English 222
(American Literature)
An Online Course (WebStudy)
Office Telephone and
Voicemail: (215) 751-8340
Office: BR-37
E-mail: kmurphey@ccp.edu
Course Web-site: http://ccp.whyy.org
Course Description:
English 222 (American Literature) serves as an introduction to literary history and analysis that focuses on American literature from the Civil War (1861-1865) to the present day. The course is multicultural in focus, including not only “canonical” areas of study such as poetry and fiction by the modernists, but also Native American tales, women’s rights manifestos and texts from the Civil Rights Movement. The course will include diverse approaches to literary analysis such as cultural criticism and close reading. The goals of English 222 are, through the reading, for students to come to an understanding of the roots of American literary culture and to begin to participate in the ongoing debate about how those cultural roots may be defined and represented. Prerequisite: English 101.
Required Major Texts:
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (e-text or Dover Thrift Edition)
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (e-text or Dover Thrift Edition)
Bob Blaisdell, editor, Great Speeches by Native Americans (Dover Thrift Edition)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (e-text or Dover Thrift Edition)
Upston Sinclair, The Jungle (e-text or Dover Thrift Edition)
Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (e-text or Dover Thrift Edition)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (any edition)
Dover Thrift Editions ($1.00-$2.00)
should be available at the CCP bookstore for or through Amazon (amazon.com) or
through
Song of Solomon ($12.95) should be available at the CCP bookstore for or through Amazon (amazon.com).
Local Used Bookstores include The
Bookhaven,
Course Rationale:
Course Delivery
Format:
After the orientation, this course will be conducted primarily through lectures posted on Web-pages, asynchronous chat (discussion/forum), and e-mail.
Class Discussion/Participation:
Since we are communicating in an untraditional format (i.e. e-mail, Web-pages, and asynchronous chat (discussion/forum)), all students must actively utilize these media. Assignments will require students to browse and search the Web for information on various topics. (Some assignments may require students get information from local libraries.) Students may ask questions of the instructor by e-mail, and they will post questions and responses in the class’ asynchronous chat. Students MUST post two questions and two responds every week—this is required, MINIMUM class participation and will be graded according to relevance to the course material and quality of thinking. (“Hi, how are you?” in other words is not a legitimate question for credit. Whereas, “Why were Kate Chopin’s works (The Awakening, “Story of an Hour,” “The Storm,” etc.) so shocking to the American literary world in the late Nineteen Century?” is a good, thought provoking question which is related to course material.) Also, students should make every attempt to enter class discussion early in the week. The instructor will note students who chronically participate in class discussion at the very end of the week (i.e. at the last minute) and their class participation grades will suffer. Standard English is expected.
Flaming:
Class discussion and communication can be greatly enhanced by the use of e-mail and asynchronous chat (discussion/forum). People find that participating in a discussion by e-mail allows them to think about their responses more carefully than in a traditional classroom discussion. Also the depersonalized medium of the e-mail text and the computer screen often make students feel less on-the-spot than answering questions in a traditional classroom discussion. Students, therefore, often feel freer to say things in e-mail or asynchronous chat (discussion/forum) than they do in a face-to-face classroom situation. With this freedom, however, there is responsibility. It is not appropriate to say anything on e-mail or in asynchronous chat (discussion/forum). Students need to remember that their remarks by e-mail or asynchronous chat (discussion/forum) must contribute to a respectful, learning environment. Flaming, using inappropriate language or being disrespectful of others (whether to other students or the instructor), will not be tolerated. Remember that others cannot see your face or body gestures to see if you are kidding or serious in messages sent by e-mail or asynchronous chat (discussion/forum). Students should, therefore, carefully consider their remarks (Would you make such a comment in a traditional classroom setting? Do you think your remark is inflammatory or could be taken the wrong way?). Again, we want to create a positive, learning environment through e-mail and asynchronous chat (discussion/forum). To do this, we will need to be mindful of the things we say, just like in a traditional classroom setting.
Grade Breakdown:
Class Discussion 15%
Quizzes 15%
Journal Assignments 25%
Paper and Report 25%
Final Exam 20%
Please Note:
Assignments are not optional. They are course requirements.
