Required Texts


English 25,"Literature and the Information, Media, and Communication Revolutions" (Spring 2020, Professor Alan Liu)

 

["X" or Experimental Version of Course for Online Instruction Only. See also supplementary Gauchospace site supporting this course.]

Emergency light icon See notices below about how this course has been adapted on an emergency basis for the COVID-19 virus and COLA strike situations. (See also FAQ on special course procedures in Spring 2020)

 

Required Books To Be Purchased

Emergency light icon

During the COVID-19 virus emergency, many students will not be on campus and the UCEN Bookstore and UCSB Library Course Reserves will be closed. Therefore, students must purchase the two required hard-copy books for English 25 from an online vendor. Please search online for the two books listed below and purchase them to be shipped to your location as soon as possible.

 

All other readings in English 25 are online (either on the Web or in a folder on the supplementary Gauchospace site supporting this course) and are linked from the course Schedule.

Purchase the following books at the UCEN Bookstore or elsewhere.
(The books and reader will also be on 2-hour course reserve at the UCSB Library)

 

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

(Harper Perennial, 2006)

ISBN-13: 978-0060913076

Available at UCEN Bookstore

Purchase from Amazon, or search for other online vendors.

(Please purchase this specific edition if possible: ISBN-13 number: 978-0060913076) (Same edition as ISBN-10: 006091307X)

Thomas Pynchon -- The Crying of Lot 49 

William Gibson, Neuromancer

(ACE, 1984)

ISBN-13: 978-0441007462

Available at UCEN Bookstore

Purchase from Amazon, or search for other online vendors. (Please purchase this specific edition if possible: ISBN-13 number:  978-0441007462) (Same edition as ISBN-10: 0441007465)

 

 

 

William Gibson -- Neuromancer (this year's edition with green cover) 

 

                       

 

 

Online Readings

 

All other readings are online either on the Web or on Gauchospace (and are linked from the course Schedule page). 

Emergency light icon During the COLA strike by TAs, the below assignment (creating your system for working with online readings) will not be checked by the TAs. The assignment has thus been changed to optional instead of required. However, it is strongly recommended that you conduct this assignment because it will benefit your work with all the online readings in the course (and in other courses too!).

Because so many readings are online (an increasingly prevalent trend in college courses), students will need to develop a method or workflow for themselves that optimizes their ability to study the materials. For your section meeting in Week 2 of the course, bring on your laptop or other digital device copies of the two assigned readings for Week 1 of the course (originally PDFs) plus at least one of the readings for Week 2 that was originally a Web page. You need to demonstrate to your TA that you have a method for downloading, storing in an organized way, and highlighting or annotating the readings.  (If you do not own a laptop, tablet, or other digital device, then bring a printed copy of one assigned reading.)

 

Guide to Downloading and Managing Online Readings:

While everyone has their own personal preferences and technical preferences, the following are some suggested options for handling online materials:

 

  1. Printing.  UCSB students have 200 pages of free printing at selected computer labs on-campus each quarter through Gaucho Printing Services.  See https://collaborate.ucsb.edu/services/student/printing
  2. Annotating PDF's on a laptop or desktop computer.  Some of the online readings in the course are Adobe Acrobat "PDF" files.  An excellent way to read PDF's is to use the highlighting, commenting, bookmarking, and other annotation features in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program (or another PDF reader program) to mark up documents as you study them, then save your annotated copy of the document locally or in a "cloud" service like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc..  The latest version of the Acrobat Reader program may be downloaded here
  3. Annotating PDF's on a tablet computer.  If you own a tablet computer such as an iPad, download an app like Adobe Reader, iAnnotate, PDF Reader, PDF Expert, or another PDF-capable documents reader that will allow you to annotate documents as you read.  Many of these apps also synchronize with cloud storage services such as Dropbox so that you can keep your annotated documents in a central location accessible to both your tablet and your laptop or other computer.
  4. Converting Web pages into PDF's. For assigned readings that are Web pages (HTML pages), you can download extensions for your browser such as Save as PDF and Web 2 PDF that will convert most Web pages to PDF files that you can save.  (The exceptions are password-protected Web pages or some pages that for a variety of reasons do not convert well into PDF's.)  You can also use an online convert-to-PDF service like PdfCrowd.
  5. Annotating Web pages without turning them into PDF's. A variety of programs and browser plug-ins exist that allow you to highlight, draw, comment, and otherwise annotate Web sites and retain the marked-up copy of the page.  Some of these programs are described here. Recent new Web page annotator systems include Pundit (for Chrome web browser) and Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is is especially worthy of consideration: it is a free, open-source platform created by a non-profit organization that follows W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) evolving technical standards for annotation to allow users to annotate web pages they see in their browser by highlighting/commenting and then saving in the cloud. Annotations may be private to the user or shared publicly. 
  6. Storing and Organizing Your Annotated Readings. You should have a location on your computer or in a cloud service such as Dropbox where you store in organized fashion the materials from the Internet that you have downloaded and annotated.  For example, create a single folder where you store your readings under file names such as: "McGann, Jerome (2002), Literary Scholarship in the Digital Age.pdf"
    1. You may also want to consider using the Zotero open-source, free bibliography program, which collects and manages citations in CML (citation markup-language) and can also be used to store downloaded files.