Wells College
Fall 2007
1:45 TUESDAYS; 1:30 WEDNESDAYS
ENG 104--Introduction to
Literature: Form and Meaning
Instructor: Professor Catherine Burroughs
Teaching Assistant: Mark Broderick
315-364-3247 (o); 315-364-7871 (h); cb64@cornell.edu
Office hours: Wednesdays: 12:45-1:30; Thursdays 12:30-1:30 and by appointment
Course Description:
This course studies how form creates meaning and how meaning engenders form. Our texts will be drawn from British and American writers' experiments in three major genres of literature--drama, poetry, and "the novel." Developing modes and strategies for effective analyses and explications of literature will be our primary goal.
Course Texts:
M.H. Abrams, ed. A Glossary of Literary Terms (most recent edition). (GLT)
Samuel Beckett. Happy Days.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night.
Suzan-Lori Parks. The America Play.
John Keats. Complete Poems.
Course Approach:
The syllabus will be revised periodically to reflect the evolution of the dynamic and performance of the individuals in the class. Much of our class time will be spent in "workshop mode"--that is, we will practice "close reading" in collaborative and autonomous exercises both in and out of class. Specific passages to "close read" in preparation for class discussion will be assigned, and students will be held accountable for these passages through oral exchange, quizzes, small group exercises.
Course Requirements:
1. 30% of your grade will be based on attendance/participation, which includes:
--attending class and scheduled conferences;
--informal writing;
--"work ethic";
--enactment of Wells College's honor code;
--completing all in-class exercises, overnight assignments, and any other assignments;
--participating in class through: raising critical questions for discussion; offering comments about your reading; listening attentively to others; thoroughly editing your classmates' papers;
2. 45% of your grade will be based on the performance on weekly quizzes, midterm, and final exams.
3. 25% of your grade will be given in response to your formal writing.
Class Policies:
Attendance/Participation:
1. As you would in an employment situation, please notify me in advance of missing a class.
2. n.b.: If you miss two classes, I will ask you to withdraw
from the course.
3. No late assignments accepted. (The exceptions are documented medical or family emergency).
PLAGIARISM POLICY:
Plagiarizing is the most serious academic violation that one can commit.
Representing another person's work as one's own and/or failing to attribute sources properly can result in dismissal from this course, a recorded F, and/or expulsion from the university.
Course Schedule:
(PLEASE BRING TO CLASS EACH DAY A Glossary of Literary Terms)
Tuesday 8/28 and Wednesday 8/29: Introduction to the Course
UNIT ONE: READING
DRAMA
What do you mean, he
says, God help you? (stops filing, raises head, gazes front.) And you, she says, what's the idea of
you, she says, what are you meant to mean? (Winnie in Beckett's Happy
Days, I, p. 43)
Tuesday 9/4 and
Wednesday 9/5:
Quiz
Act I of Beckett's Happy Days
Close-reading exercise due (see below)
GLT: "Literature of the Absurd" (p. 1-2); "Drama" (pp. 69-70); "Dramatic Monologue" (pp. 70-71); "Soliloquy" (p. 299)
Tuesday 9/11 and
Wednesday 9/12:
Quiz
Act II of Beckett's Happy Days
Close-reading exercise (see below)
GLT: "New Criticism" (pp. 188-90)
Tuesday 9/18 and
Wednesday 9/19:
Quiz
Re-read Beckett's Happy Days
Close-reading exercise (see below)
GLT: "New Historicism" (pp. 190-197)
Tuesday 9/25 or
Wednesday 9/26:
Quiz
Review of "New Historicism"/"New Criticism"
Workshop: Paper # 1: Bring all previous exercises to class
Sign up for Formal Paper (due between Nov. 1-12)
UNIT TWO: READING
POETRY:
Tuesday 10/2 or Wednesday 10/3:
Quiz
Xerox: "Versification"
John Keats’ Poems and Letters (TBA)
INFORMAL WRITING EXERCISE due: (Preparation for your formal
paper, due between November 1-12).
After reading through the Keats selections,
1. create an extensive list of observations that you have made about Keats’ "formal choices." Number these observations. Use your critical vocabulary from the "Versification" essay;
2. write a paragraph that clearly and precisely describes "John Keats’ style" to someone who has not read her work.
Tuesday 10/9 or Wednesday 10/10: No class--fall break
Tuesday 10/17 or
Wednesday 10/18:
Quiz
John Keats (TBA)
Informal writing assignment due (TBA)
Fill out mid-Term evaluation in class:
Today, please spend your time reflecting on your own work in this course, as well as on ENG 104.
1. Review the concepts undergirding ENG 104 (see below), and state which ones you are still having difficulty with--either in understanding or in doing them, or both.
