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.”