The new Lit Collab discussion group (and some comments for incoming students)

Current CCS Literature students have set up a new Literature Collaborative Facebook group for talking about the program and sharing links with each other. Yay! And for incoming Lit students, I've been writing a little bit of advice in the unofficial UCSB CCS class of 2015 Facebook group. I'll include those comments here, with some extra context, in case future incoming CCS Lit students are interested.

Clarifying the future of CCS Lit

Every year, Bruce (the dean of CCS) meets with students in each major to update them on the status of their program and ask for feedback on how well the program is working. This year, a lot of the Literature meeting was about the future of our program. Bruce is dedicated to making sure that CCS Lit is here to stay, and that it's here to grow stronger, but there are some interesting uncertainties about what the future will exactly look like. Here are my full notes from this meeting (also included at the end of this post).

All of this may sound worrying, but I've found that CCS Lit is an interesting and unique program, especially because many of the students are so passionate about it. We're very lucky as students that we get to participate in this improvement process — it's pretty rare that a dean of any department/college makes an effort to discuss internal department processes and politics with undergrad students.

CCS students get to participate in the construction of their educations on every level, from selecting much of your own course plan to freedom in choosing how to complete assignments — to learning about how the college works and being able to contribute real feedback to help direct the current and future state of the college. This is my favorite thing about CCS: it's an intellectual community influenced by all of its members, especially people who choose to actively put in effort to help organize and develop it, not just a standardized academic program that gives you a degree at the end.

Basically I love CCS to little pieces and I want all of you incoming freshmen to be really excited about it. And when you arrive here, I want to encourage you to make your education into the education you're looking forward to.

Comments about taking classes outside CCS Lit

I loved the English department! Taking classes there worked very well for me because my particular focus was in academic study of literature, media, and technology, not really in creative writing (CCS Lit is wonderfully flexible for people with unusual interests). So I took tons of upper-division seminar classes over in the College of Letters and Sciences. You do have to put some care and effort into picking your professors and classes, but I found a lot of smart professors and students in the English department.

I'd recommend that CCS Lit students check out the specializations available in English and see if any of them ring true for your interests, and if so, consider unofficially following their curriculum recommendations and the professors in that specialty. (I chose Literature & Culture of Information, unsurprisingly.)

Taking upper-division classes as a lower-division student is a privilege that's available if you want it. Some departments around campus are less willing to accept lower-division CCS students into their upper-division classes, even though you're technically allowed to take those classes, but it was easy in the English department. I also took a graduate-level class in the Comparative Literature program and it was great; I should have done more of those.

CCS Lit already includes a number of academic/theory classes — in my experience, they're often taught by people from other departments who want to have a chance to teach more specialized and experimental topics than they can in their "home" departments, since CCS allows for a lot of flexibility in class topics and usually has small class sizes. It sounds like CCS will be doing more of that in the future, and possibly in a more formal way, which sounds good to me. Generally it's good when CCS students spend time in outside departments and within CCS.

The Book Art classes within CCS are awesome, and everybody interested in art or books should take them. Sign up for them right away if you can — don't wait too many quarters to start!

My unsolicited advice

CCS Lit is not a program that works for everybody by default, but when you apply the effort to make it into something that does work for you (with a bit of luck along the way), you can't imagine having gone anywhere else. Bruce says that CCS is a place for "weirdly focused" students. I think it works especially when your interests and ambitions don't quite fit into a standard college structure — when you want more, when you want to determine your own intellectual path, when you want to work on what you're interested in, when you want to produce original work instead of filling out assignments for grades, when you are willing to find your own advisors from across campus and hang out with people in different majors to learn what you can learn. And maybe also for people who find interdepartmental politics fascinating. :)

Edit: My notes from the meeting

Since the CCS Literature Collaborative group is now a closed group, I'll repost my notes from that meeting below:

To ensure the survival of CCS, Bruce is working on integrating the college more effectively into the campus. External reviews over the past ten years criticized the inward-facing structure of the college because it was not terribly valuable to UCSB as a whole (although of course valuable to its students). Improving this will mean that we can keep our budget now and in the future.

