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| The Bug Project Welcome to The Bug Project, A Saint Michael's symposium on the common text for 2009-10, Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis." (You should have received a copy of the book along with your New Student Manual,  which
was mailed in mid-May. There is a
description of the Summer Reading on p. 15 of the New Student
Manual.) Our five faculty essays about the story are now complete; you will find them as links below. These are PDF files, which may take a few seconds to open. I recommend that you read the original story before reading the essays; they won't make much sense otherwise. Since "Metamorphosis" is a relatively short narrative, it should be possible to go back and reread the story after you've read the essays. In asking these five faculty members to write brief responses to Kafka's story, I emphasized that we were not looking for full-blown scholarly essays, but simply for intelligent immediate reactions to the text. None of these professors is a specialist in Kafka or in German literature. In fact, they come from five different fields: Biology, Religious Studies, English, Music, and Psychology. I told them their responses did not necessarily have to represent their disciplines; we just wanted to see how five different faculty members would approach this challenging story. The results are wonderful, and we are deeply grateful to our respondents. If you are enrolled in a fall semester First-Year Seminar, you should receive a letter from your instructor early in August with instructions about working with this material. We will send the letter to SMC e-mail addresses as well as by snail mail. If you don’t receive such a letter, or if you have a problem with the links, feel free to let me know at the e-mail address below. If you will be taking First-Year Seminar in the spring semester, we still expect you to read Kafka’s story and the faculty responses. There will be a program focused on the text during Orientation, and you won’t want to miss out on that conversation. All spring seminars will also begin with this material, so you’ll have a head-start in preparing for January. Will Marquess, Coordinator of First-Year Seminars
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