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Spring 2000 | |
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English 372 |
Rice 114 |
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King 323 |
Office Hrs: TWTH 3-4:30 |
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E-mail: William.Patrick.Day@oberlin.edu |
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Week 1 Feb. 7 |
"The Dehumanization of Art" by Ortega Y Gasset "Tradition
and the Invidual Talent" T. S. Eliot
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Week 2 Feb. 14 |
"The Object of Study" & "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign" by Sausurre in Modern Criticism & Theory (MCT) edited by David Lodge, "Polemical Introduction" by Northrop Frye, "Literary Genres" by Tzvetan Todorov (OR), "Structuralism & Literature by Gerard Genette (MCT), "Against Interpretation " by Susan Sontag (OR)
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Week 3 Feb. 21 |
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (MCT) & from Of Grammatology (OR) by Jacques Derrida, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious" by Jacques Lacan, "What is an Author?" by Michel Foucault (MCT), "The New Sentence" by Ron Silliman (OR) |
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Week 4 Feb. 28 |
Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson
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Week 5 Mar. 6 |
"The Death of the Author" (MCT) & The Pleasures of the Text (OR) by Roland Barthes, "Sorties" (MCT), & "The Laugh of the Medusa" (OR) by Helene Cixcous |
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Week 6 Mar. 13 |
"Interpreting the Variorum" by Stanley Fish, (MCT), "Race, Gender & The Politics of Reading" by Michael Awkward |
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Week 7 Mar. 20 |
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood |
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Week 8 Mar. 27 |
Spring Break |
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Week 9 April 3 |
"Geneology, Nietszche, History" by Michel Foucault, "Against Tradition:Towards a Particularized Theory of Literary History" by Marilyn Butler (OR), "Orientalism" by Edward Said, (MCT), "Literature, History, and Politics," by Catherine Belsy, (MCT) |
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Week 10 April 10 |
Salem's Lot by Stephen King |
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Week 11 April 17 |
"The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," by Frederic Jameson, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" by Donna Harraway, "Simulation and Simulacrum" by Jean Baudrillard, |
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Week 12 April 24 |
Without You I'm Nothing produced by Jonathan Krane, dir. John Boskovich, written by Sandra Bernhardt & John Boskovich (OR) |
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Week 13 May 1 |
The Man in The High Castle by Philip K. Dick |
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Week 14 May 8 |
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1) I assume valuable things happen in class sessions. I take attendance; I expect you to keep track of your attendance too, because "I didn't realize I'd missed that many classes" is not an excuse. You get two unexcused absences, absences other than illness or family emergency . "I had a paper due for another course, my fish was depressed, I don't do Tuesdays, I'm in a production of The Sunshine Boys and we had rehearsal" are not excusable absences.
We only have 26 classes, less than 39 hours over the semester. More than 2 unexcused absences and your grade goes down; after 6 unexcused absences, you've no-entry-ed the course.
2) You have to participate in the class. Participation doesn't mean talking a lot, it means being engaged in the interchange among the members of the class: asking good questions, responding to other people's questions, thinking before you talk. Talking in groups such as a class is a skill, every bit as much as writing is. Its a skill worth having, because in fact a lot of work in all institutions gets done in that way. Being able to talk effectively in a group is, as they say, an important "self-empowerment." I know that a number of people have trouble speaking up in class. You should feel as free to consult me on strategies and methods for doing that as you'd to consult me about your writing.
3) You have to form, with other members of the course, a discussion group that meets outside of class once a week. Some groups prefer to meet before discussions and/or lectures, other prefer to meet after. That's up to each group to decide. Groups should be 4 or 5 people maximum.
Academic or emergency incompletes are yours to take if you want, as long as you are in good standing in the course. You don't need to tell me the story, unless you want to; I trust that you wouldn't take an incomplete without a good reason. "Good Standing" means that you have completed all the work assigned for the first module and at least some of the work for the second .
The class will be divided into 5 groups. Each week one group will write a short essay due by 6 p.m. on Monday, another will write a short essay due by 6 pm on Wednesday. Essays should be about 600 words..
A 3000+ word essay on a topic of your choice. The essay will be developed over the course of the semester in five stages. I am open to proposals for different kinds of final projects, though they will require a proposal, a progress report, and a final report/reflection on the project. The assignments are on line on this course's web pages.
#1. A 750--900 word essay explaining why you're taking the course and what specifically you want to get out of it.
#2. Midterm essay, 1000 words. This essay will take the form of a reflection on what we have done in the first half of the semester. You may revise or reflect back upon your first essay, or you can write something totally new. Due the week before Spring Break.
#3 Proposal. A brief 500 word explanation of what you think you want to write about and why you think this is important. due 4/20.
#4 First Draft. Due 5/5. I'll read and comment on this draft. It should be as complete as possible, but I don't expect a "finished" product.
#5 Final Draft. Due at the end of Reading Period.
The comments on your writing will be, as one former student put it, "ambiguous." I don't do much "this is good, that's bad" commenting. The comments I make will be directed to making you think about what you're writing about, raising issues you may want to consider in revising, or writing about in the next prep essay. For specific advice on how to revise, what to do with a particular argument, etc., we should set up a conference.
You won't receive any grades over the course of the semester. This isn't because the grade is unimportant (if it was unimportant we wouldn't give it, would we?) but because the work in the course is part of a process, rather than a sequence of discrete units. If I am trying to encourage you to use your writing to be experimental and speculative, leading to your final essay, it makes little sense to grade it along the way. But if you want a sense of how you're doing, you should feel free to come and speak to me about your work. I will be able to tell you if you are making what I see as reasonable progress, what things you may want to work on, what things you seem to be doing best. I won't be able to be extremely precise about a grade equivelent, however. On a rough scale, though, I would say that if you are doing intelligent analysis of the works we consider and are able to state your own views clearly, that is C- to C+ work. If you are able to interpret the material we are working with, discuss not only what is "said" but what its significance might be, you would be in the B- to B range. If in addition you can demonstrate a capacity for self-reflective critical work (thinking about your own way of thinking and what it means to think as you do) you would be in the B+ to A range. So these are the kinds of mental activity you will be doing in the course: analysis & response, interpretation, and self-reflection.
It's useful for people in the course to get an idea of why other folks are here. It's also useful for you to clarify for yourself why you're taking a particular course and what your expectations are. It's also important for this course to get used to the idea of writing as public communication rather than either private reflection or an address exclusively to the instructor.
In this essay of about 750-900 words (around 3 pages in hard copy) try to explain what you think "theory" is about and why you want to spend a semester studying it. You may want to think about how you imagine this course fitting into the other courses you've taken here. This account will by necessity be intimate but need not be personal; that is, rather than an autobiographical narrative, you're communciating the ideas you've arrived at on this subject more than the route by which you got there.