ENGL 383-13 HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN ENGLISH, PART III

Ms. Jolie Sheffer

Fall 2005

TR 4:00-4:50 pm Office Hours: MW 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Bryan Hall 328 Bryan Hall 214

Required Texts

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Donald Barthelme, Snow White
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Policies and Expectations

· Participation: This is a discussion-based class and you should come to each session thoroughly prepared to contribute actively to discussion. In addition to reading and completing your assignments on time, you are required to participate daily with enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and intelligence.

· Absences: You are permitted two absences throughout the course of the semester. For each additional day missed, your final grade will be marked down one-third of a grade.

• Essays: These are due at the beginning of class. For every day late, your grade will be reduced by 1/3 of a grade. There will be no revisions. All papers should be typed, double-spaced, in 12-point Times font, with one-inch margins, pledged. Please include a cover sheet with your name and course information, and a title for your paper.
• Short assignments: You will be required to submit detailed response papers (2-3 paragraphs) over e-mail. The first is due anytime before the mid-term, and three (3) more are required before the end of the course. These responses should focus provide a close, detailed reading of a passage or theme.
• Weekly Quizzes: Each week there will be a quiz. These quizzes are designed to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings.
• Office Hours: I am happy to discuss papers, readings, and other issues in the course during office hours. This is your opportunity to receive one-on-one attention and feedback from me. If your schedule conflicts with my office hours, please contact me so that we can arrange an alternative appointment.
• Plagiarism & Cheating: Plagiarism will not be tolerated under any circumstances. Cheating of any kind (including taking extra times on exams) will not be tolerated. Please review the honor code, the university’s policy on plagiarism, and proper citation format (MLA style).

Grading:

1^st paper (4 pp.) = 10% Due: September 27

2^st paper (5 pp.) = 15% Due: November 1

3^th paper (6 pp.) = 15% Due: December 1

Mid-term examination = 15%

Final examination = 25%

Weekly quizzes = 10%

Short assignments and class participation = 10%

Course E-mail List

Everyone in the course has been subscribed to an e-mail list. The address is:

ENGL383-13@toolkit.virginia.edu

You will be required to respond to this email list for some assignments. In addition, you are encouraged to react informally to readings even when it’s not your turn to put in a response. Be sure to check your e-mail regularly for messages related to readings and assignments.

Contact Information:

In addition to office hours, you can reach me via email at sheffer@virginia.edu or telephone at 249-1006 (between 9 am and 9 pm).

Note on Reading Poems

Assignments for Yeats, Bishop, and Walcott average 40-45 poems each, or about 13-15 poems for each lecture and section devoted to a particular poet. Because poems take less time to run your eyes over than novels do, it is easy to read them quickly and put them aside, but it is not adequate to do so. Read each poem slowly and carefully at least twice, perhaps one time aloud. For each poem, look up unfamiliar words and phrases in a dictionary (these are good material for quizzes) and jot down some notes about its form. Does it rhyme? If so, in what pattern? Is it in meter? If so, can you identify the meter? Is it in short lines or long ones? Stanzas or verse paragraphs or an unbroken column? What do these features seem to mean?