ENGL 251
Dr Ken Hirschkop
Hagey Hall 245
Tel: 888-4567 x32095. Email: khirschk@uwaterloo.ca
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 1:30-2:15; Thursdays, 4:00-4:30, or by appointment
COURSE GOALS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES
The course aims to
- introduce you to the basic terms and techniques necessary for literary and rhetorical analysis
- show you how to read literary texts in a way that is both close (detailed) and theoretically sophisticated
- teach you to think about the methodology of literary analysis
- introduce you to a variety of theoretical approaches to literary analysis
- prepare you for advanced work in English literature.
By the end of the course you should
- be comfortable in using variety of terms and techniques when analysing prose and poetic works
- understand the aims and methods of literary-critical practice
- be able to compose a substantial written analysis of a selected work
- understand how to support a critical analysis with evidence drawn from a text.
READINGS AND CLASSES
In this day and age it is possible to access an extraordinarily wide range of literary texts on-line. We therefore have no course reader. All texts, critical and literary are available either online or as pdfs on the course LEARN website. You are welcome to use any reliable on-line source for these, but make sure – in the case of older works – the text is rendered in modern spelling.
There are three on-line critical sources we will use occasionally: 1) the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, available in the “Reference Works” section of Literature Online, which you access through the English Subject Research Guide in the UW library website; 2) Silva Rhetoricae [The Forest of Rhetoric], which you can find online 3) the University of Cambridge Virtual Classroom Glossary of Literary Terms, available at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/classroom/terms.htm
There won’t be a lot of reading, so you’re expected to do it carefully. You should make sure you read any critical work carefully and come prepared to ask about whatever you don’t understand. I’ll provide time at the beginning of each class for questions about the critical reading. When reading the literary works we are looking at critically, read them carefully and slowly and make sure you come to class with questions and observations.
ASSESSMENT
Midterm examination: 15%
Attendance and participation: 10%
Analysis assignments: 20%
Reading diary: 25%
Final essay: 30%
Midterm examination:
Form: In-class exam. You will be asked to define some critical terms, to scan a poetic text and to do a brief analysis of a text.
Submission date and method: Thursday, February 13th.
Grading criteria: Knowledge of the critical terms; intelligence with which you use the critical tools we have studied; the quality, persuasiveness and sophistication of the analysis; lucidity and organisation.
Attendance and class participation:
Form: You are expected to attend every class and to participate in class discussion.
Submission methods and dates: Attendance will be taken for every class and class participation noted. If you have an excuse for missing a class, please email me or leave me a note. You can miss classes for medical reasons and for unforeseeable personal difficulties. Every excused absence must be documented.
Grading criteria: If you attend every class but say nothing, you will receive a 70 for this part of the assessment. If you have more than three unexcused absences, you lose 20% from this part of your grade; more than six classes, 40%, and so on (which means 2% off your cumulative mark for the course for 4 absences, 4% for 7 absences, and so on). Class participation is graded on how well and how often you contribute. Contributions to discussion should demonstrate that you have read the material carefully and will be assessed on their relevance, interest, and originality.
Analyses
Form: Four times over the term you will have to submit a short analysis of a text, using the critical methods we have studied. The two first analyses will involve marking up a text; each of the last two will be 500-1000 words long.
Submission method: Analyses 1 and 2 to be submitted in class, analyses 3 and 4 are to be submitted to the relevant dropbox on the course website. Due dates: January 30th , February 6th, March 10th, and March 17th.
Grading criteria: Level of detailed attention to the text; accuracy of the analysis; demonstration of knowledge of critical tools; intelligence and interest of the analysis. Analyses that are late will be penalised 50% for the first three days and 75% thereafter.
Reading diary:
Form: I want you to read poetry and prose outside of class critically. That is, I want you to use the critical method we explore in class on texts you choose for yourself. Your reading diary should be a commentary on a total of 6 poems and 3 short stories (or a novel) you read on your own time during the term. You should provide the author and title of the poem or story (and a weblink when available) and a 400-500-word commentary on each item. The commentary should reflect the work we do in class, that is, you should be applying the critical techniques we explore in class to the texts.
You will choose your own reading, but do not use more than one text for each author. You should aim to choose a variety of texts and to choose texts that are reasonably challenging.
Submission method and dates: You’ll be expected to submit installments of the diary (print copy) on February 25th and March 24th. These are not graded, but I will look at them an make comments and suggestions. The final version is to be submitted electronically on April 6th.
Grading criteria: Completeness of work; thoughtfulness of the commentary; skill with which you apply the work from class to the discussion of your chosen works; selection of works (if you choose more challenging works, this will be rewarded).
Final essay:
Form: An analysis of a single work using the critical terms and methods we have studied on the course. You will be given a choice of texts on which to write. The final essay should be 2500-3000 words long (excluding bibliography and/or notes). If you want preliminary feedback, please send me a list of points you wish to make (in bullet point form) at least one week before the final deadline.
Submission method and dates: The essay is to submitted electronically, in the appropriate dropbox on the website by 5 pm on April 15th. The choice of works will be given to you in the penultimate week of the term.
