HEAT 494A/CRN 30412: Travel for credit

Summer, 2000

Instructor:
 

Course description: This course approaches the study of American literature through the window of French culture and its influence on selected American writers. France has exerted a strong influence on America since before the Revolutionary War--an influence that, as with many things French, has been a complex mixture of criticism and admiration, seriousness and humor, scandal and wonder. To the French, Americans can often seem both strikingly creative and irredeemably naïve; to Americans, the French can be at once stylish trendsetters, stuffy traditionalists and unprincipled libertines. And yet, as critical as we are of one another, our cultures seem mutually inspirational, or at the very least (in the case of American writers) nurturing to inspiration in a way that the native culture cannot be. We will read from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and James Baldwin among others to explore the ways in which France as a place and a culture has given American writers a beginning point for their work. How has France given them (and us) a subject, a setting, a point of view with which to reflect upon their (and our) cultural condition with new eyes?

Objectives: By the end of this course, the student should have

• gained a critical appreciation of selected works by American authors set in, inspired by, or written in the context of French culture;
• gained an introduction to French culture through the eyes of American authors and immersion in the culture itself;
• gained an understanding of the influence of place on artistic production;
• developed the abilities to think and write analytically and critically about what we see, hear, taste, feel, and read before, during, and after the trip.

Due dates:
 

Paper #1: May 17

Reading journal: June 30

Travel journal: June 30

Take home essays: July 7

Long paper (ISC): July 21

Students should keep copies of everything turned in (including journals).
 
 

Paper #1:

The first paper will have two parts. In part one, you should do neither reading nor research, but simply write down what you know (or think you know) about France. If you are familiar with the country, try to encapsulate your knowledge of it in a few pages. If you are unfamiliar with it, go ahead and record what you have heard or imagined about it. You may recognize your thinking to be incomplete or inaccurate or even stereotyped-that's o.k., as long as you are describing what you think you might see (or what you want to see if you will see). Be as specific as you can. Paris, for example, might evoke some particular images for you that could be included. Do try to organize this first section (introduction, body, conclusion, with a unifying idea or thesis); limit it to no more than 750 words. In the second part of the paper, look at either Jefferson or Twain or Hemingway (in The Sun Also Rises) and analyze one writer's views of France by comparing and contrasting them with your own. Analyze in some detail, and support your ideas with direct quotations from the text you are analyzing (other than your own, I mean). This section also should be no more than 750 words.

Reading journal:

The reading journal should be a record of your reactions to everything you read (or in the case of films, see) for the course. You might regard it as the place where your thinking can begin and develop without the pressure of the instructor or your fellow students looking on. In it, you should note both the language that sparks your thought and your responses to that language. To do this, you can fold the pages of your journal down the middle (or draw a line down the middle of them), record the language of your sources on the left, and write your own notes and responses on the right. Your quotations from the literature needn't be lengthy (although at times you may find it interesting to copy out a whole passage), but they should be enough to allow you and me to see what it was in the text that sparked a response.

Your responses can take any number of forms. You might feel, for example, that you have simply found a particularly important word or phrase or passage, record it on the left, and note its importance on the right. You might be surprised or emotionally moved or made to laugh by something you read--any of these reading experiences could be worth noting. You might have a very subjective reaction to something you are reading--it might remind you of a particular person or event in your own experience. Note that. Or you might find yourself thinking about the way a scene or passage or conversation develops a theme--or what you think is a theme--in the piece you are reading or in the course as a whole. Even if you are unsure of your interpretation, the journal is the place to put down your thinking. It is the place to express emotions, to make connections, and to speculate explicitly on the meaning of what you are reading. There are no restrictions on what you can say. Anything is fair game--exclamations, short comments, wild conjectures, reasoned analyses. (As a starting point, if you still feel unsure of what to do, you might try using the question at the end of the course description to give you a way into the works.)

The journal will provide you with a record of what you have noticed in the reading you have done and of your reactions to it, and it will also, if it is used well, provide you with a repository of ideas that you can reflect upon, develop, and use in your more formal writing in the course, as well as in discussion (when you want, for example, to challenge your professor, or to add to what one of your fellow students has said).

The journals will be collected toward the end of the term. They will be evaluated, but not on the basis of logic or organization or even standard grammar and usage. I will only look for evidence that you have read the material assigned and been engaged in thinking about it actively.

Travel journal:

The travel journal will be much like the reading journal, except that instead of noting passages in a book or other reading, you will be noting place names or details and commenting on them. The two column method might still work, but it isn't required. Travel journals often read like narratives, and you may wish to write yours that way. Make this a record both of what you saw and what you thought about what you saw.

Take home essays and Independent Study Component (ISC):

The topics for these assignments will be distributed separately. The essay assignments will be distributed and discussed early in the trip itself. The ISC will be outlined for you in a separate mailing before we leave for France.

Plagiarism:

The following passage will serve as a working definition of plagiarism for this course:

NOTA BENE: All students are responsible for being familiar with the "Guidelines on Academic Integrity" published in the University of St. Francis Undergraduate and Graduate Catalogue (pp. 37-38, 1998-2000 edition).