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English 213, 9308
Course Description
This course is
designed to teach you the necessary advanced skills to major in English. This
course will introduce you to some of the techniques and ways of talking and
writing about literature that practitioners of literary studies use. You will
learn some of
its methods, modes of analysis, major theoretical
concepts, and key terms, as you begin to become a practitioner of literary
studies.
We will explore a range
of interpretive practices and frameworks, keeping in mind that what texts
“mean” depends on the questions we ask about them, and that the questions we
ask are inevitably shaped by our culture, our history, our politics, our value
systems, and our individual and collective commitments as readers.
In addition to the primary texts on the
syllabus, we will read essays and glossary entries designed to help us
explicate the key terms of the discipline, as well as essays modeling a variety
of critical approaches to our primary texts.
Course
Objectives
By the end of the semester,
you are expected to have cultivated a familiarity with some of the modes of
literary analysis to which you will be exposed as you go on as an English
major, and to be able to recognize and perform readings of individual literary
works informed by each of these critical approaches.
In addition, you are expected to have sustained
a high degree of competence in close-reading, critical thinking, and formal
writing about works of both literature and literary criticism. To do this, you
will need to master a range of basic critical tasks, including making sense of
literary language in its formal and representational complexity, scanning lines
of poetry (reading for meter, rhyme, and other sonic features), identifying
fundamental literary elements and tropes (including plot, characters, setting,
speaker/narrator, tone, point of view, figurative language, allusion and
structure), examining the ideological implications of individual works, both
literary and critical, drawing thematic, analytical and historical connections
between and among disparate works (both literary and critical), and
understanding, evaluating, and synthesizing pieces of published literary
criticism.
Exit
Examination Policy
Introduction to the Study of Literature is
designed to introduce students to the skills and knowledge base needed to
successfully complete a Major in English, and to introduce them to literary
studies as an academic discipline. In order to ensure that all students
pursuing this degree are adequately prepared to complete the English major,
students in English 213 are required to pass an exit examination at the end of
the semester. In addition to the evaluation breakdown you see below,
passing the exit examination is a requirement for passing the course.
Please note that the exit exam is pass/fail.
Students who fail the exit exam will meet with their instructors or other
members of the English department faculty to review their performances on the
exam as well as how the exam was assessed. Students will come away from
these meetings with a full understanding of the course objectives that they
have yet to achieve, and will then re-enroll in English 213.
Schedule
of Readings:
Sep 3 introduction to the class
. In
class, read Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” Introduction to using the
Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms:
Text, prose, textual evidence, author, narrator, monologue, dialogue,
character, fiction.
Sep 10: Allegory:
Chris
Van Allsburg,
The Wretched Stone;
selection from John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim's
Progress; Siv Cedering Fox, “Offering” (handouts).
Critical and Literary Terms:
Allegory, abstract and concrete, metaphor, personification, synecdoche,
metonymy, parable, fable, narrative, didactic, stock character, tale
Sep 17: Tools for Reading:
Arthur
Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,”
W.J.T.
Mitchell, “Representation,” (Handouts),
Critical and Literary Terms:
Representation, symbol, symbolism, sign, icon, index;
frame story, genre, detective fiction and
mystery fiction, protagonist, short story, foil, style, verisimilitude, orientalism,
the Other
Sep 24 Drama
Susan
Glaspell,
Trifles and “Jury of Her
Peers” (handouts)
Critical and Literary Terms: Drama,
play, dramatis personae, thick description, realism, plot, flashback, feminist
criticism, resolution, scene, gender
Oct 1 Poetry:
tba
Critical and Literary Terms:
Poetry,
rhyme, rhythm, rhyme scheme, meter, accent, pentameter, blank verse, free
verse, eye rhyme, end rhyme, internal rhyme
Oct 8 Poetry:
tba
Oct 15 Herman Melville, “Bartleby the
Scrivener”
(handout).
Critical and Literary terms:
setting, point of view, novella, unreliable narrator, diction, voice,
monologue,
Introduction to independent study
plan assignment.
Oct 22
(class does not meet),
Essay #1 Due. Begin work on independent
study plan assignment.
Oct 29
Longer Fiction
Mark
Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Critical and Literary Terms: Setting,
picaresque novel, dialect, naive heroes, grotesque, nom de plume, local color,
sentimentalism, caricature, black humor, pastorale, novel,
Nov 5
Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Critical
and Literary Terms: intertextuality, pastiche, ode, myth, race, quest romance,
Noble Savage, satire, parody, pantomime,
Nov 12 Controversy and Criticism:
Critical
essays on Mark Twain,
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
Critical
and Literary Terms: Canon (more to come)
Nov 19
What Makes a Text Literature? Mary Prince,
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave
Critical and Literary Terms: Slave
narrative, autobiographical, allusion, memoir, rhetoric
Nov 26
- no class, Thanksgiving
Dec 3:
Essay #2 Due Poetry, tba
Dec 10
- Wrap up and prep for
exam.
Plan for independent study due.
Dec 17
– Final Exam
Books
to buy:
You should also have a good dictionary.
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