The other majors have made a lot of progress, but CCS Literature is still inward-turned -- and there aren't enough qualified faculty in the program right now to lead the Lit major going forward, since Shirley is retiring next year. We need to add in more people from the rest of campus. But CCS Lit will continue to have creative writing as part of its unique value to UCSB and its students, especially since English and the Writing Program don't provide that kind of class. Bruce wants CCS Lit to stay here and stay strong, and it is obvious that it will be altered over the course of this growth process, but he does not yet know exactly how.

English is interested in increasing and developing its multimedia and multidisciplinary offerings. This will probably become a stronger part of CCS Lit -- but the idea is to open the additional doors of new media, not to close the existing doors of developing the craft of writing for readers.

Over the course of the transition period, current students will be able to continue with the program they signed up for (their intellectual contract with the college). New students will get the new program.

What can we do to help? Talk to our favorite professors about CCS and generally be good CCS citizens across campus. Get involved with campus jobs, especially as tour guides, and share information about jobs with each other. It'd be great if CCS could develop its alumni network more.

The current CCS Lit advising system is very weak. Bruce knows this and is working to get more faculty into the program to help with it.

Can't we make our current lecturers into stronger parts of CCS, as advisors and leaders? Not really, because of how the university is structured. There are three kinds of teachers here: "ladder faculty" who are long-term members of the staff hired for teaching, research, and service; "lecturers" hired for teaching and service (who can become longer-term members of staff after teaching for a while); and "unit 18s" who are hired to only teach (on a shorter-term basis). A lot of our teachers in CCS Lit are unit 18s, but the leader of CCS Lit is required to be a ladder faculty member.

How do we help the university and the broader community learn about CCS? Bruce knows that the CCS website is awful and is attempting to make progress on that front. Bruce is also working on getting CCS classes to not be "secret" on GOLD. Ellen also proposed the idea of a downtown reading series that would involve CCS students and alumni, to help promote the image of CCS and also benefit student and alumni writers.

14 suggestions for improvements to the Lit program

I completed my Literature degree with the end of Fall quarter in December, and I've moved away from Santa Barbara! Since I'm not at CCS anymore, Lit Collab no longer exists as a weekly club, but it may be picked up and led by another student if people feel a need for it again. We founded the group in Spring 2007 in response to perceived problems, so in one way, it's good when that interest fades. Somehow I made a bunch of good friends along the way. ♥

Over my years at CCS, I discussed the Literature program in depth with my advisors (Robyn Bell and James Donelan), Lit Collab members, and other friends, usually trying to come up with ways to improve the major. Here are some of these ideas in writing in the hope that they will continue being discussed.

Note that these are just recommendations, limited by my single viewpoint as a student. I've sometimes been frustrated by aspects of this college, but as a whole it's been even more than what I imagined as a bored high school student thinking about the perfect university. I love CCS, and I'm happy I got to contribute to it in a few ways.

Advising

1. Advisors should regularly ask their advisees what they think of the Lit program and how it should be improved, starting during their freshman year. (Some advisors do this already, but not all of them.) Encouraging students to think critically about their educations and involving them in discussions of teaching styles, curriculum, etc. supports the mission of CCS: helping students think for themselves and produce their own educations instead of simply accepting knowledge.

2. Advisors should encourage their advisees to take core classes from a broad range of instructors in both CCS and L&S (English, Comp Lit, etc). Every instructor has something different to teach.

3. Advisors should follow up with all of their former advisees 1 year and 5 years after they graduate, probably through simple personal emails, and compile the results into a document discussed by the Lit program and used to help fine-tune future advising and program choices. Do they have jobs, and if so, where are they working? Are they in graduate school? Are their careers in progress? Are they satisfied with the preparation that CCS Lit gave them? Do they want to start donating money to CCS?

4. Advisors should encourage all students to consider taking a CCS Book Art class in their freshman or sophomore years as a way to think more deeply about writing and reading. Setting a poem by hand with metal type makes a person consider every single comma; learning to sew and glue eight different ways to structure a book encourages a person to think about innovative ways to structure narratives.

