| ENGL 670 – 03 3 graduate credits Term: Fall 2023 Time: 5:00-7:30 p.m. W Room: Bliss Annex 153 |
Prof. G. Steinberg Office: Bliss Hall 216 Office Hours: 2-3:30pm MR or by appointment Office Phone: 771-2106 E-mail : gsteinbe@tcnj.edu |
TEXTBOOKS:
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- King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthur (Medieval Institute, 1994), ISBN 9781879288386
- Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Medieval Institute, 1995), ISBN 9781879288591
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. and ed. James Winny (Broadview, 1995), ISBN 9780921149927
- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (Norton, 2003), ISBN 9780393974645
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Penguin, 1989), ISBN 9780140422535
- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Norton, 2018), ISBN 9780393284171
- Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, ed. John F. Plummer (Penguin, 2006), ISBN 9780451530240
Note that you can get free online copies of the first two texts (King Arthur’s Death and Sir Gawain) at https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/benson-and-foster-king-arthurs-death and https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/hahn-sir-gawain.
COURSE DESCRIPTION. The brotherhood of the Round Table. Virgins. Knights in shining armor. Adultery. The Holy Grail. This course explores gender as a central concern in stories about King Arthur from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. Among texts and authors included in the course are The Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Mark Twain.
LEARNING ACTIVITIES AND EXPECTATIONS. The principal learning activity in this course is reading – the reading both of literary texts and of scholarship about them. Readings provide students with a foundation of knowledge about the Middle Ages, the 19th century, and gender theory, useful both to secondary English teachers (who need to broaden their instructional repertoire in order to teach Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory, Tennyson, Twain, and other texts in their classrooms) and to prospective Ph.D. students (who need a broad base of knowledge in the foundational authors, such as Malory and Tennyson, in order to navigate their doctoral studies successfully). In order to facilitate your learning from your reading, readings for class are opened up through response papers and through participation in class discussion. In addition, the writing of two conference papers helps to develop your skills in terms of critical practices in research and writing in the field of English.
Reading and responding to scholarship about the literary texts that we are studying is crucial to your graduate education. When you take graduate courses and get a Master’s degree, you are joining the ranks of professional scholars as an apprentice academic, going far beyond what you did as an undergraduate student. In your graduate classes, you should be engaging in conversation with other scholars, not as a lowly undergraduate writing superficial research papers but as an aspiring peer entering into dialogue with the experts and professionals. That’s what getting a Master’s is all about – becoming an expert and interacting with other experts as their peer. You’re entering the world of your professors and other scholars. You’re joining the professionals in conversation as an adult. Don’t be afraid. You’ve got this. Enjoy the intellectual stimulation of other scholars’ ideas. Enjoy disagreeing with eminent scholars (because everybody, even the most revered expert, is wrong sometimes). Enjoy the conversation. Don’t underestimate yourself or what you can do.
“BLENDED” FORMAT. This course is offered in a “blended” format. About half the regular class meetings will be in person (in Bliss Annex 153), and the other half will be conducted remotely via Zoom. Links for joining the remote class meetings are available in Canvas under “Zoom.” If you have technology issues or needs during the semester, please contact the IT Helpdesk at (609) 771-2660 or helpdesk@tcnj.edu. NOTE: I am going to require you to keep your camera and microphone on for the class’s Zoom meetings. If you have a good and pressing reason that you need to keep your camera or mic off for a particular class meeting, let me know before class, or if you need to turn your camera and mic off temporarily for a couple minutes because of loud noises or a mini-emergency where you are, feel free to do so. Otherwise, please keep your camera and mic on. It’s virtually impossible to have a good class discussion when only some people have their cameras and microphones on.
GOALS. In this course, you will learn
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- to become more aware of, question, and enrich your basic assumptions about gender, culture, and literature,
- to understand some of the historical constructions of gender in the Middle Ages and the 19th century,
- to recognize and interpret some of the seminal texts of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages and the 19th century, and
- to demonstrate facility with critical practices in research and writing in the field of English.
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Also, the following goals for the School of Humanities & Social Sciences apply in this course:
#1 Written Communication
#5 Critical Analysis and Reasoning: Ability to critique the arguments of others in the discipline and the construction of one’s own arguments in the discipline, using data/evidence are a focus of instruction and/or the ability to analyze linguistic and cultural patterns
#6 Information Literacy: Evaluating the validity and/or reliability of a source
#7 Interpret Language and Symbol
REQUIREMENTS. This course has the following graded assignments:
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- eight two-page response papers (together worth 20% of your final grade),
- two conference papers (the first worth 20%, the second worth 25%),
- a midterm exam (15%), and
- a cumulative, comprehensive final exam (20%).
