "information" by arguing that each seems to be what Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver called "noise"--but what writers and artists call a kind of deformance or glitch--from the point of view of the other.)

 

Please watch this page for any updates or changes as the situation evolves/clarifies.

 

Stay safe, and please try to have a happy holiday season even if in Santa Barbara it snows only ash.

 

--Yours, Alan