Grading criteria: Intelligence with which you use the tools we’ve studied; the sophistication, inventiveness and persuasiveness of the analysis; the lucidity and elegance of the writing; the organization and presentation of the argument. I won’t expect any secondary reading, but you are welcome to support your analysis with some historical background if that’s appropriate. Final essays than are late will be penalised 3% for the first day and 1% each additional day.
LECTURES AND POWER-POINTS
The lectures will almost always involve PowerPoint presentations, which will be put on the course website after the lectures.
WEEK-BY-WEEK
Week 1: January 7, 9
Tuesday: Introduction
William Wordsworth, ‘Nuns fret not’
Thursday: Literariness (what makes a text a ‘literary’ text)
Reading: Viktor Shklovskii, ‘The Resurrection of the Word’
Preparation/literary texts: Examine Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’, and pick out 5 interesting features.
Week 2: January 14, 16:
Tuesday: Poetic syntax
Literary texts: Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’; William Wordsworth, ‘Nuns fret not’
Preparation: Rewrite Wordsworth’s poem in ordinary English.
Thursday: Syntax and rhetoric
Reading: Entries in Silva Rhetoricae on anadiplosis, anaphora, anastrophe, asyndeton, chiasmus, periphrasis, polysyndeton, isocolon, prosopopoeia, zeugma.
Literary texts: Shakespeare, Sonnet 64
Week 3: January 21, 23:
Tuesday: Tropes, figures of speech
Reading: Entries in Silva Rhetoricae: “metaphor”, “simile”, “metonymy”, “synecdoche”, “catachresis”, “conceit”. See the first four also in the Cambridge Glossary.
Literary texts: Shakespeare, Sonnet 64; Emily Dickinson. ‘I felt a funeral in my Brain’; John Donne, ‘Death Be Not Proud’
Thursday: Scansion
Reading: Entries on “assonance”, “rhyme”, “sonnet”, “stanza”, and “metre”, “accentual-syllabic verse”, “foot” in the Cambridge Virtual Classroom Glossary of terms (see above for location); Paul Fussell, ‘The Technique of Scansion’, in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (NY: Random House, 1965).
Literary texts: Donne, ‘Death be not proud’; Marianne Moore, ‘The Fish’
Week 4: January 28, 30
Tuesday: Rhyme
Reading: Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Rhyme and pararhyme’, in Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (London: Routledge, 1996), 36-52.
Literary texts: Moore, ‘The Fish’; John Milton, ‘On his blindness’; Shakespeare, Sonnet 64.
Thursday: Tone, stance, intertextuality.
Analysis 1 due
Literary texts: P. B. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’; Richard Wilbur, ‘Death of a Toad’; Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’; William Carlos Williams, ‘By the road to the contagious hospital’
Week 5: February 4, 6
Tuesday: Politics and metaphor
Literary texts: Wordsworth, ‘Nuns fret not’; Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, ‘England in 1819’; Paul Muldoon, ‘Meeting the British’.
Thursday: Deconstructive reading
Analysis 2 due
Reading: J. Hillis Miller, ‘How Deconstruction Works’, New York Times 9 February 1986.
Literary texts: John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4, lines 287-311.
Week 6: February 11, 13
Tuesday: How to write a critical analysis
Literary texts: Louis MacNeice, ‘Sunday morning’; Richard Wilbur, ‘Death of a Toad’
Thursday: Midterm examination
Week 7: February 25, 27
First installment of reading diary due in class
Tuesday: Plot and story
Reading: Entries for “plot”, “fabula/sujet”, and “narrative” in the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism
Thursday: Plot functions
Reading (critical): Selections from Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, in The Semiotic Challenge (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 103-17.
Literary text: “Snow White”
Week 8: March 3, 5
Tuesday: Plot functions and sequences
Literary texts: ‘Snow White’; Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band”.
Thursday: Sequence and order
Reading: Seymour Chatman, ‘Order, Duration and Frequency’, in Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 63-84.
Literary texts: Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’
Week 9: March 10, 12
Tuesday: Focalization, point of view, and author functions
Analysis 3 due.
Reading: Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘Text: focalization’, in Narrative Discourse: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1989)
Literary texts: Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band”; James Joyce, ‘Eveline’.
Thursday: Style
Reading: Entries on irony and free indirect discourse in the Columbia Dictionary; excerpts from Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Literary text: James Joyce, ‘Eveline’.
Week 10: March 17, 19
Analysis 4 due
Tuesday: Race
Reading: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Writing, “Race”, and the Difference It Makes’, in Loose Canons: Essays in the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 43-69. E-book
Literary text: Walter Mosley, ‘Smoke’ (in Six Easy Pieces New York: Atra Books, 2003). Pdf on LEARN
Thursday: Gender
Reading: TBA
Literary text: Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Mrs Aesop’, ‘Mrs Beast’, in New Selected Poems (London: Picador, 2004). Pdf on LEARN
Week 11: March 24, 26
Hand in second installment of Reading Diary
Tuesday: Postmodernism, avant-gardism, generally strange texts
Reading: Hans Bertens, ‘Postmodernism’, in Literary Theory: the Basics (London: Routledge 2002), 138-44. E-book
Literary texts: Donald Barthelme, ‘Rebecca’, The New Yorker, 24 February 1975.
