Archive for ‘Announcements’

Before next Monday, go ahead and post your second blog post to the Blog Post #2 thread. Feel free to respond to either 15 minutes research on the Mapping Margery Kempe site described in the Margery Then & Now post OR to the Margery Live interview also linked below. Leave a comment to this post if you have questions.

**Finally, just to make sure everyone is posting okay now, if you had trouble adding your Blog Post #1 this weekend I think I’ve found the problem. Please go back and add that post to the Blog Post #1 thread so we’ll have everyone’s work on file. Thanks.

I’m looking forward to meeting each of you this next week and working through some truly great works of literature that have shaped and changed the world. I can’t believe they pay me for this!

Sometime this week, come on into the class blog and look around a little. Before we begin Beowulf, I’m asking you to post a short introduction to the Class Introductions discussion thread in the sidebar. You’ll respond to several questions. No one will be marking your responses up with a red pen (we’ll save that for later!), but this will give us a chance to get to hear a little more from you than we’ll have time for in class this week.

*Before you post, I’m asking you to Add Your Own Avatar. This profile photo will appear on class blogs, so please choose a mugshot that helps us (mainly me) connect names with faces. (For information about gravatars, see ACU Blogs.)

The first week of any semester can be disorienting, so if you have questions about the class blog feel free to post that to the Unit 1 Discussion Thread.
For now, you’ve already impressed me with wisdom beyond your years in making two key decisions: returning to ACU and signing up for this class. I look forward to learning with you and from you this semester,

Kyle Dickson

For thousands of years, journeys have been a recurring motif in world literature. Whether in the form of odysseys or wilderness wanderings, sea voyages or expeditions into unknown territory, characters have been setting off on narrative explorations of the physical and spiritual world. England has welcomed its fair share of literary wanderers, from Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins, with their astonishing tales of There and Back Again.

So many great stories from the Bible begin or end with a journey. It would be hard to retell the stories of Jonah or the Prodigal Son without images of the road or the open sea. How meaningful would their endings be without time spent in a far-off country or the belly of a fish? In the allegorical world of Pilgrim’s Progress, as Christian travels from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, it is the journey and not the destination which maintains our interest. Christian’s progress reminds us that stories, like journeys, follow a path toward maturity or knowledge, toward death or life. This progress is a story Christian readers share since, as the King James Version affirms, we too are “pilgrims and strangers on the earth.”

An academic “course” is, strictly speaking, a path or journey toward knowledge and personal growth. We’re glad you’re undertaking such a journey with us. Willingly or unwillingly, eagerly or with some trepidation, we’re preparing to set off into a far-off country together.

KD