Return to main page

 

ENGLISH 2306, WORLD LITERATURE II

Fall 2006

9:25-10:40 TTh, Irby 316

12:15-1:30 TTh, State Hall

 

 

Dr. Mike Schaefer                                                                                                     Office phone: 450-5119

Office: Irby 408                                                                                                          Home phone: 329-0538

e-mail: schaefer@uca.edu

course website: http://faculty.uca.edu/~schaefer

 

Office Hours: 9:00-10:00, 11:00-12:00 MWF; 8:15-9:15, 11:00-12:00 TTh; and by appointment

 

TEXT:

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 1650 to the Present, second edition (three volumes—D, E, and F—sold together as “package 2”)  NOTE: This text is required for the course.  Students who routinely fail to bring the appropriate book to class will be dropped from the course with a WF.

 

READING SCHEDULE:

 

Aug. 24                  Introduction to course

 

Weeks 1-2:            Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, pp. 1418-60 (volume E)

 

Weeks 3-4:            Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, pp. 920-80 (volume E)

 

Weeks 5-6:            "The Enlightenment in Europe," pp. 295-301; Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man," pp. 489-92, 510-17 (volume D)

 

                MIDTERM EXAM DUE AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10

 

Weeks 7-9:            "Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America," pp. 651-58; William Wordsworth, "Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," pp. 789-95 (volume E)

 

Week 10:                “The Modern World: Self and Other in Global Context,” pp. 1579-99; Naguib Mahfouz,
 “Zaabalawi,” pp. 2527-38 (volume F)

 

Week 11:                Premchand, “The Road to Salvation,” pp. 1907-17 (volume F)

 

Weeks 12-13:        Zhang Ailing, “Love in a Fallen City,” pp. 2735-70 (volume F)

 

Week 14:                Tadeusz Borowski, “Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber,” pp. 2770-86 (volume F)

 

Week 15:                Inuit Songs, pp. 2036-44 (volume F)

 

Thurs., Dec.  14                FINAL EXAM—8:00-10:00 AM for 9:25 class, 2:00-4:00 PM for 12:15 class

 

ATTENDANCE:  Attendance--on time--is mandatory.  Absences will lower your class participation grade, as will recurrent late arrival.  If you miss four classes, you'll have one week after the last absence to see me with a believable excuse and a promise to sin no more; if you don't make this deadline, you'll be dropped from the course with a WF grade.  And if you miss a fifth class following our conference about the six absences, you'll likewise be dropped with a WF.  Important note: “Attendance” in this class is defined as being present mentally as well as physically.  If you spend the greater part of a class period sleeping, chatting with those around you, doing homework for another class, or in any other way failing to engage with the class discussion, you’ll be marked absent for that period.  All materials not essential to your participation in the class must remain in your backpack during class; this includes cell phones and other communication devices, books and notebooks for other classes, newspapers, etc.

 

EXAMS: Our midterm exam will cover the course material through October 5.  The final exam will have one section covering the course material from October 10 to the end of the semester and then a second section taking in the whole course, asking you to make connections between the various works and periods we've studied.  These exams will consist of essay questions, and both will be take-home in format.  I'll discuss these exams and their make-up in greater detail in class about a week before their dates.

 

JOURNALS: Each student must keep a journal of his or her thoughts on the assigned readings, with one entry devoted to each reading before we discuss it in class (that is, one “before” entry on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one “before” entry on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass—not entries for every day of class).  Ordinarily, I’ll pose a question for you to respond to in each entry, with that response consisting of at least three paragraphs, but beyond that requirement you're also free to write as much more as you wish about whatever intrigues, inspires, confuses, or upsets you about the work in question, and about this work's relationship to other works you've read and its relevance to human life in general and your own life in particular.  There are two goals to this assignment, both of which you're probably already aware of.  First, the act of writing stimulates thinking: even if at the outset you feel you have nothing at all to say about a given work, you'll find that putting fingers to keyboard will bring ideas forth; if you do have some ideas to start with you'll find that writing them down will cause you to extend and refine them.  Second, as is obvious from what's just been said, these entries will prove a rich source of class discussion and exam topics.