2. Reflect on your own work in this class. Which exercises did you find most helpful to you? Which did you do best at? Which gave you difficulty?
3. What areas do you want to work on as this class progresses? What approaches would be most helpful for you to progress? What are your specific goals in this class at this point?
Tuesday 10/23 or Wednesday 10/24: Midterm Exam
Tuesday 10/30 or
Wednesday 10/31:
John Keats TBA
UNIT THREE: READING NOVELS: (schedule TBA)
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
F.V. Bogel's "Understanding Prose"
In this unit, make
sure that what you hand in is an excellent demonstration of what you've learned
as a critical reader. You will do this same kind of exercise on the final exam.
1. Choose one section
(a fairly lengthy paragraph) from Tender is the Night.
2. Please reproduce
it (double- or triple-space) so that you can make extensive marks on the
section. (Use Bogel's categories of prose analysis to
guide your marking). Please hand in this reproduction.
3. After you have
marked the passage at length, start listing your many observations about
Fitzgerald's formal choices, which are the elements of his style. Make an
extensive list.
4. What conclusions do you draw about the meaning of Tender is the Night based on your pursuit of "textual meaning" above? Again, define "textual meaning" clearly and precisely here.
UNIT FOUR: RE-VISITING DRAMA: (schedule TBA)
Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play)
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INFORMAL WRITING
ASSIGNMENTS (for September):
Due 9/4or 9/5: Close-reading exercise
1) Please read Act I of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days.
2) n.b.: Resist the urge to make meaning or sense of the text. Instead, analyze the pages you've read for formal patterns. That is, focus less on content than on identifing patterns that you see in formatting (spatial arrangement of the text on the page); in punctuation; in word choice; in figures of speech; in other patterns of rhetoric. (Remember that a pattern requires repetition).
3) Type out a list of these patterns, with citations from the text. (Your list should be extensive).
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Due 9/11 or 9/12: Close-reading exercise
1. After reading Act II of Beckett's Happy Days, choose a word from the text that most interests/puzzles/amuses you, and look up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Xerox the entry.
2. Next, study the history of the word, and state how many definitions of the word are applicable to Happy Days. How does your understanding of the play change now that you have this new information? Explain in detail by citing the text.
3. Finally, write a substantial paragraph explaining "New Criticism" in detail--in your own words. Imagine an audience for your prose who is unfamiliar with the term.
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Due 9/18 or 9/19: Close-reading exercise
Re-read Read Beckett's Happy Days, and--in a typed short essay--describe as precisely as possible your interpretation of Willie's "expression" that so shocks Winnie (see top of page 63). You should imagine your essay as going to help an actor playing Willie on stage. In order to be convincing and persuasive, your description of the expression must be based on textual evidence (form and content) that you cite from earlier sections of the play.
Self-evaluation:
--Does the essay offer a precise interpretation of Willie's expression? (Can your reader "picture" this expression?)
--Does the essay frame the discussion of "expression" in relation to the problem of an actor performing the role? (the context)
--Does it cite textual evidence from previous parts of the play?
--Does it talk about the play's form as well as content?
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Notes for Close
Reading (Informal) Exercises:
1. Please type all exercises.
2. Proofread your work.
3. Provide examples--citing the text with quotation marks--for every observation you make.
Winnie's vocabulary draws on religious discourse. ("heavenly" [I, p. 2]; "altar" [II, p. 25]; "Jesus" [ ]; "God" [ ])
4. Focus on formal patterns--on how the text is constructed (as if a piece of architecture.
Instead of saying that Winnie is doing a lot of rummaging in her bag (this is indeed a pattern of gesture and action, and she repeats this pattern frequently), think about the specific way in which this rummaging action is communicated at the textual level.
The word "rummage" only appears in parentheses, as part of the play's stage directions, which are distinguished by italics from the text to be voiced by the actors.
Beckett's stage directions state that, when Winnie turns to her "capacious black bag" (I, p. 7), she "rummages in it" (I, p. 8). The word "rummage" appears in the stage directions (between pp. 7-15) exactly six times. Beckett does not use another word--that is he uses "rummage" only --to describe Winnie's interaction with the "capacious black bag" (I, p. 7).
5. Aim for precision in your observations and in your communication of these observations.
For instance, avoid saying that someone speaks or writes in a particular manner or way. Instead, describe this manner or way or style at the level of form.
Example:
Avoid: The way that Winnie speaks conveys her loneliness.