5. Advising is central to CCS, but I’ve heard many students complain about their advisors for all kinds of reasons. I’d like students to have to write an anonymous advisor evaluation at the end of every year, much like class evaluations: formally collected, typed up, compiled, and distributed back to those advisors (and the Lit program as a whole).

Requirements

1. The Lit program should produce and distribute a one-page document that explains to students why they have to take Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Students complain about the arbitrariness and old-white-men bias of this requirement, but there are reasons for it: they are a symbolic remnant of traditional liberal arts curriculums, they changed the English language, etc. I picture this document with one paragraph from each instructor explaining his/her thoughts about this requirement, putting it into a broader academic context.

2. Lit Symposium should present Marvin Mudrick once a year (or couple of years), with a video or a reading of his writing and/or transcribed classes. A lot of students graduate from CCS Lit having barely heard of the interesting person who established much of what CCS is today, and I think they missed out. I’ve benefited from reading about his ideas and thinking critically about them both on their own and as embodied in the current Lit program. This remembering shouldn’t be worshipful or antagonistic, just educational.

3. Lit Symposium should also have a student reading once a year or so, probably in Winter quarter. There are usually some student-organized readings in Spring quarter for Spectrum and Teeth, and sometimes people create other reading events in the evenings, but it’d be great for students have more chances to share their work with their peers in a large-ish and somewhat formal setting. It could work like this: the Lit Symp organizer would email a call for submissions to all Lit students a couple weeks before the reading, and then the organizer would review the submissions and approve 10-12 diverse short pieces or excerpts.

4. The Senior Portfolio project is important and should be more rigorously defined. I imagine it like this: each student would produce at least two copies of a portfolio book of some kind, to be determined in conjunction with his or her advisor. This may be: a collection of poetry xeroxed and stapled; a set of academic essays and short stories, interspersed with drawings by a friend, bound by the Alternative Copy Shop; a themed gathering of photography and memoir writing hand-bound with a technique learned in a Book Arts class; or anything like that. They would usually include an introduction and a list of important classes the student has taken while at CCS. One copy stays at CCS in a small library of portfolio books created by graduates, available for all interested current Lit students to browse and take inspiration (maybe on a shelf in the CCS office or something like that).

5. More small group projects outside of class might be able to help Literature students get to know each other better. A sense of community in the Literature program is very important. Each student’s Literature friends contribute to his or her individual success through informal discussions, writing exchanges, class recommendations, etc.

The program itself

1. Literature is too large, diverse, and personal of a field to approach with a rigorously defined system. Throwing students into the deep end with serious classes starting as freshmen and teaching them via modeling by instructors and other students in discussion-based classes, with lots of reading and lots of writing, is the most effective way I’ve seen to teach literature. We should continue improving this system with good visiting instructors and enthusiastic new students.

2. Some aspects of the CCS Lit program aren’t well explained, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. I’m in favor of incremental changes, not drastic ones.

3. CCS Lit should offer core classes that engage with a broad range of approaches, subjects, and time periods, so that each student can piece together a solid and specialized overview of the field by the time he or she graduates. This may include classes involving feminist theory, postcolonial scholarship, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic theory as well as the literatures of many nations and cultures and eras.

4. What’s the difference between the L&S English program and the CCS Literature program? I’d really like to be able to provide a solid answer for this when people ask me, respectful of the perspectives and goals of both of these programs.

Some recommended classes

Now that it's time to pick Winter classes, here are recommendations from members of Lit Collab. See also our Fall 2008 Very Unofficial Collection of Helpful Hints for New Lit Students (PDF), which has more suggestions on page 5 from Jordan '09, Ellen '10, and me. Feel free to comment on this post with a list of your own favorites!

Danielle '10

Basic Narrative Technique or anything like it is crucial for jump-starting your creative writing skills. Even if you think you know all the basics, trust me, you don't. Take this class.

Sign up for every creative writing class, attend the first meeting, and decide which ones you want to keep, if any. If you don't have a writing class every quarter, you can always do independent study, and the great thing about independent study is that you can pick which teacher you get to work with and what you work on.