Students must pass the final exam to pass the course.
Plagiarism on any assignment (discussion, quiz, journal, paper, exam) will result in
automatic course failure.
Quizzes:
Quizzes will be a series of twenty multiple choice reading comprehension questions. Students will have ten minutes to answer the twenty questions. Please mind your time. Webstudy will not cut you off after the ten minutes are up (and risk loosing your material). Students going over time will have points deducted from their quiz scores. Quizzes will be only be available from Monday to Wednesday.
The American literature survey courses are often the first experiences that many students have studying literature as a discipline. Therefore, the instructor asks students to keep a journal that introduces them to literary analysis. This focused journal writing allows students to learn the art of interpretation as they move beyond the complicated style of some of the older texts. For each reading assignment, students write a journal entry in response to their choice of one of these questions:
How do human beings interact with nature?
How do human beings set up and maintain rules for social control?
How do human beings use myths, symbols and metaphors to express thoughts and
to tell stories?
How do human beings deal with the unfamiliar?
How do human beings respond to oppression?
How do human beings describe spirituality?
How do human beings react to new technologies?
How do human beings define themselves as a nation, a society, a community?
How do human beings determine their individuality within the constraints of
society and culture?
How do human beings arrive at the conditions for literary and cultural
production?
How do human beings create the criteria for literary “canons” and “high” culture?
How do human beings approach questions of race, socioeconomic class, age and
gender?
How do human beings work with language to communicate ideas?
(English 222 (American Literature): Course Description and Course Documents, May 1997, English Department, Community College of Philadelphia)
Weeks Eight and Ten students may select a single author and write ONE journal entry responding to his or her works. Additionally, Weeks Three and Seven students should respond to the primary work: The Red Badge of Courage and The Jungle, in their journals-—he Whitman poems are intended as contrast and do not require journal entries.
Journals should significantly engage the text/texts. Stronger journals will give specific examples (scene summaries/ and to quotes) to support statements. Outstanding journals may also make reference to outside research on the author/text/historical context/literary movement—with proper citations/credit to sources. Standard English is expected.
Students will pick from among the selected authors and texts. Each student will read the his or her chosen text critically, research the author and his/her historical context, and write a short critical paper (4-6 double-spaced, typed pages—bibliography should be in addition). Papers should explore a theme in the work or critically analyze an aspect of the text in terms of a literary critical approach (feminism, structuralism, etc.). The texts we read as class and the discussion and analysis of those texts will provide a model for student papers. Paper must give credit to sources by using standard citation formats (MLA or APA preferred). Plagiarism or cheating will result in automatic course failure. This paper must be written in stages. Students will be given specific deadlines for the various parts or stages of paper writing.
Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884)
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900)
Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)
Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903)
Charles Alexander Eastman’s Indian Boyhood (1902) or The Soul of the Indian (1911)
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1920) or O Pioneers! (1913)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) or The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)
Ernest Heminway’s The
Sun Also Rises (1926) or A Farewell
to Arms (1929) or For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Mourning Dove’s Cogewea the Half-Blood (1927)
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) or Passing (1929)
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) or Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937)
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) or Black Boy (1945)
Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1945)
Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)
Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953)
James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicles (1957)
Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
Natachee Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1969)
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1969)
Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The
Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) or The Revolt of the
Cockroach People (1973)
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976)
Leslie Silko’s Ceremony (1977)
Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1981)
Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984)
Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984)
Joyce Carol Oates’ You Must Remember This (1987)
Julia Alvarez’s How
the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1990) or In the Time of the
Butterflies (1994)
Papers must be thesis-driven and 4-6 pages typed (double-spaced) (pages numbered, 12 point font, and standard margins). Papers should include a summary of the novel, but they should not be book reports and/or long summaries of the novel. A close reading of the text where students pick a theme or issue to discuss using quotes and scene summaries (i.e. specific examples) from the text is the idea. Strong papers will be well-written (standard English and expository essay format), well-supported with specific examples, and may refer to outside research with proper credit to sources. A works cited page is required.
Themes, historical events/periods, and literary periods to be aware of: The Civil War, Reconstruction, Local Color/Colorists, Industrialization, Imperialism, Populism, Immigrant Fiction, Realism, Naturalism, Progressivism, Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, Literature between the Wars, Depression Fiction, Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, The Sixties, etc.
