Showing posts with label course setup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label course setup. Show all posts

First Day

Welcome to your English 2112 course! I hope this semester will be both fun and challenging for you! Your professor's name is Dr. Matthew Horton (that's me!), but you can call him Dr. H. I have high hopes that this semester will help you improve your skills as a college-level reader and writer.

Click on these icons and see what you can do! This course is about reading great literature, but I also want to make you familiar with some useful technology that can help you discover new possibilities. Keep in mind, these tools are just for your benefit--the only required one is Google Drive:



Also, go ahead and look through some of the most important resources on this course website:

Read the syllabus
Check the calendar
Using Google Drive
Resources on Google Drive

Other resources are available by clicking the tabs across the top and various links in the right-hand margin. As much as you can, familiarize yourself with this course website. My contact info is in the right-hand margin at well, towards the top.

Syllabus

Description of Course
English 2112 is World Literature II, a 3-credit hour course offered by the English Department in the College of Arts and Letters that fulfills the Area C "Literature" requirement, the Area B "Global Course" requirement, or an Area F course for majors that require or allow 2000-levels English courses. You must have earned a "C" in English 1102 before you can take this course.

In this course, you can achieve the following goals:
  • Learn methods for measuring the value of selected works of literature around the world.
  • Understand the intersection between appreciation, evaluation, and enjoyment.
  • Apply characters and dramatic situations to important ethical questions:
    • How do we define human goodness and excellence?
    • In what ways do the standards of goodness and excellence shift and change?
    • What sorts of conflict between values give rise to ethical crisis?
  • Interpret characters and dramatic situations as examples of ethical complexity:
    • What sorts of choices do characters or speakers make?
    • What sorts of values do characters or speakers defend?
    • What motivates them to make those choices or hold those beliefs?
    • Where does their confidence come from?
  • Become proficient in responsible reading.
  • Learn literary terms to help you engage with the literature we read
  • Analyze works of literature with thoughtful and developed written responses
  • Develop confidence discussing literature with your classmates

Calendar

Reading Notes for assigned readings are due at the beginning of class on the days they appear on the calendar. That is, when a reading assignment is on the calendar, it must be read by the beginning of class that day, and you must turn in the notes when you arrive. Quote Responses will be submitted through Google Drive. Click on each agenda item to read additional details (if any) about the assignment. Please be aware that printing this calendar will hide the details for each item, so be sure to check the digital calendar often.

Page numbers refer to e-texts I've made for this course. They are available here. The only text you have to purchase is The Stranger.

Assignments

Readings

Check the calendar to know when we are reading each work. And don't forget that reading notes are due for every reading assignment.
This list might change as the semester progresses . . .

Extra Credit

You can earn bonus points all semester, but they will only count if you have turned in all of your Quotes Responses and Reading Notes. You can turn these assignments in on time (for credit) or late (for no credit), but they must be done and complete in order for extra credit points to kick in. Your extra credit points will accumulate even if you have missing assignments, but they will not be calculated into your grade as long as you have missing assignments.

These books are available in the UNG Oconee Library. The bulleted items are sections of the books you can read for extra credit. Read a selection and then write a one-page response detailing how it informs your reading of one of our works for this course. This is a difficult task because you must think theoretically about the way you are reading, your method of reading, not just WHAT you are reading: In order to receive extra credit for this task, your report must make direct reference to the outside reading selection and one of the works for the course and also explain how they are connected. Of course, polished writing is a must, and a report that goes beyond the minimum length will be more strongly considered.

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988.
  • Chapter 5: "Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?"
  • Chapter 6: "Implied Authors as Friends and Pretenders"
Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
  • Chapter 4: Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories
  • Chapter 5: Discourse: Covert versus Overt Narrators
Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
  • Chapter 1: Selection and "Significance"
  • Chapter 2: Character
  • Chapter 4: "Dubliners"
Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
  • Booth, Wayne. "Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple" pp. 16-29
  • Phelan, James. "Sethe's Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading" pp. 93-109
  • Miller, J. Hillis. "How to Be 'in Tune with the Right' in The Golden Bowl" pp. 271-86
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1954.
  • Chapter IV: People (continued)
  • Chapter V: The Plot
Frank, Joseph. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
  • Chapter 1: "Spatial Form in Modern Literature"
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
  • "On Several Obsolete Notions"
  • "New Novel, New Man"
  • "Time and Description in Fiction Today"
  • "From Realism to Reality"
Fuller, Edmund. Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing. New York: Random House, 1958.
  • Chapter 1: "Three Images of Man"
Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
  • "Moral Fiction" pp. 105-126
  • "Moral Criticism" pp. 127-146
Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. 3rd Ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
  • Chapter 2: Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"
  • Chapter 7: Wayne Booth, "Distance and Point of View: An Essay in Classification"
Levenson, Michael H. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  • Chapter 6: "From the Epic To the Lighthouse"
Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
  • Chapters I-IV (as a group)
  • Chapter XI: The Experiment
Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
  • Chapter 1: "Reading Doing Reading"
  • Chapter 6: "Re-Reading Re-Vision: James and Benjamin"
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
  • "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" pp. 36-50
  • "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" pp. 63-86
  • "Writing Short Stories" pp. 87-106
Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
  • Chapter 1: "The Implied Author, Unreliability, and Ethical Positioning"
  • Chapter 2: "Dual Focalization, Discourse as Story, and Ethics"
Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.
  • Chapter 5: "Reexamining Reliability: The Multiple Functions of Nick Carraway"
Phelan, James, ed. Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989.
  • Booth, Wayne. "Are Narrative Choices Subject to Ethical Criticism?" pp. 57-78
  • Miller, J. Hillis. "Is There an Ethics of Reading?" pp. 79-101
Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
  • Chapter 5: "Character in Narrative"
  • Chapter 6: "Plot in Narrative"
  • Chapter 7: "Point of View in Narrative"