Do: The fact that Winnie uses the word "happy" three times in the first five pages of the play draws attention to her fixation on the word. Winnie is clearly preoccupied with happiness. (The reasons for her fixation on happiness may have to do with the fact that she is buried up to her waist in a "low mound" [I, p. 7]). Winnie also uses twenty dashes in her monologue about Charlie Hunter and during the two moments when she speaks directly to Willie about his sunburn. Dashes can signal (self)- interruption, fragmentation, confusion, distress, excitement, rapid thoughts, zeal, passion--a whole range of emotions.
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Concepts for ENG 104:
1. "Meaning/Content" (the WHAT) are inseparable from "Form" (the HOW).
2. HOW a writer does WHAT s/he does requires that we study "form."
3. "Form" is separate from "style" but is essential for describing "style."
4. There is a large body of technical vocabulary to help us describe precisely HOW a writer does WHAT s/he does--to describe the formal patterns a writer (un)consciously chooses.
5. Studying "form" is essential for discerning "textual meaning," the understanding (according to F.V. Bogel) that we derive from NOT neglecting the "verbal identity" of texts.
6. "Textual meaning" is our aim in doing a critical analysis of "literary" texts. (Is the same aim our goal in analyzing "other kinds" of texts?)
7. Persuasive and judicious (literary) analysis requires an understanding of the fact that form and meaning are interdependent; and a willingness and ability to demonstrate HOW form creates meaning and HOW meaning affects form.
8. "Close reading"--the technique refined by the "New Criticism" for explicating a text's formal properties--is an invaluable and essential tool for demonstrating HOW a writer does what s/he does and describing this "HOW" to other readers.
9. The literary critic, like Hermes ("the messenger god") moves between text and other readers, offering a "message," an interpretation of a text, which is made persuasive by "close reading."
10. In order to persuade readers that a text's form (the "HOW") works to create meaning (the "WHAT") and that the text's meaning (the "WHAT") works to create a text's form (the "HOW"), it is necessary to "show our work." This part of literary analysis is perhaps the most difficult feature of our enterprise.
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Terms/Categories to
use in Writing about Literature:
parataxis (paratactic)
hypotaxis (hypotactic)
asyndeton
anaphora
polysyndeton
periodic
nonperiodic
demotic style
hieratic style
euphemism
euphuism (see p. 304, Abrams)
parallelism
antithesis
chiasmus
zeugma
aphoristic (aphorism or maxim)
diction
grammar
syntax
rhetoric
figures of speech
archaisms
Latinate or polysyllabic
sentence "rhythm"
prosody
feet
metre or meter
iambic
trochaic
anapestic
dactylic
spondaic
pyrrhic
monometer
dimeter
trimeter
tetrameter
pentameter
hexameter
heptameter
monosyllabic
polysyllabic
metaphor
simile
metonymy
assonance
alliteration
synechdoche
personification
apostrophe
paradox
oxymoron
voice
speaker
persona
narrator
narratee
audience
tone (speaker's attitude toward his/her subject)
deictic (or shifter)
declarative sentence
interrogative sentence
verb tense
grammatical mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative)
active "voice"
passive "voice"
simple sentence
compound sentence
somplex sentence
compound-complex
point of view: first-, second-, third-person or limited; omniscient, intrusive, authoritative, impersonal or objective, self-conscious, self-reflexive, fallible or unreliable
categories of the novel: episodic, novel of incident, novel of character, epistolary, realistic, novel of manners, Bildungsroman and Erziehungsroman and Kunstlerroman, social novel, historical novel, nonfiction novel, regional novel, involuted novel, antinovel, nouveau roman (new novel), surfiction, fabulation
"textual meaning"
"stylistic imitation"
New Criticism
closer reading
New Historicism
ASSIGNMENT FOR FORMAL PAPER (due November 1-12):
Your aim is to produce a 5-6-page (double-spaced, 12-point font) critical analysis of one of the works studied in class that demonstrates ways in which the form of the text works to create meaning.
Your paper should contain:
--a title that “arrests” the reader—and identifies your topic;
--a debatable assertion (thesis) about the play that emerges from a critical question about a formal pattern (Exercise 1) and/or choice of word (Exercise 2). (You may take the central question that structures Exercise 3 as your own critical question).
--paragraphs structured by topic sentences that develop the argument through acts of “close reading”;
--Works Cited page in MLA format.
The informal writing exercises that we are doing over the course of this class are designed to help you construct your formal paper so that it contains the elements above.
SAMPLE Midterm Exam
ENG 104: Introduction to Literature: Form and Meaning
Professor Catherine Burroughs
October 18 and 19, 2005
I. Identification. Please define the following terms and state the significance of each term in the context of this course, ENG 104: Introduction to Literature: Form and Meaning.