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In the course of the term, you are required to write eight short, informal response papers (about 2 double-spaced pages each) on the critical readings – the scholarly articles – assigned for class. You may choose on which days you want to submit a response paper, as long as by the end of the term you have submitted eight total. You may not submit a response paper on a day for which there is no critical essay assigned, nor may you submit a response paper for a past critical essay from an earlier class meeting. You write about the scholarly articles in your response papers before we discuss them in class. You should submit each response paper by “sharing” it with me as a Google Doc before class on the critical reading’s assigned day. Be sure to grant me “editing” or “suggesting” status when you share the Google Doc with me (so that I can comment directly on the paper). Your response papers need not be a perfect, polished product. Rather, response papers should be just what their name says – a response. You are to summarize the main point of the scholarly article assigned for the day (in two or three sentences at most) and respond to that main point in a critical but reflective fashion. Your response may require discussing the article’s argument, but your focus should always be on your response rather than on summarizing the critical essay’s argument. If you ever find that you’re writing more than a sentence or two of summary, STOP and rethink. But don’t worry about typos or comma splices or organization. Be as specific and focused as you can, getting down as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Treat response papers more like a journal entry in response to the scholarly article than like a formal paper. I want an exploration – as detailed and specific as possible – of the critical essay assigned for the day. You may not submit more than one response paper on a single day, nor may you submit a response paper for a day that you are absent from class – absolutely no exceptions. Response papers will be graded pass/fail. You may submit more than eight response papers in the course of the term (to make up for any response papers that do not receive a grade of “Pass”), but no matter how many extra response papers you submit, you will receive credit for no more than eight. Normally, as long as you submit a response paper of suitable length, focus, detail, and thoughtfulness (and as long as you submit it before class on the assigned day), you will receive all the credit that the response paper is worth (i.e., 100% or A++).
The exams are an assessment of how well you are learning, understanding, and retaining the material in class. One of the goals in this course is that you learn to “recognize and interpret some of the seminal texts of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages and the 19th century.” To assess your ability to do that, the exams include quotations from our Arthurian readings for you to identify and analyze, based on what we’ve learned and discussed in class. The quotations are usually ones that we discuss at length together, although some quotations may be less discussed in class but still central to the plot and themes of the work from which they come (and therefore reasonable passages for you to be able to identify). In addition, the exams assess your retention of important character names, settings, critical terms, and concepts by asking you to identify and describe them. Finally, the exams offer you the opportunity to draw together all the different strands of what you’ve been learning in class in an essay that asks you to look broadly at overarching themes and ideas.
Your two conference papers are another opportunity for you to show me what you’ve learned in class – by applying what you’ve learned in a new context. In your conference papers, you need to argue a clear, specific, original thesis, and you need to do so with professionalism appropriate to a young scholar in the discipline of English. I expect you to enter into the critical conversation going on in scholarly articles and books on your topic, contributing something worth saying while responding to what others have said before you. I encourage you to discuss your papers with me as you write them (over email or in person). A conference paper should be 8-10 pages in length (not including notes and “Works Cited” page). Under absolutely no circumstances should a conference paper ever exceed 10 pages – not even by a single line. For the first conference paper, write about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s tale (with or without the Wife of Bath’s prologue). I recommend that you choose one text that we’ve read in class and relate the Wife of Bath’s tale to that text. For the second conference paper, write about one or two of the poems from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris. I recommend that you choose one text that we’ve read in class and relate your poem(s) from The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems to that text.
Your final grade will be based on the following scale: A = 93%-100%, A- = 90%-92%, B+ = 87%-89%, B = 83%-86%, B- = 80%-82%, C+ = 77%-79%, C = 73%-76%, C- = 70%-72%, D+ = 67%-69%, D = 60%-66%, and F = below 60%. This scale is absolute. Because the response papers are in a sense a form of extra credit built into this course from the start, I do not give extra credit at the end of the semester to help students raise their grade even a whisker. So, even if, at the end of the semester, you are just .0001 points away from an A-, your final grade will be a B+.
