Students’ Archive

When I first started Pulau Ujong as a WordPress.com site in 2015, it was as a class blog for courses I taught at National University of Singapore in Singapore and Southeast Asian Literatures in English. I was aiming for a testbed to develop critical commentary on writing and literary events which could then be tagged and distributed on different social media. This was part of a growing feeling I had that while the expansion of the Singapore Literature scene from 2010 onwards was very welcome, it had resulted in a focus on authors and authors’ personalities rather than on readers and practices of reading.  Asking students to review a book, performance, or other event for credit had the additional benefit of addressing a problem I’ve found undergraduates often struggle with in academic writing: developing a sense of audience.

In 2016, I restructured my courses as seminars, and substituted the blog exercise for a closer attachment to an arts organisation. However, I’ve reproduced the posts here as individual website pages, more or less in posting order: I did make a commitment to students to maintain the site, even though the url has now changed.

Some brief reflections follow. I think the process was interesting for students as a supplement to more formal academic writing, and many of the pieces had a strong personal voice. I was conscious of not trying to impose too much of a structure, and so I simply wrote a few sample blog posts myself as models which students could choose to follow or diverge from. I copy-edited the pieces before approving them for publication, and this involved a fair amount of work in some cases! While I think many of the responses are very strong and engaged, problems did come up. One writer responded to one of the blog posts and felt his work had been misrepresented through factually inaccurate statements. I reviewed this with the student who wrote the post and we felt he had a point, and agreed that the student would revise and resubmit while still maintain the critical tone of the post. If I were to repeat the exercise I think I would want to put aside more time in class discussion for thinking about the nature of critical commentary, and the rhetoric of social media posts. As the years go on, however, these posts are becoming an interesting archive of a moment in Singapore’s literary history: some of their authors are now taking interesting paths as educators, writers, or social actors.

All authors are credited on the individual pages. If you’re a student who contributed here, do get in touch with me, at philip@puluauujong.org.