Spring 2024 – LIT 102/Approaches to Literature

LIT 102 – 05
1 course unit
Term: Spring 2024
Time: 3:30-4:50pm TF
Room: Bliss Annex 228		 Prof. G. Steinberg
Office: Bliss Hall 216
Office Phone: 771-2106
Office Hours: 2-4:50pm M or by appointment
E-mail : gsteinbe@tcnj.edu

TEXTBOOKS:

      • Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2023), ISBN 9780367709426
      • Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Vintage, 2006), ISBN 9780307387899
      • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage, 1998), ISBN 9780307278449
      • Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 3rd ed. (Bantam, 2002), ISBN 9780553382167
      • William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Grace Ioppolo (W. W. Norton2010), ISBN 9780393931716
      • Edward Albee, The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? (Dramatists Play Service, 2003), ISBN 9780822219767
      • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Johanna M. Smith, 3rd ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), ISBN 9780312463182
      • Tracy Letts, The Minutes (Theatre Communications Group, 2024), ISBN ‎ 9781636700052 (Samuel French, 2023), ISBN 9780573707186

COURSE DESCRIPTION.  The official catalogue description of the course is available in PAWS.

You may have heard a lot about literary theory in the past, and if so, most of what you’ve heard is probably bad:  Literary theorists use obscure jargon and are difficult to understand.  Theory is abstract navel-gazing that has little application in the real world.  The discipline of literary studies is failing in the U.S. because literary theory has politicized and radicalized the study of art and literature, destroying what made literature enjoyable in the past.  Right?

But literary theory is actually none of those things and has done none of those things.  Literary theory is actually about thinking carefully and precisely about language, culture, symbol, and narrative.  It’s about not taking things for granted.  We assume that everything about our language, our culture, our symbols, and our stories is natural, inevitable, easy, and transparent.  But actually that’s far from the truth.  When we look closely at language, culture, symbol, and narrative, we discover all kinds of unexpected, fascinating, mind-blowing, and sometimes even frightening things.

In this course, we explore the terminology used by different schools of theoretical thought in order to understand their terms precisely, accurately, and thoroughly — in order better to understand (and not take for granted) the literary and cultural phenomena that they describe with those terms.  We identify the salient features of various schools of theoretical thought and the intellectual relationships between schools and theorists.  We use literary theory in order to develop sophisticated readings of literary texts by applying specific theoretical approaches and their precise terminology to those texts.  In addition, we learn how to situate ourselves, our theoretical approaches, and our readings of literary texts in relation to critical essays, written by literary scholars.  After this course, you should have the tools that you need to do sophisticated readings of literary texts in all your other English courses.

When the College went through a curriculum revision several years ago, the vast majority of undergraduate courses were “transformed” from 3-credit to 4-credit (1-unit) learning experiences.  While most of the classes continued to meet for only 3 academic hours per week, it was understood that the “transformed” courses offered a depth of learning with additional learning tasks unfolding in the equivalent of a fourth hour, including, sometimes, an actual additional hour of class interaction.  As the equivalent of the fourth hour in this course,

F) students are assigned additional learning tasks that make the semester’s learning experience more deeply engaged and rigorous, and no other additional classroom space is needed.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES AND EXPECTATIONS.  The principal learning activities in this course are reading, writing, and discussion.  The readings that I have chosen to assign to you are the foundation of your learning.  If you do not do the readings, you miss out on that foundation, so keeping up with the readings is absolutely essential.  Upon the foundation of the readings, you build by writing response papers, which are more about writing-to-learn than writing-as-assessment.  Response papers are a safe, low-stress space for you to try out ideas, increase your understanding of texts and concepts, and improve your retention of what you’re learning.  By writing, you reinforce and expand the learning that you’re gaining from your reading.

Building on your reading and writing, discussion is also very important for your learning in this class.  In general, my approach to class discussion is to begin by posing a question, topic, or problem, then to have us brainstorm lots of ideas together in response to the opening question/topic/problem, then to move to evaluating the ideas that we’ve brainstormed, and finally to come to a consensus, as a class, about the best answers/solutions to the opening question/topic/problem.  Your input to the discussion is absolutely critical.  Even though I’ve taught the readings in this class many, many times, no two classes have ever had exactly the same discussion about them.  Different classes come up with different perspectives, different solutions, different ideas.  As the professor, I’m not looking for one perspective or one solution or one idea in particular.  I want us to think things through together – to throw out as many ideas as possible, to test and evaluate those ideas against the evidence of the text in front of us, and to draw the best conclusions that we can.  We all learn so much by working together in a free and open discussion to answer a question or solve a problem.  I learn so much from your fresh perspectives, and you learn so much from each other.  But this means that our class discussions always depend on your preparedness (how thoroughly and thoughtfully you’ve done the readings and written your response papers before class) and on your participation (how willing you are to take risks and share your ideas – even when they’re only half-baked – with your classmates).  I can’t make a good discussion happen.  Only you all can do that.  I can work to create a classroom space that feels safe, and I can pose provocative questions for us to discuss, but a good discussion – along with the incredible learning that comes from a good discussion – only happens if you all come to class prepared and willing to join in.

GOALS.  In this course, you will learn

      1. to grow ever more responsible for and independent in your own learning,
      2. to be more aware of, question, and enrich your basic assumptions about language, culture, and literature,
      3. to appreciate that literary theory can help us to see and interpret texts more richly,
      4. to know the fundamentals of various literary theories and schools of thought,
      5. to apply literary theories and schools of thought to literary texts independently,
      6. to find, use, and respond to literary criticism,
      7. to write interesting, original, persuasive literary analysis, and
      8. to demonstrate greater facility with critical practices in the field of English.