You'll submit these journals by e-mail to the address listed for me at the top of the syllabus.  Each entry must reach me no later than 24 hours prior to the first class meeting during which we'll discuss that work.  I won’t accept a journal entry after the due date, but you are allowed to miss one journal with no penalty.  I'll grade you for each submission: if your entry shows an honest, thoughtful effort to come to grips with the work, you'll get somewhere from 8 to 10; if it shows a solid but not all that insightful effort, you'll get somewhere from 4 to 7; if you don't do the entry, or if you blow it off with superficial comments, you'll get somewhere from 0 to 3.  At the end of the semester, I’ll figure your final journal grade by taking the ratio of the total points you’ve earned to the total points possible.  If we do nine journals, for instance, then the total possible score will be 90; if you earn 80, then your percentage is 89, which means a B for your final journal grade.  (My grading scale is 91-100=A, 80-90=B, 70-79=C, 60-69=D, below 60=F.)

 

GRADES:  Your final grade will come from the following percentages:

Attendance/Participation:      25%

Midterm Exam:                        20%

Final:                                         30%

Journal:                                     25%

 

ACADEMIC HONESTY:  Knowingly presenting someone else’s work as your own, whether in an exam, journal, or any other format, constitutes plagiarism.  Plagiarism carries serious penalties, from failure on a particular assignment to failure for the course.  If you ever have any questions on this subject, please feel free to ask me about them, without fear of embarrassment.

 

UNIVERSITY POLICIES: If you have questions about the university’s academic policies, guidelines regarding sexual harassment, or any other matters, please consult the relevant sections of the UCA Student Handbook.  UCA adheres to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  If you need an accommodation under this act due to a disability, contact the UCA Office of Disability Services at 450-3135.


 

 

Key Ideas for Discussion of Course Focus

 

My heart rouses
                thinking to bring you news
                             of something

That concerns you
                and concerns many men.  Look at
                                what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in
                despised poems.

                                It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                yet men die miserably every day
                                                for lack
of what is found there.

                                --William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

 

Iris Murdoch—“Education doesn’t make you happy, nor does freedom.  We don’t become happy just because we’re free, if we are, or because we’ve been educated, if we have, but because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy.  It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind.”

 

littera


X. J. Kennedy--literature is "a kind of art, usually written, which offers pleasure and illumination."


Robert Frost--literature/poetry provides "a clarification of life--not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but . . . a momentary stay against confusion." 

Henry Adams--literature seeks to "run order through chaos."

Chinua Achebe--"Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality . . . enabling us to encounter, in the safe, manageable dimensions of make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life; and at the same time providing through the self-discovery which it imparts a veritable weapon for coping with these threats whether they are found within our problematic and incoherent selves or in the world around us."

 

Fables, parables, myths

 

Robert Altman--literature should first of all entertain people but should also "give them pause to think, give them reason to feel important, to be important, [because they're being asked] to put their own ideas together with existing ideas." 

 

Anton Chekhov--literature presents problems, not solutions

 

William Trevor--literature is a kind of jigsaw puzzle to which the writer has some of the pieces and the reader has the others.

 

Edward Albee—“Some people ask me, ‘Why don’t you write plays that I know exactly what the specific answer to the question you’re raising is by the end of the play?’  And I always have to answer these people by saying that I find I can ask an awful lot more interesting questions if I don’t have to supply the answers to them.  If I limited the content of my plays to what I could give specific answers to, I think I’d write very dull plays.

 

Barbara Kingsolver--"Fiction creates empathy, and empathy is the antidote to meanness of spirit.  Nonfiction can tell you about the plight of working people, of single mothers, but in a novel you become the character; touch what she touches, struggle with her self-doubt.  Then, when you go back to your own life, something inside you has maybe shifted a little."

 

Vladimir Nabokov—“In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on detail that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention.  Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all ‘general ideas’ (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another.”