1. "theater of the absurd"--see Class Notes and
pp. 1-2 of Abrams; term identifies a type of theatre that arose in response to
the existential philosophy of post-World War II writers such as Camus and Sartre; this theatre, like the literature of the
period, views "a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an
alien universe. . .possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning" (1).
Eugene Ionesco: "Cut off from his religious,
metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become
senseless, absurd [meaning what?], useless" (1). 10 points
Significance of term in the context of ENG 104: Beckett was the most famous practitioner of this type of theatre, and his play, Happy Days (1961), is an example of this genre of dram . The play presents a woman and man in a hopeless, isolated, alien (thus "absurd") situation--Winnie is buried up to her waste in a mound of earth in the first act; Willie is living begind the mound in a hole--and making meaning from "waste" requires gigantic effort on the part of both characters.
10 points
2. non-periodic or running sentence (You may also include an example)--see Class Notes and pp. 303-04 of Abrams and/or pp. 187-88 of Bogel. This type of sentence--sometimes called "loose"--appears in paratactic prose (a prose style that lacks subordination, is unhierarchical, and contains "serial [and continuously perspicuous syntax]" [Bogel 187]). In contrast to the periodic sentence, whose syntactic structure is suspended until the end of the sentence, the non-periodic or running sentence is "more relaxed and conversational in effect," and its elements are "continuous, but so loosely joined that the sentence would have been syntactically complete if a period had been inserted at one or more places before the actual close" (Abrams 303-04).
Example of non-periodic sentence: "The collie leapt into the air, which had been fumigated for anthrax and the West Nile virus."
10 points
Significance of term in the context of ENG 104: Because we are learning to analyze prose, distinguishing between types of sentences is crucial for gathering information about how different prose styles work. In Shelley's novel, Matilda (1819), for instance, discovering that a large majority of the sentences are non-periodic or running underscores the declarative and indicative mode of the text, which, in turn, highlights the narrator's need to assert her story in urgency; rhetorical situation: she's on her deathbed.
10 points
II. Short Answer. Please provide specific and precise responses to the following:
1. Describe the major concepts that shape the literary analysis of a) New Critics and b) New Historicists.
See Class Notes and Abrams pp. 180-88.
New Criticism: 1930s-1960s
a. a poem should be treated as a "verbal object"; text vs. context; "words on the page";
b. the principles of New Criticism are mainly verbal; literature's "special language" is defined in opposition to science, and the critic's practice is to analyze words, figures of speech, and symbols;
c. main procedure of NC is "close reading";
d. NC is not concerned with distinctions among genres
10 points
New Historicism: early 1980s to the present
a. literature is not independent of cultural and historical forces; text is embedded in "context";
b. History is not "background" for literary texts; rather, history is both a product and producer of textuality;
c. there is no "essential" human nature common to authors, characters, or audiences; the human subject is an ideological, cultural, historical "construct";
d. readers/audiences are "constructed subjects" as well ("positionality")
10 points
2. Name the six major categories that F. V. Bogel uses to classify sentences, and briefly explain the information that each category leads one to seek.
Same question
appeared on your announced quiz
See Class Notes and pp. 179-192 in Bogel
a. sentence length--Include explanation of what these categories mean after each. One looks for...
b. tense, mood, and voice--one looks for...
c. subordination and its uses (simple, compound, etc.)--one looks for...
d. periodic and non-periodic (or running)--one looks for...
e. parallelism, antithesis, chiasmus, and zeugma--one looks for...
f. aphorisms--one looks for...
20 points
III. Close Reading. Identify
and use Bogel's categories for analysing prose to read closely the xeroxed
passage from a novel. Your aim is identify a range of formal properties in the
process of making ONE assertion
about the passage that connects form to
meaning.
A. Identify Bogel's five categories for prose analysis (see Class Notes and pp. 177-200):
1. Rhetorical Situation
2. Sentences and Syntactic Patterns
3. Figurative Language
4. Diction
5. Rhythm and Sound
B. Provide an example of each category from the prose passage (Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God). Cite the text as you provide examples or label by number, letter, etc.
C. Make one assertion about the passage that derives from your analysis above and connects form to meaning. X=Y. (Form=Meaning)
20 points
REVISING YOUR PAPERS:
Attach the graded paper to your revision when you turn it in on December X.
Please follow this process:
1. Re-read the original
assignment, and make sure you have fulfilled all of the expectations in the
original paper. Attach the original
assignment to your revision.
2. Then, create a topic sentence tree--if you have not yet done so (in the case of Paper #1)--and revise this "tree" before revising the body of the paper.
3. Revise the body of the paper in response to my original evaluation. Re-vising implies "seeing again." In most cases, you will create a very different paper from your original. Consider making an appointment with me; seeking peer editing; visiting the Writing Center.