A Catcher in the Rye passage

Just heard the news that J.D. Salinger passed away yesterday.

February 2nd

Please read Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" if you have not already.

Please read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and his Nobel Prize speech.

Also, please post the following blog assignment before we meet for class:

When you read and re-read Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," I want you to pay attention to narration and the organization of the plot. The story begins in a kind of 3rd Person Objective mode and then slips into a more subjective/limited mode. See if you can locate where there are mode switches and consider what effects this has for a reader. How does the opening get us into the story? What does it offer and what does it suppress? How does the transition of narrative mode change a reader's relationship to the events and to the main character? Perhaps associated with this is the emplotment of the story in a very non-chronological order. When you read, mark the points at which the story changes in time and see if you can notice an effect on how this gets you into the story differently.

With those ideas in mind, I want you to write 3 paragraphs for a total of 250-350 words on this story. Each paragraph should consider a different moment of transition in the story, whether of p.o.v., of chronology, or of both if you find them coinciding. They don't need to connect up in any way, but can remain 3 separate paragraphs of speculative response.

Revised Assignment Schedule

Thu., Jan 28 “What is Narrative?”
Read Bierce “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, Poe “The Cask of Amontillado”
Key Concepts: Basic Structures of Story & Plot—Fabula & Syuzhet
Poetry Essay Due in class

Tue., Feb 2 “There are no longer problems of the spirit.”
Read Faulkner “A Rose for Emily” and Nobel Prize Banquet Speech; Gardner pp. 57-60
Key Concepts: Narrative persona, characterization, revelation-suggestion-suppression
Writing: Conclusions

Thu., Feb 4 “Narratives within Narratives”
Read Frankenstein: 1-68
Key concepts: Beginnings, Frames, and epistolary writing
Writing: Organization—at the local and global levels of your writing

Tue., Feb 9 “Dialogue in the Alps”
Read Frankenstein: 69-123
Key Concepts: Focalization, POV, Landscape settings…
Writing: Development—extending your ideas into longer writings

Thu., Feb 11 “Questions of Progeny”
Read Frankenstein: 124-170
Key Concepts: Representations of Technology in Cultural Texts
Writing: Technology and Academic Writing

Tue., Feb 16 “Lost in darkness and distance”
Read Frankenstein: 171-191
Key Concepts: Ambiguity in Fiction, the Franken-meme

Thu., Feb 18 “Encounter with Literary Criticism”
Reading TBA; Gardner pp. 110-137 on writing a research paper
Key Concepts: Reading Professional Literary Criticism; Incorporating Research into Your Academic Writing

Tue., Feb 23 “What is Drama?”
Read Capek’s RUR, pp. vii-49
Key Concepts: A Literary History of Drama
Writing: Revisions: strategies and priorities

Thu., Feb 25 “history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants…”
Read RUR, pp. 50-End, Gardner pp. 92-93
Key Concepts: Drama & Social Issues, Mise-en-scene
Writing: College Writing as Process and Product

Tue., Mar 2 Suturing Frankenstein and RUR
In-class Screening of Blade Runner (1992 Director’s Cut)

Thu., Mar 4 “Settle thy studies”
Read Doctor Faustus (A-Text), pp. 5-54.
Key Concepts: Early Modern Dramatic Modes
Writing: In-Class Draft Workshop on Fiction Essay

Tue., Mar 9 “What can Marlowe mean?”
Reading to be assigned from the Norton Critical Edition of the play.
Discussing the Play and Criticism

Thu., Mar 11 “There he goes…He’s feelin’ his Cheerios”
Read Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance
Key Concepts: Fiction and Mixed Media
Writing: Describing multi-media texts in your writing
Review for Final Exam; Course Evaluations
Fiction Essay Due in class




Saturday, Mar 20 Final Exam: 8-10am

Homework for January 28

For Thursday, your essay on poetry is due. Please bring it to class, stapled.

Also, please read the two short stories by Poe and Bierce.

No blog assignment so you can focus on finishing the essay strong.

Here's a Poetry-in-Pop-Culture Moment

The poem is Walt Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!"

The benefits of challenging literature...

A recent psychology study by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and University of British Columbia indicate that reading Kafka can improve your learning. So, consider reading some challenging literature before studying for your statistics midterms.

Assignment: Poetry, Pop Culture, and New Media

For this blog writing, I've embedded a machinima video tribute to Langston Hughes's poem "Suicide's Note." Machinima is an art form in which you can work with video game scenery and characters while inserting your own soundtrack and thereby making your own story. Please watch the video a couple of times and then write 1-2 paragraphs on the effects of this poem being machinima-ized. How does it add or detract to the text's meaning, to your enjoyment of the text? Does the machinima version remain true to the tone of the poem or diverge? How?
Then, please locate a reference to poetry in popular culture: for example, Stewie's quoting of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night". Explain how the poem enhances this pop culture moment. This part of the blog can be more free-form thinking and writing.