Torrie '10

Some of the best courses are the random ones taken outside of your major. I highly recommend looking into the Anthropology and Classics departments; Professor Erickson in Classics is wonderful.

The language departments offer cool courses on literature, film, culture, etc. which are taught in English, so there is no need to be afraid to take a course in the Italian department if you don't speak the language. Just look for courses that have weird letter combinations after them, like Ys and Zs, and they will often be the English-language offerings.

The English department has a lot of great classes. I loved Environment and Literature, Detective Fiction and Fairy Tales. For professors, I recommend Zinn, Hiltner and Shirley Lim (who is also very involved in CCS).

If you are interested in creative writing, take Barry Spacks.

As a Lit student it seems almost required — but very fun and rewarding — to take either or both John Wilson's Diaries course and Caroline Allen's Telling Life Stories.

Take Walking Biology before you graduate.

Britta '09

Try the Feminist Studies department. I signed up for Gender, Science, and New Technology, not expecting much, and I loved it. Experience with academic feminist study can add a lot of depth to your understanding of literature, and it's also just refreshing to be part of a room full of people who deeply agree about the equality of human beings.

Take at least one graduate-level class — even better if you buddy with a CCS Lit friend and take it together. Danielle and I picked one in the Comparative Literature program and learned a lot in a tiny class from a distinguished visiting professor. So good! If the class you choose turns out to be too hard, you can drop it halfway through and still have had a valuable experience. All you have to do is pick up a form in the CCS office and get a few signatures.

Advice about writing papers

The following quote is from an email that Professor Richard Corum (now retired) sent to his CCS Lit Shakespeare class in October 2007, when we had a paper due soon. I find this oddly helpful to re-read when I'm working on an essay, and I hope you will too.

You're being asked to do this task entirely on your own. The point of this is not to defeat you and lead to learned helplessness, but to empower you, to give you confidence that you can do this kind of work on your own — that, more generally, you can learn to do all kinds of difficult things. This is the most important part of the assignment because this is the only hope that your age group will be able to keep on creating new knowledge once all of your teachers are dead. What you are most up against in doing this are, most likely, your feelings of panic, incapacity, fear, of wanting to do the right thing, the best thing, of succeeding even if success is handed to you. To write this paper you need to be able to get these emotions under some control, and to keep them from destroying the possibility of stepping outside your comfort zone. If you are in your comfort zone on this paper you aren't doing the assignment (unless you've done a lot of things like this in the past).

Take risks, and make this, in whatever way possible, something pleasurable for yourself. And, remember, it's better to get nowhere (this time) than to cave in and do the same old, same old.

The big three

People don't always like the Literature requirement of taking Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and there isn't much official communication about why we have to take them. Here are some reasons that I've heard or thought about:

• They're a vestige of traditional Literature education — back thirty years ago, all you studied as a Lit major (or equivalent) was old white men. Now we study a much wider range of writing, but there's a little bit of that left.
• Robyn says that part of the reason we study those three is because they each changed the English language.
• Nobody knows, especially since our founder was not a fan of them: "we were asked (though perhaps not expected) to get through piles of Shakespeare (whom he called a misogynist), Chaucer ('just pretend it’s horribly misspelled'), and Milton (again, no favorite of Mudrick's)".
• They show that Lit is a "hard" major.
• For bragging rights.
• To inspire debate about the literary canon.
• To understand allusions and references (but then why not include the Greek and Roman epics or the King James Bible?).
• Because they're old white men.
• Because they're just that good.
• Because they're challenging.
• Because it'd be ridiculous to get a Lit degree without having read them.
• Because it sounded like a good idea at the time.

For one of the three, we used to be able to substitute a class about a significant author if taught in the original language; now we can substitute various single-author classes (ask your advisor for details).

Litify it!

Hello, all! Danielle here, pinch-blogging for Britta to give you the happenings from the Literature meeting held last Friday:

Notes

The Annual Literature Meeting began on a somber note, with Bruce having to explain to us that a beloved teacher was going to have to take the remainder of the quarter off. As a result:

1. Solo Authors is canceled. Students will be rewarded 2 units for work already completed.
2. Donelan takes control of Milton after a week and a half hiatus.
3. Graphic Novels will be covered by another professor.
4. Lim will oversee the creative writing advisees as well as independent studies and my colloquium.

