Dear ENG2400 Students:

Greetings, and welcome to ENG2400: Film from Literature. I am your instructor, Prof. Sean Scanlan, and I look forward to working with you this semester.

Our first class is Tuesday, February 1 at 2:30pm. I want to let you all know some important information about our online course:

 

1–Our class is synchronous. This which means that we have set meeting days and times.

2–We meet each class  from 2:30 to 3:45pm on Zoom.

3–I will take attendance for each class, so please try to be on time.

4–Please note that my email is sscanlan@citytech.cuny.edu (please use your City Tech email to contact me).

 

ZOOM INFORMATION: THIS LINK WILL BE USED FOR EVERY CLASS

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87583224688?pwd=SGVxd2FhRzdnLzg0VUxuMnhUbnY2QT09

Meeting ID: 875 8322 4688

Passcode: please get the passcode from BlackBoard–see announcements (I need to do this for security purposes)

 

If you have trouble getting onto Zoom, please email me: sscanlan@citytech.cuny.edu. If things are really frustrating, you can text/call me: 718-308-7132 (please use my number sparingly).

 

 

Getting started: One of the most important questions in our class will be: what is a story and what is a narrative? How can we define it?


Let’s read this short story by Jose Luis Borges:


The Captive

by Jose Luis Borges, published 1960


The story is told in Junín or in Tapalquén. A boy disappeared after an Indian attack. People said the Indians had kidnapped him. His parents searched for him in vain. Then, long years later, a soldier who came from the interior told them about an Indian with blue eyes who might well be their son. At length they found him (the chronicle has lost the circumstances and I will not invent what I do no know) and thought they recognized him. The man, buffeted by the wilderness and by barbaric life, no longer knew how to understand the words of his mother tongue, but indifferent and docile, he let himself be led home. There he stopped, perhaps because the others stopped. He looked at the door as if he did not know what it was for. Then suddenly he lowered his head, let out a shout, ran across the entrance way and the two long patios, and plunged into the kitchen. Without hesitating, he sank his arm into the blackened chimney and pulled out the little horn-handled knife he had hidden there as a boy. His eyes shone with joy and his parents wept because they had found their son.

Perhaps this recollection was followed by others, but the Indian could not live within walls, and one day he went in search of his wilderness. I wonder what he felt in that dizzying moment when past and present became one. I wonder whether the lost son was reborn and died in that instant of ecstasy; and whether he ever managed to recognize, if only as an infant or a dog does, his parents and his home.

 

Source: Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin, 1998, p 300.

 

 

 

HOMEWORK: These two tasks are due before class on Thursday, February 3 

1–Sign up for OpenLab and join my class (I’ll provide directions on Tuesday’s class)

2–Please fill out the First Week Questionnaire — see below.

 

Best wishes,

Prof. Scanlan

 

 

First Week Questionnaire for ENG2400