University of Richmond

In the Summer of 1999, the team would develop a hypertextual reading lab based upon Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, a text read by all UR freshmen. The lab would be adopted by our freshman "Core Course" and would be available to other ACS institutions in the 1999-2000 academic year. The grant would be for $2500.

Exploring Human Experience: About the Core Course

All freshmen at the University of Richmond enroll in the two-semester course "Exploring Human Experience." This Core Course began with support from the NEH in 1991; today the university funds the course. Core involves students in the reading and discussion of challenging ideas as expressed in a common syllabus of ten texts each semester. The syllabus changes each year, but frequently assigned texts have included Genesis, Tsitsi Dangarembga's (Zimbabwe) Nervous Conditions, Naguib Mahfouz's (Egypt) Fountain and Tomb, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Each professor also chooses a supplemental text, film, piece of music, or artistic event for an eleventh topic of study (The syllabus and other course materials can be found at www.richmond.edu/~core). As stated in the syllabus, Core has larger goals for students and faculty:

• To develop the ability to read, think, and speak, and write;
• To enlarge the understanding of the problem of giving meaning to life;
• To establish a foundation for University-wide conversations on serious questions.

The course has a history of innovative and interdisciplinary pedagogy. Sections are kept small, fewer than 25 students, and are taught by full-time faculty. Approximately 60 faculty, representing more than 20 disciplines, have taught the class. Teachers who volunteer to teach Core are strongly encouraged to structure classes as discussions, not lectures. Other pedagogical innovations vary by instructor; several teachers include technology in their sections, such as electronic mail and newsgroups. The Core course is also a major element of the university's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Program, in which student Writing Fellows write commentary and conduct conferences with students working on first drafts of papers (more information about the WAC Program can be found at www.richmond.edu/~wac).

Integrating the Nietzsche Project Into The Curriculum

The project would have these goals:

• Providing a synthesis of larger issues explored in the first semester of the course
• Enabling students to get past a shallow, reductive reading of the text
• Challenging readers to see the application of Nietzsche's thought in the corpus of his own work and through Web resources.

To date, the Rousseau Project (www.richmond.edu/~core/rousseau/), a hypertext based upon Jean-Jacques Rousseau's A Discourse On Inequality, has been the only course-wide application of technology to the teaching of Core. The Rousseau Project, funded by an internal grant, provides first-semester Core students with practice annotating text, reading it recursively and in depth, and evaluating Web sites that use and misuse Rousseau's ideas. The Rousseau Project was piloted in a small number of Core sections last year, and it will be used again, with modifications, this fall.

The work with Rousseau provides a valuable introduction to the practices of academic reading and research while examining a single text. The Rousseau Project does not, however, synthesize that study with what students have already learned in Core. The proposed Nietzsche hypertext, used at the start of the students' second semester in Core, would provide a tool for building more synthesis into the class through several exercises:

• A focus on the most misread passages from the Genealogy: Nietzsche's examination of the origins of a "Slave Morality," the concept of ressentiment, and the notion of a master class of "blonde beasts" who follow a different system of morality
• A bridge from these sections of the text to passages and questions from other texts read during the first semester of Core
• Hyperlinks from the text to other sections of text and to notes about Nietzsche's other works and ideas
• A Web form designed as a notepad, with some preprinted questions and texts areas for typing, which students could use to take notes about the text, then print or e-mail to themselves or an instructor
• Links to individual instructors' assignments, newsgroups, mailing lists, or chat spaces on the Web
• Web-search activity that would expose misunderstandings of Nietzsche and complicate the students' facile, and typical, misreading of Nietzsche as a racist. In service of the larger goals of the Core Course, this section would challenge the idea that Nietzsche's book is a dead text. Students would see that it has implications and repercussions not only in the world of ideas, but also in contemporary society.

Students and faculty regard the Genealogy as the most difficult text read either semester. The hypertext's links between related passages, other Core texts, and the implications of Nietzsche's thinking would provide a foothold for both faculty and students who have not studied Nietzsche before. Exploring Nietzsche's provocative challenges to establish systems of morality would, in turn, link the reading of the Genealogy to the other texts read before it.

As with the Rousseau project, Core faculty would learn to use the Nietzsche hypertext during the Core seminar. The Director of the Core Course would assist with advertising the project to current faculty through meetings and announcements in the Core newsletter and e-mail list.

Copyright Issues & Sharing the Hypertext with ACS Colleagues

The developers of the hypertext would place it on the World-Wide Web at the Core-Course site. It would be available, without restriction, to other ACS faculty who were teaching Nietzsche. The hypertext would use small portions of Walter Kaufmann's translation of the Genealogy, published by Vintage Books. Given the small number of pages quoted the hypertext would be covered by the Fair-Use provisions of copyright law. The hypertext would in no way replace the printed edition of the text; the model for the project would be an interactive workbook or laboratory exercise.

As with the Rousseau Project, the developers, with the assistance of the Core-Course Director, would distribute a survey to all teachers and faculty in the Core Course. The results of the survey would then be tallied and distributed to the ACS.

Joseph J. Essid, Writing Center Director
Daniel Hocutt, Writing Fellows Coordinator
Martin Ryle, Professor of History
Marcia Whitehead, Coordinator of Library Instruction

Joe Essid, Writing Center Director
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173 (804) 289-8935
jessid@richmond.edu
http://www.richmond.edu/~writing