A "Thinking Of You" card will be circulating throughout classes to be signed by all students who feel so inclined this week and next.

After the bad news, we received some better news. Changes are happening within the Lit program in order to make ours as defined and organized as all the others in CCS. Most of the changes that will be implemented to support this project sound great so far.

In conjunction with the struggle to cover Robyn's classes and advisees, more student advisers are being sought out so each professor will have fewer students to advise and we, in turn, will receive more one-on-one mentorship.

Classes will be outlined hopefully a full year in advance to aid in planning of schedules.

Bruce is working to expand the breadth of topics covered by Literature classes, as in recent years they have been mostly regarding the same types of subjects (ie. specific authors, time periods, regions). In the past, however, Literature classes ranged from philosophy, religion, history, etc. studied through "a literary lens."To help bring in new literary topics outside of our usual studies, professors from departments including German/Slavic Studies and Psychology will be on loan.

A few students, including myself, will be working with Leslie to define more clearly the requirements for Literature majors in order to graduate. Lists will be drafted to clarify which classes fulfill the breadth and related reqs.

The mid-residency review process is still being polished, but its basic function remains this: to determine after a few quarters in CCS if a student is really meant to remain within the college, or might possibly be best served in another deparment. This decision will rest in the hands of a panel of faculty that will review a student's portfolio as it stands at the end of the sophomore year.

The senior portfolio is also a work-in-progress. They are not required this year but may be next year. The senior portfolio will also be critiqued by a panel of faculty to polish the set of work for graduate school applications and resumes.

Bruce introduced the idea of a Literature Symposium that all freshmen would take to reveal to all students the resources that are available to them at our university. The skills focused on in this one-quarter class would aid students in writing university-level papers and the general critical study of literature.

Spectrum and Teeth for this year have received full funding but other arrangements need to be made to match their budgets against next year. One goal Bruce has for Spectrum and Teeth is to reopen them to the literary world on a national level by increasing circulation.

These are the changes that so far are in effect/being finalized. Some other problems with the Literature program were brought to the Dean's attention by students.

Colloquiums are remaining at two units but the prospect of a writing workship colloquium counting for writing requirement credit was proposed. Bruce agreed that with a supplemental two-unit independent study with a faculty member would allow this.

The number of L&S students appearing in writing classes was brought up in relation to lack of opportunities to fulfill writing requirements. Marthine is going to be researching the ratio of L&S students to CCS Lit students in all classes, not just Creative Writing, to determine if this is a valid concern. Among the possible solutions suggested were a weeding-out process for any non-CCS Lit students in the form of a submitted piece of work to the professor.

Thoughts

The final concern voiced was the monotony of Literature Symposium. Whether students realize it or not, Literature Symposium is an opportunity to hear from many different kinds of people, writers and performers and publishers alike. It exposes us to a variety of careers and genres of writing and even the speakers we hate further educate us in what we do not want to do. As long as speakers are not being repeated within the year, we really have no right to complain. On top of all of this, it is only one hour a week. What doesn't kill us, makes us a stronger, for lack of a better way of phrasing that thought.

This brings me to a point of Bruce's I would like to touch on. Many Literature students waste their time complaining about the Literature class offerings not fulfilling every one of their educational desires. What many Literature students do not realize is that all other CCS majors receive the majority of their education outside of CCS. There are hundreds of classes out there in the university that will provide the subjects and studies we all want to persue. CCS cannot cover everything. The Literature program should primarily concern itself with teaching classes we cannot get outside of the college, otherwise money and time is being wasted. Also, a variety of professors should be circulated through CCS in order to give us all well-rounded educations.

These are all important things we need to think about concerning our futures in CCS and within the Literature major. We also need to keep in mind that Bruce cannot come up with a solution to every single problem we come up with. Changes take a lot of time and Bruce does his best to listen to everyone and take all opinions into account.

