Course Syllabus
ENGL 480Z: Special Topic

Modern English Literatures

Spring, 2000
4 credit hours

Instructor information

Course description

Welcome to "Modern English Literatures." This course deals with selected works from all literatures written in English between about 1900 and the end of World War II. Since it is such a large body of work, we can't possibly cover it all, or even representative samples of every nationality that has written in the English language, so what we will do is to look at a few texts that will introduce us to some of the central issues surrounding reading and writing in English by the various groups that have done so during this period. Those issues revolve around the question of identity. It works something like this: for most English speakers (India alone will account for several hundred million), English is not their first language, and not the language of the home. It may be the language used nationally, in the marketplace, even in government, but it is a language that has been received and learned from (most likely) the British. It is a language that carries with it a whole culture--the home culture of England, which has been exported to the British colonies and imposed on the people who live there. So when a colonized English speaker uses the language, what happens? Mustn't he or she (to one degree or another) move outside the native culture and become part of the English culture? Who then is speaking?

Dealing with questions like these isn't something that just happens when we think about foreign English speakers. It happens anytime people from two different "cultures" or two different sub-cultures within the same culture or even people of different races or genders try to communicate with one another, especially when one of the people is granted more power than the other--or perhaps considered more "normal" than the other.  So it happens not just between nations and proples but within nations, too--including the United States.  This course will ask you to consider the way ideas about race and gender and culture shape language and the way language both expresses and shapes identity.  But that description of the course is really too abstract.  What we'll really be doing is to read some very good stories and poems and talk about the way authors and characters succeed and fail in communicating through them and in them.
 
 

Objectives:

At the end of this course, a student should be able to

• identify selected major twentieth century literary texts written in English by author and national origin;
• analyze these texts especially with reference to their cultural contexts and issues of identity in a post-colonial environment;
• compose and develop competent written analyses of selected texts as assigned;
• employ standard written English and proper conventions of citing sources in formal written work.

Two short papers (750-1,000 words)--15% each; mid-term--10%; final exam--15%; weekly quizzes--10%; participation (at least three postings a week to pass)--10%; ISC (long paper--about 2,000 words)--25%.

Calendar:

Week of:	Readings	Assignments
Jan. 10	Smith: "Not Waving but Drowning"	Profile/First posting
Jan. 17	Hemingway: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Gordimer: "A Hunting Accident"	Week 2 questions
Jan. 24	Conrad: Heart of Darkness	Week 3 questions
Jan. 31	Achebe: Things Fall Apart (Chapters 1-13)	Week 4 questions
Feb. 7	Achebe: Things Fall Apart (Chapters 14-25)	Week 5 questions
Feb. 14	Eliot: "Preludes," "The Burial of the Dead" in The Waste Land	Week 6: On Eliot     Paper #1 due (2/16)
Feb. 21	Yeats: selected poems Collected Poems on the web            On Reading Yeats (lecture) Week 7: Yeats discussion
			Mid-term (2/24)   (due 3/6)
Feb. 28	Hemingway: "Soldier's Home," "In Another Country"	Week 8 questions
March 6	Identities (lecture) Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (Ch. 1-3)           Week 9-10:  Gatsby discussion	Spring Break March 7-9
March 13	Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (Ch. 4-9)
March 20	O'Brien: "How to Tell A True War Story," "The Things They Carried"            Week 11:  O'Brien discussion	Paper #2 due 3/23
March 27	Hemingway: "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" Erdrich: "St. Marie"	Week 12: Hemingway and Erdrich
April 3	Mukherjee: "Loose Ends"; "Fathering"	Week 13:  Mukherjee discussion 1
April 10	Mukherjee: "A Wife's Story"; "The Tenant"                   Week 14:  Mukherjee discussion 2	Long paper postings due (see long paper assignment)
April 17	Mansfield: "Sun and Moon"; "The Garden party"; "The Doll's House"         Week 15:  Mansfield discussion	Long paper final draft due (ISC)
April 24	No assignments	Final examination (4/27)

Academic Policies:

Discussion: "Discussion"--which means participation in the course room by posting responses to the questions there--is perhaps the most important part of this class. I'll be posting questions at the end of each week (Thursday afternoon) for the readings due the following week, and looking for your first responses no later than Tuesday morning. You should expect to post a minimum of three responses to my published questions by the end of each week (the minimum will earn a passing grade--responses to more questions and to other students' postings will earn you more credit). Participation accounts for 10% of your final grade, but if you use it well, it will be much more important to you than that. It's the place for you to try out ideas--to see what your fellow students think of them, and to respond to the ideas of your fellow students. (On the exams, you'll be asked to refer explicitly to your fellow students' comments when providing your interpretation of a passage.) Discussion is a good place to begin to develop ideas for your papers, then, and to work out and gather ideas that you can use on the quizzes and tests. Naturally, we don't have to be on-line at the same time to benefit from it. Learning Space allows you to participate in a discussion of texts and assignments in the class at your convenience. You can read other people's contributions and post your own in reply whenever you are ready. Keep in mind that the Course Room is a forum for the whole class. If you have a message for an individual (including me), use his or her individual e-mail address.

One last note: participation does not necessarily mean agreeing with published sources you have found or with the instructor (namely, me). In fact, informed and well-reasoned disagreement is liable to bring you more credit than simply agreeing with someone else (though that can play a part when you add further support to a point already made). Questions, too, can be important to class discussion, including questions that begin, for example, "Do you mean that . . . ?" In general, I will look for participation that shows you to be engaged in the work of the class--in active, critical reading, thinking, and writing.

Quizzes: There will be a quiz on Wednesday or Thursday of each week (with the exception of the weeks in which there are tests). I'll give you until Monday morning to complete it. The quizzes will be short and, of course, open book--they will ask you to complete a quoted phrase or passage by filling in blanks with exact language from the appropriate text and making a short comment on the significance of the passage. We will have them towards the end of the week so that you can draw on the discussion that has already taken place, but the quizzes won't be the place for conjecture and experimentation. You'll want to be short and to the point in expressing as best you can the meaning of the passage in the context of the work as a whole.

Tests: The mid-term and the final, once again, will be open book, but will ask you for somewhat longer responses than the quizzes to prompts on what we have covered. You will have a limited time period in which to finish them--more about this later in the term.

Papers: The short papers will ask you to interpret passages from stories or novels we have read (paper #1), or analyze a character from one of those works. The long paper (the ISC) will ask you to deal with a broader theme in more depth. I will ask you to submit your papers formatted in Microsoft Word 97 as attachments to e-mails. The specific requirements of the papers will be forthcoming, but for the long paper, you will probably want to use outside sources. (For the short papers, I prefer that you do not do this--just show me your own thinking.) When you do use outside sources, you should cite them according to the MLA format.

Help on writing about literature can be found in many places on the web. When the time comes, I'll have some specific recommendations for you. For now, you might want to look at Jack Lynch's collection of sources: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/writing.html.  Also, I will be available via e-mail and fax if you have questions about your work or want me to look over a rough draft. Exploit me.

Consultations: You will have questions and ideas about the works we read that, for one reason or another, you may not want to deal with in class. You may also wish to discuss your own work on written assignments as you are working on them or after you have had them returned. Feel free to write to me (or call--the telephone is a marvelous tool) about any topic related to the class whenever you wish. I should be in my office every morning Monday through Thursday. I encourage you to communicate about such topics with one another, too, and contact me as a group. Sometimes, our exchanges will concern issues or lead to comments that might be appropriate for the whole class, but I won't use names without your permission.