(10/24/12 8:49pm)
Course: Multi-Ethnic British Literatures
Professor: Visiting Instructor in English and American Literatures Benjamin Graves
Department: English and American Literatures
Credits: CMP, EUR, LIT
Location: Axinn 100
Meeting Time: M, W 2:50-4:05
Professor Perspective:
Aiming to give a wider perspective of literature, Visiting Professor of English and American Literatures Benjamin Graves teaches books that lie outside the usual English reading list.
“The course is about black British and Asian British writing,” said Graves. “Some of the books are pretty high profile, like The Satanic Verses, but a lot of them have not figured into the ‘canon’ of British literature yet.”
In this course, students read books like The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta, analyze poems and watch films related but not limited to national belonging, multi-identities and race.
“Some of these novels and poems are great pieces of art, but they do a lot more than offer themselves up for aesthetic appreciation,” said Graves. “They work through complex questions about national belonging, ethnic and racial identity and more. That’s what we’re trying to explore in the class.”
The course will also work through writers from different generations and will analyze the changes in authors’ viewpoint of Britain and British identity. “By working through authors from different generations, we can see the disagreements forming between them,” Graves said. “It’s really fun to see these different books come into historical focus.
Student Perspective:
Graves’s class is full of students ranging from senior English majors to undeclared first years and everyone else in between. Many students of this course voiced their appreciation of how the course allows them to expand their perspective on Britain. “The class really opens up Britain to more than just the queen, tea and Shakespeare,” said Katie Pett ’13.5. “It’s interesting to read the variety of voices and perspectives.”
Catherine Corbett ’14 was interested in the course after visiting Britain.
“In looking for a class that fulfilled the EUR distribution requirement, I stumbled across Graves’s class and it immediately piqued my interest because I spent this past summer in London,” said Corbett. “I also took Professor [of Political Science] Bleich’s Politics of Diversity in Western Europe class last spring, which focused on the politics of citizenship, immigration and integration of minorities in Great Britain, so I thought it would be cool to expand my understanding of these topics through an entirely different channel. I really enjoy the class and find the novels and poetry we read to be fascinating as we explore them through a lens of race, culture and identity.”
(09/19/12 11:29pm)
Thanks to a pilot program that began this fall, students seeking ways to save money on textbook costs now have free access to 44,000 e-books. An e-book is an online version of a printed book.
The e-books can be accessed with a wide range of mobile-enabled devices, and students can browse available titles online at go/ebl.
Many students burdened by high prices on printed textbooks welcome the College's move towards free access to books.
"It is going to take a bit of time for everyone to get used to using e-books, but e-books are something that I will definitely opt for, considering the money I would get to save," said Camila Fernandez '15. "I would choose e-books, especially for ones that I only have to read a chapter or two out of the whole book."
Head of Collections and Digital Initiatives Rebekah Irwin said that the e-book program will benefit students across a wide range of disciplines.
"Along with thirty other colleges and universities like Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of California Berkeley, we're taking part in an experiment this fall semester to gain first-hand experience with e-textbooks in the classroom," Irwin said. "About twenty [course] sections are taking part, including economic courses, psychology, biology and German."
Irwin added that one goal of the pilot program is to determine the advantages and disadvantages of permanently adopting an e-books program, as well as to gauge student and professor responses to using e-books in place of traditional textbooks.
Though students are able to access the e-books free of charge, there are certain costs associated with the books that students may not see, according to the College Bookstore Manager Georgia Best.
"Although some students had access to free e-books this semester, they were not free – the College paid a hefty fee to participate in this pilot program," Best said.
"Whether the College continues to participate in the program [and] how to pay for the fee will be up for discussion after we evaluate the pilot program at the end of the semester."
Irwin described the e-book program's benefits as far-reaching.
"Right now we are stuck in the middle," Irwin said. "We are buying thousands of books and we are also buying thousands of e-books; we want to make everyone happy."
"The thing with print books is that we buy books for other Middlebury schools in Mills College Cali. or other places and they ship it back to us if there is work to be done on the books and we ship it back to them," Irwin said. "So it seems, if you are thinking about carbon footprint, the way we ship books back and forth to our other schools is not the best environmentally and there are other options. But with e-books, there are no boundaries when we are thinking about students who are going abroad or traveling, since they would be able to access these e-textbooks almost anywhere."
She added that students fond of making notes, annotating and highlighting their books need not fear the digital textbooks.
"You can annotate and add notes on these e-textbooks," Irwin said, "and faculty can highlight sections and add their own annotations to share through the e-textbook with their entire class."
Professor of Economics William Pyle and Assistant Professor of Economics Andrea Robbett are both participating in the experiment this fall with their microeconomic theory courses.
"For me, the jury's still out
[regarding e-books]," Pyle said.
"In part, [this is] because I still need to learn how to use the various features. But I can see it being useful to write clarifying notes next to certain textbook questions or problems and to have those notes visible to all students. I asked my class for feedback and many reported liking the highlighting and post-it notes features [of the e-book]."
Pyle discussed students who already are using the College's new textbook options. "About a third have already opted to purchase the soft copy, three-hole punch version for $34. So some, obviously, are opting out. But even at that price, it is still a deal compared to the hardback copies." The hardback copies of the textbook cost $197.
"No one quite knows what the solution will be yet," said Irwin, at some point in our lives, textbooks, like personal mail and newspapers, may well move online. But that is many years off. We plan to buy both e-books and printed books for many years to come."