If you by choice did not attend the Literature meeting, seriously think about attending next year. Not only is it the perfect forum to have a say in your education (which you're paying thousands of dollars for), but it's also a great way to meet other Literature students and get to know our loveable Dean.

Thanks to Britta for having me as a guest blogger on the official Literature Collaborative blog =)

Literature course catalog descriptions

The official UCSB Catalog descriptions for CCS Lit classes sound so good:

CS 110. Genres
Emphasis on the development of literary forms, represented in the work of major authors, essential traditions. Exploration of ways genre directs and, discovered by a topic, takes individual shape.

CS 111. Literary Structure: Chronological
Emphasis on periods and influences: intervals during which literary production especially corresponds with or responds to activity in the culture at large.

CS 112. Literary Structure: Nonchronological
Logical, analogical, cyclical, and repetitive schemes.

CS 113. Subjects and Materials
Emphasis on style and content of literary texts: critical investigation of how matter and manner work together in serious literature.

CS 114. Themes and Motifs
Emphasis on structure and meaning in literary texts: analytic focus on principles of representation, and on recurrent features, in the literature studied.

I hope all of that is what I've actually been learning during the past 3.75 years! But no, Lit Collab has decided that these descriptions were probably just made up by our instructors a long time ago when UCSB demanded that they list something in the catalog. I still like them.

Sad news!

I got an email from Christopher recently about Professor Corum's "Shakespeare and Theory" class canceling and I wrote back in concern about Corum's health since there were rumors that he was feeling ill. Christopher wrote back saying that Corum is fine — just retiring.

While I'm glad there is nothing physically wrong with Corum, I'm severely disappointed by this change of events. Not only am I losing out on a great class that will fulfill one of the few requirements we have, I'm losing my adviser.

Though I will say that GOLD does not yet say "canceled" nor did the man himself confirm the news in response to the email I sent, but I'm pretty certain that Christopher has all his facts straight.

Robyn returns!

For everyone who hasn't already heard, Robyn Bell will be returning to the mothership for the Spring 2008 Quarter.

As a meager second year, I've only had once class with Robyn. The course was titled "Graphic Novels" and cycled through a collection of books that were certainly not "comic books," with authors like Neil Gaiman, Craig Thompson and Marjane Satrapi (writer of now motion picture Persepolis!). The ten weeks of writing, reading, discussing and, on one day, painting with Robyn were enough to leave me with a strong impression. Besides her sharp wit and wry sense of humor, which always kept the class at a relaxed but crackling mood, she constantly drank green tea out of those little Arizona juice boxes. That was super adorable. I remember thinking that.

For those of you that have been here longer, I'm sure you have better anecdotes to tell about the professor who many consider the "heart" of CCS Literature. Those lucky enough to have her as an adviser tell stories of her sitting with them and imparting lessons in between checking classes on their yellow slips. Those that are yet to experience one of her amazing classes, well, I feel much like my friend Megan did when she realized I hadn't seen the third Star Wars and told me she wished she could go back and experience it again. Robyn's like that — a showdown on a lava covered rock. Meaning that she'll keep your hearts abeating and your brains aworking. Rejoice.

Robyn will be teaching two courses next quarter as follows:

Solo Author

Is there a writer you like who is not taught, or not sufficiently taught? In this course, you investigate that writer. You sleuth through all your author's writing and through pertinent criticism, biography. You teach class in small weekly installments; distribute weekly written reports; and in the end produce an article, for class, presenting your findings, mysteries, and other research.

Emily Dickinson's Bookmaking

When she was in her late twenties and early thirties, Emily Dickinson transformed herself from a gifted amateur to "one of the greatest poets of all time." We watch that happen. How? By reading, in very approximate chronological order, most of the poems she produced then — those that she copied and bound into 40 small booklets. From first to last, we try to keep up with her; we follow Dickinson's hairpin turns, light-year leaps, and zero-to-the-bone stops.

Also, the Literature Collaborative will hopefully be co-hosting a welcome back party for Robyn at the beginning of the quarter, so keep an ear out for news!

And don't forget to sign up for Robyn's classes when your next pass time comes!