Schools of Literary Criticism: feminism, Marxism, structuralism, formalism, reader-response, deconstruction, cultural analysis, etc.
Good General Literary Reference Sources to Begin with: a dictionary of American Literature; Contemporary Authors; Current Biography; Black Literary Critics, American Writers, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Dictionary of American Biography, etc.
Good General Historical Reference Sources to Begin with: a dictionary of American history; American Decades; etc.
Students are expect to give credit to sources for direct quotes, paraphrased or summarized material, and the ideas of others in standard bibliographic formats (MLA, APA, etc.).
Students will have a choice of a series of broad essay questions. The exam is designed to allow students to demonstrate what they know about American literature from the 1860s to the present. Since the course is largely thematically based, students may expect the exam questions that require them to demonstrate their knowledge of selected themes in American literature from the 1860s to the present. Specific examples from course texts must be used to support student answers. Plagiarism or cheating will result in automatic course failure.
Students must show mastery of the major texts and the literary and historical movements discussed in the course. They should support their statements by using specific examples from a variety of course texts. Expository essay format and standard English are expected.
Plagiarism (or
Cheating):
Plagiarism or cheating on any assignment will result in automatic course failure.
Please refer to the Student Code of Conduct for information on Plagiarism and Cheating in the Student Handbook. All behavior engaged in with reference to this course is expected to adhere to acceptable forms of college behavior whether through e-mail, asynchronous chat, papers, exams, or the traditional classroom setting. This includes Academic Dishonesty or Plagiarism. According to Community College of Philadelphia’s Cheating and Plagiarism Resolution (1997), “Students are expected to maintain the highest standards of integrity in all their academic work. It is further expected that any written assignment presented by students in fulfillment of course requirements will reflect their own work unless credit is properly given to others. Therefore, students must identify any part of an assignment which uses the words or materials of other people and give credit for the source. Failure to do so is a form of stealing known as plagiarism and is a very serious offense. Plagiarism is defined as the act of appropriating all or part of a literary composition of another person or language of another person and passing them off as one’s own (Black’s Law Dictionary). It may consist of quoting from a source without using quotation marks, transcribing or paraphrasing published material without attribution, or submitting work which has been reproduced or bought from another person. Anyone who assists another in such academic dishonesty is equally responsible.”
Electronic Cheating: “Respect for intellectual labor and creativity is vital to academic discourse and enterprise. This principle applies to works of all authors and publishers in all media. It encompasses respect for the right to acknowledgment, right to privacy, and right to determine the form, manner and terms of publication and distribution. Because electronic information is so volatile and easily reproduced, respect for the work and personal expression of others is especially critical in computer environments. Students, faculty, and staff who use the computer have the right to privacy and security of their computer programs and data. Computer uses should not tamper with files or information that belong to other users or to the operating system. Violations of authorial integrity, including plagiarism, invasion of privacy, unauthorized access, and trade secrets and copyright violations, may be grounds for sanctions against individuals who violate these understandings.”
Tentative Reading and
Assignment Schedule:
All students should complete the “Online Self-Assessment” listed through
the Timeline under Materials.
All students MUST read “How Not to Plagiarize” and “Plagiary and the
Art of Skillful Citation” listed through the Timeline under
Materials. All students must e-mail the instructor to confirm that
they have read these articles, understand what plagiarism is, and
agree not to plagiarize or cheat in the course.
