Now that the UHaul storage is empty, I'm busy going through papers, pictures and other stuff I've saved over the years.

I just came across a small heart-shaped piece of paper that I wanted to share with you. This is something I remember writing with my friends Shawna and Joel, probably sometime in 1995 or maybe 1996.

It's called "Intro to Lit from HELL!" This is a required course for everyone, not just English majors. We wrote the most horrific syllabus we could think of. Check it out.

Reading List:
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Middlemarch by George Eliot
David Copperfield Charles Dickens
Pamela by Samuel Richardson

Course Requirements:
1 dramatic presentation
3 ten page papers with 23 occurrences of 5 (or greater) syllable words.
1 J. Hillis Miller quote per paper (Miller was a critic that we didn't like to read)

Of course, we never actually taught this course, nor would the English department have allowed such an absurd workload for an introductory level class. I never even took a grad level course with that much reading (though the writing requirements are accurate, sans the silly syllabic requirements).

Was there alcohol involved during the writing of this faux syllabus? Perhaps, but I can't recall.