Total: 250-350 words.

in Edgar Allan Poe news...

Today a long-standing tradition was broken in which a mysterious visitor visits Poe's grave on the writer's birthday. Is something strange afoot? You can read about this here.

Homework for January 19

Please see your email for the Rita Wong poems and the Essay Assignment Prompt:

1. Read the poems assigned on the syllabus. I'm attaching a scan of the Rita Wong poems--please read "value chain" "fluorine" "the girl who ate rice almost every day" "nervous organism" "mess is lore" "forage, fumage" "recognition/identification test" and "chinese school dropout"-------when you read "recognition/identification test, the left column are plants and the right column are corporations: in your mind see how many plants you can visualize and how many corporate logos from the lists.

2. Select the poem for your first essay. See the assignment posted on the blog. Do some brainstorming on it. Try to use the strategies we use in class: make inventories of images, patterns, structure, etc. And try to draft up a thesis you might use for the essay. Bring the brainstorming and thesis ON PAPER to class.

3. There is NO blog assignment over the weekend ;P

Homework for Thursday, January 14

Once you've read Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" multiple times and really attentively, please write a 300-350 word blog on it.
First, write 1-2 paragraphs assembling evidence to argue that this poem has an anti-technology tone and message.
Second, write 1-2 paragraphs assembling evidence to argue that this poem has a pro-technology tone and message.
Finally, write 1-2 paragraphs explaining which reading you think is more convincing and explain WHY.

Please post the blog before class.

This Automated Hand...

A three-dimensional artistic image of Keats's poem at this link.

English, Science, and Team Edward...

An intersection of Physics/Math/Stats and Literature:


Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi published a paper "Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality" that attempts to prove vampires could not exist.

Efthimiou and Gandhi conduct a thought experiment: Assume that the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600. At that time, according to data available at the U.S. Census website, the global population was 536,870,911. Efthimiou and Gandhi calculate that, once the Nosferatu feeding frenzy began, the entire human race would have been wiped out by June 1602.

However, mathematician, Dino Sejdinovic published a rebuttal to their argument in the November 2008 Math Horizons called "Mathematics of the Human-Vampire Conflict."

Blog Writing for Tuesday, Jan. 12

Step 1: Select one poem from those on the syllabus for Tuesday.
Step 2: Make a comprehensive list of the images in this poem. This can just be a list without complete sentences. The purpose is to create an inventory so you can then decide what to focus on in your writing.
Step 3: Now, select one type of image or a few images you think somehow work together in that poem and write a 300-400 word hypothesis about how this image offers an interpretation of the poem.

For example, if this assignment was today you might have written a comparative argument about the three images in Shakespeare's quatrains. You might have compared the people and their settings in Wordsworth, whether incorporating the bees or not.

The poems for Tuesday are rich in imagery, so this should be an inviting assignment. Please have it posted on your blog before we meet Tuesday morning.

Gwendolyn Brooks "First Fight. Then Fiddle."

Gwendolyn Brooks's "First Fight. Then Fiddle."
(1949)


First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering,
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.

Homework for Thursday, Jan. 7

Before class Thursday morning, please accomplish the following:

1. Read the poems on the syllabus. Please use the links on the course blog to find the recommended versions of these texts. And, remember, you should read them several times, carefully. Take note of anything that piques your interest.

2. Please use blogger.com to create a blog that you will use for this course. You may email me with questions or difficulties, and I'll talk more about the blogs in class on Thursday.

Winter 2010 Syllabus

ENL3-015 Introduction to Literature
Winter 2010


Schedule: T/R 8-9:50 am Classroom: 7 Wellman
Andrew Hageman Office: Voorhies 320
Email: achageman@ucdavis.edu Office Hrs: T/R 10-11am & by appt.
Class Email: enl3morning-10@ucdavis.edu CRN: 42397

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

“Little Gidding” in Four Quartets
By T.S. Eliot


Required Texts: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Oxford), Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance, RUR by Karel Capek, Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (Norton Critical Edition), Writing About Literature by Janet E. Gardner (2nd Edition), and other texts will be available online.

Prerequisite: You must have already completed the “Subject A” requirement to take English 3.