Discussion: Introductions
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (1890)
Joel Chandler Harris, Selected Uncle Remus Tales:
Discussion and Criticism
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Walt Whitman on the Civil War (selected poems)
Discussion and Criticism
Week Four
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Quiz on Huckleberry Finn
Discussion and Criticism
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Quiz on The Awakening
Novel Selection for Student Reports
Discussion and Criticism
Selected Chapters/Essays by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
Discussion and Criticism
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
Walt Whitman Poem: “To a Locomotive in Winter”
Quiz on The Jungle
Discussion and Criticism
Claude McKay, Selected Poems
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems
Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
Zora Neal Hurston, “Sweat”
Discussion and Criticism
Selected Short Stories:
“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summaries of Novels for Student Reports and Paragraphs on Proposed
Analysis of Novels
Discussion and Criticism
Carl Sandburg, Selected Chicago Poems
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
e.e. cummings, Selected Poems
Robert Frost, Selected Poems
Sylvia Plath, Selected Poems
Anne Sexton, Selected Poems
Discussion and Criticism
Selected Short Stories
Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”
Drafts of Student Reports on Novels
Discussion and Criticism
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
Quiz on Song of Solomon
Discussion and Criticism
Student Reports
Discussion and Criticism
Student Reports
Discussion and Criticism
Final Exam
(All students must pass the final exam to pass the course.)
Course survey
Local Resources:
(Please note: Hours listed are subject to change. It is recommended that students call any institution and confirm hours and access policies before going to that institution.)
Central Learning Lab: (215) 751-8480
CCP’s Education Resources Center (Library): (215) 751-8383; Monday-Friday, 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM; Saturday, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM; (On-line Public Access Catalog).
Free Library of Philadelphia: General Information (215) 686-5322; 1901 Vine Street in Philadelphia; visitor access M,T,W 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, Th and F 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Saturday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and Sundays (during the school year) 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM; (on-line book catalog: www.library.phila.gov).
Van Pelt Library of
the University of Pennsylvania:
Reference (215) 898-7555; 34th and Walnut Streets in
Philadelphia; visitor access M-Th 8:30 AM to 10:00 PM and Friday 8:30 AM to
8:00 PM with photo identification; Penn access only to electronic journals (do
your locating of article titles, journals, call numbers, etc. before you to
through CCP!). (
Hagerty Library of Drexel University: Reference (215) 895-2755; 33rd and Market Streets in Philadelphia; visitor access M-F 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM with photo identification.
Paley Library of Temple University: Reference (215) 204-8212; 13th and Burk’s Mall (one block north of Montgomery Avenue) in Philadelphia; visitor access M-Th 8:00 AM to Midnight, Friday 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Saturday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and Sunday Noon to Midnight with photo identification.
Connelly Library of LaSalle University: (215) 951-1287; 20th and Olney Avenue in Philadelphia; visitor access M-Th 8:00 AM to Midnight (BUT visitors must arrive before 4:00 PM!), Friday 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, Saturday 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and Sunday Noon to 4:00 PM.
Francis A. Drexel Library of St. Joseph’s University: Circulation (610) 660-1901; 5600 City Line Avenue in Philadelphia; visitor access M-Th 8:30 AM to Midnight, Friday 8:30 AM to 9:00 PM, Saturday 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and Sunday Noon to Midnight.
Guttman Library of Philadelphia University (formerly Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science): Circulation (215) 951-2840; 4201 Henry Avenue in Philadelphia; Philadelphia University is a member of the TCLC (Tri-County Library Consortium) as is CCP—this means that CCP students can borrow Philadelphia University books—IF—they have a CCP librarian fill out a form stating they are a CCP student in “good standing” and take the form to the Philadelphia University librarian, Dee Link (usually available to complete this form during the week—it is suggested that you call in advance); visitor access M-Th 8:30 AM to 11:00 PM, Friday 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM, Saturday Noon to 5:00 PM, and Sunday 1:00 PM to 11:00 PM.
Please Note:
This syllabus is subject to change.
Instructors some times need to contact students by phone. If for any reason, you do not
wish to be contacted by phone by the instructor, please inform the instructor of your wishes in the first week of class.
If you have a disability of any kind which could interfere or affect your performance in
the course, you should both register with the Center on Disability ((215) 751-
8050) and inform your instructor immediately.
Please make copies of all formal assignments handed in over the course of the semester.
The instructor reserves the right to reproduce anonymously sections or entire student
assignments for educational or professional use.
The standard formula for college preparation and homework is three hours of outside
preparation and homework for every credit hour inside the classroom. On-line contact hours for this course should be the same as a regular 3 credit course, three hours. Therefore, students should expect to spend at least 9 hours on course preparation and homework very week, perhaps more since this is an upper level course.
Late assignments will be accepted only at the discretion of the instructor.