Course Description

This interdisciplinary course will explore the problems facing readers at the beginning of the 21st century in the context of old problems and solutions.  In order to understand how reading will change with new technologies, we will consider how we read today and how we have read in the past, with an emphasis on both secular and sacred texts.  Throughout the course, we will take advantage of new technologies to study these issues; we will read texts on the web and on CD-ROM (including digital versions of early books and manuscripts), and students will be invited to publish their work on the web.  Our goal is to teach our students how to be self-reflective readers, conscious of the assumptions we make about texts today, in order to prepare them to be readers--and writers--of different kinds of texts in the future.

See our links page for a preview of some of the texts and ideas we'll be discussing.  You can find out about the requirements the course fulfills here.

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