Thursday: Genre fiction: sci-fi and fantasy
Reading: Scott McCracken, ‘Science Fiction’ (Chapter 4), in Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 102-27. Pdf on LEARN
Literary text: William Gibson, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’
Week 12: March 31, April 2
Tuesday: Postcolonial considerations
Reading: Ania Loomba, Colonialism – Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 104-23, 173-83. Pdf on LEARN
Literary text: ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’
Thursday: Essay writing workshop
Where to find the texts:
Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”: many versions on-line: try the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia
Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brian”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45706/i-felt-a-funeral-in-my-brain-340
Donne, “Death, be not proud”, “Woman’s Constancy”: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sonnet10.php ; http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/constancy.php
Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/supermarket-california
Joyce, “Eveline”: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/j8d/chapter4.html
Grimm’s Fairy Tales - “Snow White”: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html
“Rumpelstiltsken”: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm055.html
MacNeice, “Sunday Morning”: http://www.artofeurope.com/macneice/mac4.htm
Milton, “On his Blindness”: http://www.bartleby.com/106/71.html
Paradise Lost, Book 4: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_4/text.shtml
Moore, “The Fish”: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/fish-1
“Poetry”: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/poetry
Shakespeare Sonnets: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com
Shelley, “England in 1819”: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1885.html
---, “Ozymandias”: http://www.bartleby.com/106/246.html
Wilbur, ‘Death of a Toad’: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=24922
Williams, “By the road to the contagious hospital”: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/spring-and-all-road-contagious-hospital
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/
Wordsworth, ‘Nuns fret not’:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6765449M/The_sonnets_of_William_Wordsworth
POLICIES AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Cross-listed course (requirement for all Arts courses)
Please note that a cross-listed course will count in all respective averages no matter under which rubric it has been taken. For example, a PHIL/PSCI cross-list will count in a Philosophy major average, even if the course was taken under the Political Science rubric.
Academic Integrity
In order to maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility. Check the Office of Academic Integrity website for more information.
Discipline
A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity to avoid committing an academic offence, and to take responsibility for his/her actions. [Check the Office of Academic Integrity for more information.] A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offence, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offences (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about “rules” for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course instructor, academic advisor, or the undergraduate associate dean. For information on categories of offences and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71, Student Discipline. For typical penalties, check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties.
Grievance
A student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of his/her university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating a grievance. Read Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4. When in doubt, please be certain to contact the department’s administrative assistant who will provide further assistance.
Appeals
A decision made or penalty imposed under Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances (other than a petition) or Policy 71, Student Discipline may be appealed if there is a ground. A student who believes he/she has a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72, Student Appeals.
Accommodation for Students with Disabilities
Note for students with disabilities: AccessAbility Services, located in Needles Hall, Room 1401, collaborates with all academic departments to arrange appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising the academic integrity of the curriculum. If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your disability, please register AccessAbility Services with at the beginning of each academic term.
Mental Health Support
All of us need a support system. The faculty and staff in Arts encourage students to seek out mental health support if they are needed.
On Campus
- Counselling Services: counselling.services@uwaterloo.ca / 519-888-4567 ext. 32655
- MATES: one-to-one peer support program offered by Federation of Students (FEDS) and Counselling Services
- Health Services Emergency service: located across the creek form Student Life Centre
Off campus, 24/7
- Good2Talk: Free confidential help line for post-secondary students. Phone: 1-866-925-5454
- Grand River Hospital: Emergency care for mental health crisis. Phone: 519-749-4300 ext. 6880
- Here 24/7: Mental Health and Crisis Service Team. Phone: 1-844-437-3247
- OK2BME: set of support services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning teens in Waterloo. Phone: 519-884-0000 extension 213
Full details can be found online on the Faculty of Arts website
Download UWaterloo and regional mental health resources (PDF)
Download the WatSafe app to your phone to quickly access mental health support information
Territorial Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (also known as Neutral), Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometres on each side of the Grand River.
For more information about the purpose of territorial acknowledgements, please see the CAUT Guide to Acknowledging Traditional Territory (PDF).
Academic freedom at the University of Waterloo
Policy 33, Ethical Behaviour states, as one of its general principles (Section 1), “The University supports academic freedom for all members of the University community. Academic freedom carries with it the duty to use that freedom in a manner consistent with the scholarly obligation to base teaching and research on an honest and ethical quest for knowledge. In the context of this policy, 'academic freedom' refers to academic activities, including teaching and scholarship, as is articulated in the principles set out in the Memorandum of Agreement between the FAUW and the University of Waterloo, 1998 (Article 6). The academic environment which fosters free debate may from time to time include the presentation or discussion of unpopular opinions or controversial material. Such material shall be dealt with as openly, respectfully and sensitively as possible.” This definition is repeated in Policies 70 and 71, and in the Memorandum of Agreement, Section 6.