October 9th, 2009
English 215 concentrates on refining critical reading abilities through intensive writing. Students learn to ask questions about literary texts, their authorship, historical contexts, genres, construction, and the reasons for their complexity.
Students will demonstrate the ability to
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Students majoring in English will take one pre-1800 course as a requirement for the major. Students in pre-1800 courses investigate discursive/literary traditions to become aware of the variety and complexity of these traditions. The English department recognizes the continued significance of texts produced before 1800. Pre-1800 courses investigate discursive/literary traditions and explore the variety and complexity of these traditions.
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I’m thinking about my book order for 200 for the Fall. I’ve had past success with anthologies, and I’ve also gone with individual volumes, too. I continue to think that essays about poetry, fiction, and drama (if not also nonfiction) remain a useful way of structuring the course in terms of a range of preparation for our students. I would also like to make the theoretical and historical framework of literary studies more visible and many majors have told me when I’ve used Eagleton’s Literary Theory in 490’s that they wish they’d been thinking of such questions earlier.
I’m thinking about six books. Is this too quirky?
1. MLA Style Guide, new 7th ed
2. Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary Ed, Terry Eagleton
3. Can Poetry Save the Earth? By John Felstiner
4. The Tempest, ed Graff and Phelan, Case Studies in Critical Controversy (or a wilde/shaw pairing?)
5. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
6. Atonement by Ian McEwan
. John Felstiner’s new book has 40 short chapters with readings of poems that students might develop both in individual presentations and papers.
These two novels are surprising and delightful, drawing attention to how fiction works, in different ways, rather than short stories—too artificial? Likely to work?
Thanks for your thoughts,
Bill
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For ten years I’ve been teaching an assignment sequence on reading and interpretation for English majors in our introductory course now called English 200. Since we conceived English 200 as the first course in an introductory sequence to the major I have been working on one of the early assignments and I paste the relevant parts below. The current version builds out from a series of exercises I have always practiced with my students in this course. But it now goes further, drawing on Jonathan Culler’s explanation of poetics and hermeneutics, a distinction we have discussed in class using his Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. One of the other notable things about this assignment is that I am asking students to work with language and texts. We are already having conversations about the literary; but I continue to see a broader focus on textuality to be an essential elment of this kind of course, a course that is both doing (generating and refelcting on interpetive strategies) and undoing (complicating the interpretive assumptions and practices my students bring to class). I’m thinking a lot about doing and undoing, teaching and unteaching. But that is another story.
Writing Assignment #2
Background Much of the activity of reading remains tacit; that is, we do it for the most part without being conscious of what we are doing. This assignment will help you make the tacit dimension of reading visible. The purpose of doing these exercises is to learn from what you do. Consider this: When we read, we often think aloud in the margins of a page; we annotate when a term or reference in the text slows us down, confuses us or presents an interpretive problem; we explicate to make visible specific lexical, grammatical, syntactic features of a text; we summarize so that we have a working understanding of the setting, character(s), action(s), and plot of a text; we analyze using on all the previous strategies-marginalia, annotation and explication-to explore the formal and thematic interest and significance of a passage or passages; and we interpret in order to persuade a reader of one thing or another.
Assignment Choose either the excerpt from Susan Sontag’s from Aids and its Metaphors (106-113) or Emily Martin’s”The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” (114-28) and practice each of the six reading exercises (marginalia, explication, annotation, summary, analysis, and interpretation) described below. Each exercise should be no more than one page in length.
Marginalia: the reader is focused on her response to the work-what springs to mind and into body in the course of your reading. Its purpose is to register your feelings and thoughts as you read in order that you may examine, deepen and perhaps change them.
Annotation: the reader brings to the work factual information from an external source. Its purpose is to clarify apparent ambiguities, obscurities and references.
Explication: the reader proceeds word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, line-by-line, with the intent of describing the work’s formal features-the lexical, grammatical, syntactic and sequential choices of an author. Its purpose is to generate awareness of the formal features of a work so as to be more accountable to how the work is put together.
Summary: the reader formulates a brief restatement that omits concrete details, in the case of a narrative, in order to isolate the significant actions and formal divisions in the work.
Analysis: the reader isolates one or more elements of the work for closer attention. The purpose of analysis is to separate the work into parts, or into cause and effect relations, in order to more fully understand the whole.
Interpretation: the reader sets forth one or more ways of approaching a work. (Hermeneutics or poetics)
Writing Assignment #3
Background In the last assignment we broke down the activity of reading using marginalia, annotation, explication, summary, analysis and interpretation. In this assignment, I will ask you to consider two kinds of work you will be asked to do as students of literature: hermeneutics and poetics.
When you are interpreting a text to determine what a text means you are involved in hermeneutics. This kind of writing in literary studies, as Jonathan Culler reminds us, comes out of law and religion, fields in which people are working to establish authoritative legal or religious interpretation to guide action (Literary Theory 61). The other interpretive project is poetics. This kind of writing, associated with linguistics and contemporary rhetoric, sets out to examine how texts are made, as well as to account for how the structure of a text (a sonnet, for example) achieves the effects that it does. Culler describes this basic distinction well. “Taking meanings or effects as the point of departure (poetics) is fundamentally different from seeking to discover meaning (hermeneutics)” (61).
Assignments
Part 1: Poetics. Select a poem from our anthology, or the packet of selected poems I will distribute, and write a 3-page essay on how the poem is put together. You should briefly summarize the attested meaning of the poem (or the possible interpretations) in no more than two sentences. The essay will then demonstrate deliberate and intentional explication and analysis why the text is significant as a text. (We will practice this kind of demonstration in class with selected poems.) What does the structure of the particular text you have chosen teach us about literary form and its effects?
Part 2: Hermeneutics. Write a 3-page essay that seeks to determine the meaning of one of the readings for this week: “The Gospel of Mark,” 129-30; Franz Kafka, “On Parables,” 130-31 or “Before the Law,” 131-32; Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” 132-33 and “Ragnarök,” 133-34; Italo Calvino, “Cities and Memory: Isadora,” 134 and “Continuous Cities: Cecilia,” 134-35; or John Barth, “Night Sea Journey,” 135-42. Your essay will involve close reading of a sequence of passages in an effort to persuade the reader that your interpretation of the text is worth serious consideration.
Remember that attention to how the text is put together (poetics) will help you make a persuasive case; in fact, your interpretive writing will be in part judged by how well you reach your interpretive conclusions-what you are able to do with the elements of the text you highlight and use to support your conclusion.
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