PROFESSOR’S AVAILABILITY. My office is Bliss Hall 216. My in-person office hours this term are 2-3:30pm on Mondays and Thursdays. If you have questions about class (or just want to talk about stuff), feel free to stop by during these hours (no appointment necessary). I can also meet over Zoom if that’s more convenient for you. If you cannot come during my scheduled office hours, talk to me about meeting at another time, and we can set up an appointment. You may contact me by email (gsteinbe@tcnj.edu) or by calling my office phone (609-771-2106) and leaving a message (if I do not answer), but email is usually the best way to get in touch with me. You may also leave a written message for me in my box at the English Department offices in Bliss Hall 124.
ATTENDANCE. Regular attendance is a virtual necessity for successful completion of this class. Class discussion constitutes important, useful preparation for your graded work. If you miss a class, you will essentially lose out on that day’s contribution to your preparation, since it is never really possible to reproduce or recapture the dynamics and flow of information for a missed class meeting (even if you get notes from someone). If, however, you positively must miss a class, I expect you to find out what you missed and to come fully prepared – without excuses – to the next class meeting.
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. Academic dishonesty is any attempt by a student to gain academic advantage through dishonest means, to submit, as your own, work which has not been done by you or to give improper aid to another student in the completion of an assignment. Such dishonesty would include, but is not limited to, submitting as your own a project, paper, report, test, or speech copied from, partially copied, or paraphrased from the work of another (whether the source is AI-generated, printed, under copyright, or in manuscript form). Credit must always be given for words quoted or paraphrased. The rules apply to any academic dishonesty, whether the work is graded or ungraded, group or individual, written or oral.
ACCOMMODATIONS. The College of New Jersey prohibits discrimination against any student on the basis of physical or mental disability or perceived disability. The College will also provide reasonable and appropriate accommodations to enable students with disabilities to participate in the life of the campus community. If you require special accommodations, I will make every reasonable effort to accommodate your needs and to create an environment where your special abilities are respected.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION. We are all enriched by greater diversity, and we all bring different perspectives to this class. I want to create a learning environment that supports diversity and honors your identities and perspectives (including your race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, mental and physical health, differing abilities, politics, etc.). If you go by a name and/or set of pronouns that differ from those that appear in your official records, please let me know. If you feel that your performance in class is being impacted by a hostile environment related to your identity outside of class, please don’t hesitate to talk to me. If something is said or posted in class (by anyone, including me) that makes you feel that your identity is being targeted, misunderstood, or disparaged, please talk to me about it. I will expect our whole class (including me) to strive always to honor every form of diversity.
CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT AND COMMITMENT TO STUDENT SUCCESS, SAFETY, AND WELL-BEING. The TCNJ community is dedicated to the success, safety, and well-being of each student. TCNJ strictly follows key policies that govern all TCNJ community members’ rights and responsibilities in and out of the classroom. In addition, TCNJ has established several student support offices that can provide the support and resources to help students achieve their personal and professional goals and to promote health and well-being. You can find more information about these policies and resources at the “TCNJ Student Support Resources and Classroom Policies” webpage here: https://academicaffairs.tcnj.edu/tcnj-syllabus-resources/.
Students who anticipate and/or experience barriers in this course are encouraged to contact the instructor as early in the semester as possible. The Accessibility Resource Center (ARC) is available to facilitate the removal of barriers and to ensure reasonable accommodations. For more information about ARC, please visit: https://arc.tcnj.edu/.
COURSE SCHEDULE. Class meetings highlighted in yellow in the schedule below will be conducted in person on campus in Bliss Annex 153. Class meetings highlighted in gray will be conducted remotely via Zoom.
This schedule is subject to change at the discretion of the professor. Changes made after the beginning of the term will be shown in red.
| Date | Assignment |
| W Aug 30 |
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| W Sep 6 |
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| W Sep 13 |
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| W Sep 20 |
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| W Sep 27 |
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| W Oct 4 | MIDTERM EXAM |
| W Oct 11 |
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| W Oct 18 |
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| F Oct 20 | CONFERENCE PAPER 1 DUE in Canvas by 11:59pm |
| W Oct 25 |
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| W Nov 1 |
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| W Nov 8 |
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| W Nov 15 |
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| W Nov 22 | NO CLASS (Thanksgiving) |
| W Nov 29 |
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| W Dec 6 |
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| W Dec 13 | FINAL EXAM |
| W Dec 20 | CONFERENCE PAPER 2 DUE in Canvas by 11:59pm |