Reading Journal Assignment

This semester-long assignment asks you to maintain a Reading Journal that records your personal engagement with the literary works we study. The central premise is that literature is not inert or distant: it is alive, resonant, and capable of helping us engage more fully with our own lives and with the world around us.

Rather than treating literature as something to decode or summarize, this journal asks you to enter into conversation with the texts. Your experiences, assumptions, memories, and concerns—your forestructure—are not obstacles to interpretation but essential tools for understanding how literary meaning is produced. Literature becomes meaningful when it is engaged, tested against experience, and allowed to speak into contemporary life.

Overview

You will write an ongoing series of short, first-person reflections responding to the primary texts assigned in the course. Each entry should explore how a literary work connects to your own life, to something happening in the present moment, or to another cultural text that reflects similar concerns, like a song or an episode of a favorite TV show.

Entries should be composed as the readings are completed, while your engagement with the text is fresh and active. The journal is designed to document a sustained, evolving relationship with literature over the course of the semester.

Requirements

Frequency

• Minimum: one entry per literary work studied.
• Recommended: two entries per week, corresponding to our twice-weekly class meetings.
• Journals must reflect ongoing engagement throughout the semester; entries written retroactively in bulk are not acceptable.

Length and Format

• Minimum 200 words per entry.
• Written in first-person prose.
• Entries must be dated and labeled with the title of the primary text.

Content Expectations

Each journal entry must address all of the following:

• Engagement with a primary text
  Demonstrate understanding of at least one assigned literary work by discussing a theme, character, symbol, conflict, or passage. Alternatively, you may approach the text comparatively by placing it in conversation with a contemporary cultural work—such as a song, film, or television show—that echoes or refracts its concerns. For example, you might explore how epic themes found in Homer appear in popular music, or how Greek tragedy continues to illuminate modern discussions of power, violence, or enslavement.
• Personal connection
  Describe a specific experience, memory, observation, or situation—personal or contemporary—that helps you engage with the text. This connection should be concrete and reflective rather than abstract or generalized.
• Insight or commentary
  Explain what this connection reveals. You might consider how the text helped you see a situation differently, offered language for an experience, clarified a moral or emotional tension, or illuminated how ancient or historical works continue to speak to modern realities.

Writing Quality

• Tone may be informal, but entries must be clear, coherent, and carefully written.
• Avoid extended plot summary except where necessary to frame your response.
• Focus on your reading experience and interpretive process rather than making broad claims about literature or society.

Submission Format

• Journals may be maintained on a blog, in a shared document, or through D2L.
• Entries are written weekly, according to the course schedule.
• Late or bulk submissions will affect the grade, as this assignment evaluates sustained engagement.
• Journals will be evaluated twice a semetser: once at midterm and once at the final. See D2L for submission guidelines.

Assessment Criteria

Journals will be evaluated based on:

• Consistency and completeness
• Demonstrated understanding of primary texts
• Depth and specificity of personal engagement
• Clarity, coherence, and care in writing
• Insightfulness: evidence that literature is being actively used to think through experience and contemporary life

Rationale

Literature matters because it helps us engage with life—its contradictions, struggles, desires, and possibilities. When read attentively and personally, literary works can offer insight into our own experiences and into the world we inhabit. This journal is designed to cultivate that engagement by asking you to reflect on how literature speaks to you, challenges you, or helps you see differently.

The goal is not to arrive at a “correct” interpretation, but to develop a thoughtful, responsive reading practice in which literature becomes a living presence rather than a static object of study.

TL;DR

• Minimum 250 words per entry. Shorter entries will be penalized.
• Write in the first person and engage directly with specific details from the text.
• This is not a summary assignment. Do not retell the plot.
• Focus on your personal engagement: how the text connects to your life, experiences, or the contemporary world.
• Original, focused, and enthusiastic entries earn higher grades.
• Generic, abstract, or oversimplified responses earn fewer points.
• Minimum effort = minimum grade.
• This is a college course; your journal should reflect that level of seriousness.