Lit 342.01
Montana Writers
Spring 2011
TR 2:10-3:30
GBB 205
Prof. Nancy Cook
LA 124
243-2963
nancy.cook@mso.umt.edu
Office hours: TR 3:30-4:15, AND
By appointment
Reading Journals
Your reading journal should be used as a means of methodically locating, collecting, and
making sense of your thoughts about the readings and the course. Think of your reading journal
as a cross between a diary (personal, subjective, private) and a class notebook. In the journal you
write about the object of study from your own personal perspective. I will look at your journals
periodically. I’ll be checking to see that you are writing often and regularly, and on occasion, at
length, about ideas related to the course.
When writing about the readings, jot down reactions to what you have just read. Why did
you react the way you did? You might compare one reading assignment with another, looking
for patterns and differences. Your journal is a good place to try answering questions, and to pose
questions you cannot (yet) answer. Recording such questions can provide you with a focus for
your reading and give you ideas about things you might want to bring up in class. Write
regularly. This will increase your chances of finding and developing ideas—for assignments, for
papers, for exams, for making sense of the themes of the course. By the end of the semester your
journal should provide you with a log of the changes in your perceptions, ideas, reading and
writing practices over the weeks. You’ll have a better sense of what you have learned.
Some ideas to get you started:
Summarize the reading selection, as if you are responding to a friend’s “What is it
about?”
Describe the point of view presented. Whose perspective do we have? How engaged in
the action is the narrator (if there is a narrator)? If there is a narrator, what do we know about
him/her? What do we learn about him/her by the end of the piece? How does s/he see Montana?
Are there clues as to how we are to regard the characters or events, if we are to share the
perspective of the observer or narrator? If you can’t share those views, why not?
Respond to the text: were you easily engaged? Why? Why not? Features of the
writing? Is it funny? Moving? Persuasive? Informative? Why? Why not? What does your
response reveal about you as a reader? What features of the work seem most significant to you?
What questions about your own historical and geographical position, or your experience,
ethnicity, gender, class, values emerge in your own writing?
How does Montana figure in the selection? Does it? Is there anything “Montanan” about
the text? (How) is location figured as gendered, temporal, multicultural, classed, urban, rural,
national, historical, geographical, and psychological? How do writers represent place? How
does an author’s cultural and historical position contribute to the representation of place? How
much of the author’s project involves revision, redefinition or reclamation of a place? How does
a writer represent her relationship with/to the land? The culture? What are the relationships
between genre and the representation of place? How does the text work to make distinctions
between places, or to set a place apart?
Your journal is a good place to continue discussions that begin in class.
Other ways of using a journal as a study aid: (these are options not requirements)
Double entry: Write only on right-hand pages, keeping the left side blank.
Periodically—once or twice a week—return to your earlier entries and comment on them—
expanding modifying, arguing. This helps you establish a dialogue with your past self, and will
help give you a sense of the ways your thinking changes over time.
Portfolio: Select a few entries for revision and re-thinking, commenting on the
differences between a first impression and a re-thinking.
Sources for journal writing tips and further information: Callaghan & Dobyns Literary
Conversation (1996); Biddle & Fulwiler Reading, Writing and the Study of Literature (1989).
I’ll try to put copies of these on reserve.