Course Description and Objectives:
The quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem above is provocatively paradoxical. If we shall not cease from exploration, how can there be an end? And what does it mean that we’ll know this familiar place for the first time? I chose this literary excerpt as a way of prefacing the course because it sets the tone for this quarter of studying literature as something quite complicated that requires ongoing and rigorous exploration to reveal new perspectives. To consider just how complicated literature is, see if you can, without consulting a dictionary, articulate a concise definition of literature. Can you tell me how to know when I am reading a work of literature as opposed to something else? Is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight literature—and why or why not?? Is literature a means of escape and enjoyment, a way to engage with ideas, a way to encounter beauty, a combination of these, or something else entirely? Furthermore, consider why reading literature is valued by individuals, society, and as part of a university degree. And, underlying these questions is the matter of whether literature still matters in our present moment of online social networking and other developments in communication, art, and culture.
These are all difficult questions to answer, and this quarter is for you about working hard toward being able to express positions on them as well as other crucial issues regarding literature. To help you achieve this objective, the course is designed to introduce you to advanced analysis of literary form, technique, genre, content, and socio-historical contexts. There is a strong emphasis on literary form and technique in this class because attention to these issues can greatly enrich our understanding and enjoyment of literature and make even the most challenging poetry accessible.
This class embraces these ideas and takes as its main objective teaching a core set of skills required to analyze, appreciate, and enjoy works of literature with an interest in content, form, and context. You will develop these skills through close reading a wide range of literary works in a variety of genres, and by writing responses, including formal pieces, about the works that pique your interest.
Throughout this quarter, you should strive to obtain and cultivate the following abilities:

 Develop a thoughtful, informed, and sophisticated perspective on the notion of literature in general and on any given literary text.
 Situate your perspective in the context of the university, the field, and/or the conversation at hand.
 Communicate your perspective clearly through writing to appropriate audiences.

Cultivating these habits of mind is our aim this quarter, so let’s peel open poetry, gnaw on a novel, and digest some drama!

Course Assignments:

Blog Writings and Projects
You will create and maintain a blog for this course. There will be regular writing assignments and/or projects to be completed and posted on your blog by the deadlines indicated in each assignment. These writings contribute to the 6000-word writing requirement for this course, range from informal to formal style, and will be evaluated on assignment-specific requirements.

Reading Quizzes, Attendance, and Participation
There will be regular short reading quizzes at the beginning of class meetings. These quizzes will be given at the start of class meetings, so be prompt in order to give yourself the full time to complete them. Also, you are expected to attend class regularly and having completed the reading. Significant absences or late arrivals will lower this portion of your grade.

Formal Papers and Draft Workshops:
You will write two evidence-based, thesis-driven essays this quarter. Your essays will go through draft workshops aimed at helping you revise the final versions. Attendance is required at the workshops—failure to attend or failure to bring a substantial draft will result in an automatic 1/3 reduction of your grade for that paper (i.e. a B becomes a B-). These assignments will be handed out well in advance of the due dates so you can start planning and drafting early.

Final Exam:
The midterm exam will be on Saturday, March 20, 8-10am.

Grading/Evaluation Policies:

Blog 25%
Reading Quizzes/Part./Att.: 10%
Formal Essays 50% (Poetry 20%, Fiction 30%)
Final Exam: 15%
Submitting Your Essays:
Your essays must be submitted to me on the assigned dates. DO NOT submit any papers to the English or University Writing Program department offices. They do no accept student papers. In case of medical or other emergency, contact me before the due date to discuss an extension; extensions are granted only under exceptional circumstances. Late papers will receive a 1/3 grade reduction for each day past the due date, and no papers are accepted after the final exam.

Office Hours:
You are greatly encouraged to visit me in my office hours early and often! I have found office hour meetings significantly beneficial to students, whether in the brainstorming phases of pre-writing, working through a challenging text or idea, or in the midst of final essay revisions. If your schedule precludes you from coming to my scheduled office hours, I am willing to make an appointment. I do not accept drafts over email, so do stop by to see me.

Course Requirements and Policies:

 ENL3 has a 6000-word requirement. You must complete every graded written assignment, including the final exam, in order to fulfill the requirement and pass the course. If you are missing any formal assignment at the end of the quarter, I cannot pass you.
 You must earn a C- or better in order to pass, even if you have turned in all the work.

Academic Honesty:
With regard to plagiarism, don’t do it! Submitting the work of others is a serious academic offense that you will do well to avoid. Suspect papers will be submitted to the UC Davis Student Judicial Affairs to follow university procedures regarding academic honesty. I am happy to help you avoid this issue, so bring any questions to class or office hours before the assignment is due. A complete outline of university policies and guidelines for avoiding plagiarism can be found at http://sja.ucdavis.edu.

Disclosures:
If you require any accommodation in the course due to a disability, please acquire formal documentation of the disability from the UC Davis Disability Resources Center. You may then notify me by providing the documentation so I can make arrangements to meet your needs.





Modifications:
Course schedule subject to change with advance notification from instructor. Course policies will be modified only if absolutely necessary.

