Temple's schoolyear starts next monday, the 28th, and is done on 12/6. This leaves a whopping 5 weeks of winter break! but there's no substantial break in the middle (a la spring break), so i probably will be burned out by Colombus Day.

I'll be taking three courses and assisting with a British Lit freshman survey to earn my tuition money. My three courses, for those interested, are as follows:
Epochs of Literary Criticism -- basically a course that covers lit crit from Plato to Derrida. a nice class of fundamental information.
20th Century Lit: John A. Williams -- an African American author I'd never heard of until a few months ago. You'll note that one of his books is in my post about books I hated. But the professor has the opportunity to make this class interesting. She has done work on other AfAm authors, including Richard Wright. Since I went to HS with practically no minorities, AfAm lit was usually not taught. Unfortunately, I took an AfAm lit course in college and the professor was literally a mentalcase (she had a breakdown pretty much every semester and was out for about a month when I took the course). So, i didn't get much learning in that class either. my only forays into AfAm lit are from 19th century and Toni Morrison. which can only get you so far. So I'm hoping this class will learn me something good.

19th Century American Lit: Character -- this is a course on character, not characters in the novels, but on the concept of character. like what is it? why were authors in this century so obsessed with it. I believe we start with Ben Franklin (which is 18th century) and go through The Golden Bowl by Henry "I've got two first names that could also be last names" James. Should be intriguing, though I have yet to get a syllabus so i'm not sure what else we'll be reading.