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Instructional Materials for
Instructors
 his
Nietzsche hypertext is intended to help students understand how
rich and varied may be the connections they can discover or create
between one text and others. The hypertext is in no way intended
to explain Nietzsche or to fully explicate On the Genealogy
of Morals. The authors began
by acknowledging that too many Core students read each text as
though it were a discrete unit, not often understanding that
ideas grow from text to text as authors grapple with the issues
that their predecessors have left unresolved or incomplete. They
decided to work from Nietzsche's text because his language is
challenging, his ideas are deeply rooted in philosophical discourse,
and his influence has been widespread.
here
is no "right" way to use this set of exercises. Indeed,
each Core instructor should tailor the material to her or his
own version of the course. If you do develop a unique approach
to using the Nietzsche project, please send an electronic copy
of your instructions to Joe
Essid, so that he can put on the website as many sets of
class instructions as possible.
 uggestions
for Use:
- Use the introduction
as an initial reading assignment before using the hypertext.
Gary Shapiro provides useful background material on Nietzsche's
life and work that will help students avoid misreading the author.
- The only directly interactive part of the
Nietzsche project is the "WebBoard." In this section of the project,
an instructor may post questions for on-line discussion. Every
response will appear for all members of the class to read, almost
like a listserv list. Instructors with experience in such activities
say that students must be required to contribute to the webboard
at first, but once they have gotten their feet wet, they will
almost certainly participate without further prodding. You can
read a brief introduction about logging
on to the WebBoard and about posting
to the discussion, and you may send Joe
Essid questions to be posted in a conference under your name.
Brief workshops will be offered periodically on hypertext Core
projects.
- The gray buttons [
 ]
are links between a passage in Genealogy and a similar
or related passage in another work by Nietzsche including Thus
Spoke Zarathustra and the aphorisms following the Genealogy
in the Kaufmann edition.. These links are intended to help the
student recognize that Nietzsche wrote extensively about the
themes found in Genealogy. Instructors who assign the
aphorisms might want the students to explain how one or more
of the aphorisms connect to particular passages in the Genealogy.
- The blue buttons [
 ]
link passages in different parts of the Genealogy, in
the attempt to persuade students to make such linkages as they
read. A related homework exercise would have the students make
three or four such linkages in the text assigned for the day.
- The yellow buttons [
 ]
are used for definitions and links to outside materials. Students
are given the definitions for some words and are asked to define
others. The goal is to encourage students to use the dictionary
or encyclopedia while they read and to expand their vocabularies.
- Perhaps the most important part of the Nietzsche
project are the connections with passages in Core texts that
appear earlier in the common syllabus, indicated by red buttons
[
 ]. This exercise is intended
to develop awareness that serious literature, both fiction and
non-fiction, creates a kind of dialogue among authors of differing
times and places, all of them seeking to understand the world
and the place of humans in it. Instructors might assign students
a similar exercise on a later text by having them describe connections
between that text and one or more previously read ones.
he
authors hope this hypertext project will help your students better
grasp connections between and among other works and texts. After
using this hypertext with your students, please take a few moments
to complete an online Instructor's Evaluation.
Your valuable feedback will inform and guide the creation of
future projects such as this.
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