ENL 3: Introduction to Literature: Winter 2010
Schedule of Reading and Writing Assignments

You are expected to complete assignments for the day on which they are listed. You will be notified of any changes to this schedule well in advance, both in class and electronically.

Tue., Jan. 5 Course Introduction
First reading and writing. Establishing our blogs.
Key Concepts: Defining “Literature” and How & Why to Write About it

Thu., Jan 7 “What is Poetry?”
Read Shakespeare “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”, Wordsworth “Nuns Fret Not”, Brooks "First Fight. Then Fiddle", “Sonnet” by Christina Rosetti
Key Concepts: Line, Stanza, Rhyme, Rhythm, Metre, The Sonnet form
Writing: Evidence and Claims 1

Tue., Jan 12 “A dimpled spider, fat and white”
Read Keats “This Living Hand”, Frost “Design”, Hemans “Casabianca”, Rich “Diving into the Wreck” and Gardner pp. 1-15.
Key Concepts: Imagery and Symbolism
Writing: Evidence and Claims 2

Thu., Jan 14 “Form and Content, Form versus Content, Form as Content”
Read Emily Dickinson “I dwell in Possibility”, Pound “In a Station on the Metro”, Blake “The Tyger”, Ted Hughes “Crow’s Theology”, Brautigan “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
Key Concepts: Couplet, Ambiguity, the Dash—
Writing: Introductions—making a first impression

Tue., Jan 19 “It Gathers to a Greatness”
Read Hopkins “God’s Grandeur” and select poems by Rita Wong; Gardner pp. 16-42.
Key Concepts: Pace, Texture, Punctuation, Repetition, and Play
Writing: Formulating your thesis

Thu., Jan 21 Poetic Form and Writing about Literature
Gardner 82-91
Draft Workshop: Poetry essay

Tue., Jan 26 “Poet on the Peaks: Gary Snyder in Context”
Read Poetry Handout of Snyder’s poems
Key Concepts: Reading poems in the context of the author and his/her historical/social/cultural contexts. Conclude poetry segment.



Thu., Jan 28 “What is Narrative?”
Read Bierce “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, Poe “The Cask of Amontillado”
Key Concepts: Basic Structures of Story & Plot—Fabula & Syuzhet
Poetry Essay Due in class

Tue., Feb 2 “There are no longer problems of the spirit.”
Read Faulkner “A Rose for Emily” and Nobel Prize Banquet Speech; Gardner pp. 57-60
Key Concepts: Narrative persona, characterization, revelation-suggestion-suppression
Writing: Conclusions

Thu., Feb 4 “There he goes…He’s feelin’ his Cheerios”
Read Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance
Key Concepts: Fiction and Mixed Media
Writing: Describing multi-media texts in your writing

Tue., Feb 9 “Narratives within Narratives”
Read Frankenstein: 1-68
Key concepts: Beginnings, Frames, and epistolary writing
Writing: Organization—at the local and global levels of your writing

Thu., Feb 11 “Dialogue in the Alps”
Read Frankenstein: 69-123
Key Concepts: Focalization, POV, Landscape settings…
Writing: Development—extending your ideas into longer writings

Tue., Feb 16 “Questions of Progeny”
Read Frankenstein: 124-170
Key Concepts: Representations of Technology in Cultural Texts
Writing: Technology and Academic Writing

Thu., Feb 18 “Lost in darkness and distance”
Read Frankenstein: 171-191
Key Concepts: Ambiguity in Fiction, the Franken-meme

Tue., Feb 23 “Encounter with Literary Criticism”
Reading TBA; Gardner pp. 110-137 on writing a research paper
Key Concepts: Reading Professional Literary Criticism; Incorporating Research into Your Academic Writing

Thu., Feb 25 Between Frankenstein and RUR
In-class Screening of Blade Runner (1992 Director’s Cut)


Tue., Mar 2 “What is Drama?”
Read Capek’s RUR, pp. vii-49
Key Concepts: A Literary History of Drama
Writing: Revisions: strategies and priorities

Thu., Mar 4 “history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants…”
Read RUR, pp. 50-End, Gardner pp. 92-93
Key Concepts: Drama & Social Issues, Mise-en-scene
Writing: College Writing as Process and Product

Tue., Mar 9 “Settle thy studies”
Read Doctor Faustus (A-Text), pp. 5-54.
Key Concepts: Early Modern Dramatic Modes
Writing: In-Class Draft Workshop on Fiction Essay

Thu., Mar 11 “What can Marlowe mean?”
Reading to be assigned from the Norton Critical Edition of the play.
Discussing the Play and Criticism
Fiction Essay Due in class

Tue., Mar 15 “Of Last Things”
Review for Final Exam; Course Evaluations






Saturday, Mar 20 Final Exam: 8-10am