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 as 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
#12 Students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with a range of critical, generic, and literary traditions (including recent theoretical approaches) that shape – and are shaped by – literary discourses and texts of particular periods or movements
#15 Students will be able to read a literary work and characterize its main aesthetic, structural, and rhetorical strategies in an argumentative, thesis-driven essay or in a writing workshop
#17 Analyze how creative texts, artworks, or performances reflect, shape, exalt, or challenge the values of a culture

REQUIREMENTS.  For this course, you must complete the following graded assignments:

      1. 8 two-page response papers (10% of your final grade, all together),
      2. a documentation exercise (5% of your final grade),
      3. PAPER 1 (15%),
      4. PAPER 2 (20%),
      5. a midterm exam (15%),
      6. PAPER 3 (15%), and
      7. PAPER 4 (20%).

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 a 90%, your final grade will be a B+.

RESPONSE PAPERS.  In the course of the term, you are required to submit eight short, informal papers (about 2 pages each) on the literary readings for class.  You may choose for which days you want to write a response paper, as long as you have completed eight response papers by the end of the term.  For each response paper, apply one of the literary theories that we have read about in class up to that point in the semester to the literary reading assigned for the day.

Please note that, when you do a response paper, you are writing about the literary reading assigned for the day on which you’re submitting the paper. So, you’re writing about the reading before we discuss it in class and submitting the paper before the class meeting for which that reading is assigned. You can’t submit a response paper about a past day’s reading assignment.  You should submit each response paper by “sharing” it with me as a Google Doc before class on the 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 on it).

The purpose of the response papers is

      1. to help you in your preparation for class discussion,
      2. to allow you to try out new and different ideas in a safe, low-stress space,
      3. to help me see where you’re struggling with the readings and concepts in class,
      4. to help you reinforce and expand on what you’re learning in class,
      5. to practice different kinds of literary analysis (in preparation for the formal papers), and
      6. to help you develop your intellectual independence and your confidence as a reader.

Response papers are graded Pass/Fail, so they need not be a perfect, polished product.  Rather, response papers should be just what their name says – a response.  Think about the literary theory that you have chosen in relation to the assigned literary reading; then write a response.  Don’t worry about typos or comma splices or organization.  Be as specific as you can, getting down as much as you can, as quickly as you can.  Treat response papers more like a journal entry than like a formal paper.  I don’t want a five-paragraph theme.  Rather, I want an exploration – as detailed and specific as possible – of the literary theory in relation to the literary reading assignment for the day.  But don’t focus too narrowly on just one scene or passage from the literary reading assignment.  Try to generalize about the reading and then look at specific examples from all over to support your generalization.

Normally, as long as you submit a response paper of suitable length, detail, and thoughtfulness (and as long as you submit it before class on the assigned day), you will receive all the points that the response paper is worth.  You may submit more than eight response papers in the course of the semester (to make up for any response papers that do not pass), but no matter how many extra response papers you turn in, you will not receive credit for more than eight total.  You may not submit more than one response paper on a single day’s literary reading assignment (even if the day’s assignment comes from more than one work), nor may you submit a response paper for a day that you are absent from class.  But you may submit more than one response paper on the same literary work if there are multiple reading assignments from that work spread over multiple days in the course outline below.  In other words, if we spend multiple days on a work, you can write response papers for each day that we spend on it, but the response papers should be on the different reading assignments for each of the days.  (NOTE: Even if you do not submit a response paper on a particular day, you should still come to class prepared to discuss the response paper topics in relation to the reading assignment, since we will focus on these topics in our in-class discussions all semester; in other words, the response paper topics above are a great guide for your class prep every day.)

PAPER 1.  In a paper of 4-6 pages, do a Marxist, feminist/gender, reader-response, or ecocritical reading of The Goat:  Or, Who Is Sylvia?  For this paper, as long as you are not using any other sources besides the text of the play, you do not need a “Works Cited” page or footnotes, but note the page numbers for your paper’s quotations of the play in parentheses in the text of your paper.  I encourage you, about a week before the paper is due, to submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) to me by email; if you do so by the date noted in the course schedule below, I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis.

Your paper will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

      1. Does the paper have a clear, specific thesis?  Does the thesis offer an interesting perspective or “hook” that is provocative without being gimmicky or offensive?  Does the paper’s thesis incorporate appropriate literary theory?  Is the paper’s use of theory appropriate and sufficiently sophisticated?
      2. Does the paper’s analysis progress logically?  Does the paper have a clear and consistent overall organization that relates all the ideas of the paper together in support of the thesis with appropriate transitions to aid the reader (rather than simply a list of random points without relation to one another or to the thesis)?  Does the paper have appropriate transitions to aid the reader in following the paper’s logic (rather than weak transitions, such as “The first…,” “Another…,” and “…also…”)?
      3. Are the paper’s paragraphs properly developed – neither too long and wandering nor too short and deficient?  Are the topics of the individual paragraphs suitably narrow and focused rather than vague and broad?  Once a paragraph gets specific about anything, does it stay focused on that specific topic to the end?
      4. Does the paper provide relevant, concrete evidence and logically persuasive reasons for every assertion?
      5. Does the paper exhibit confidence and insight when analyzing literary works not discussed in class?
      6. Does the introduction to the paper offer an interesting, helpful preview of the content, logic, and organization of the paper?
      7. Is factual information in the paper accurate?
      8. Is the writing in the paper clear, effective, and appropriate to an academic setting?

PAPER 2.  In Canvas, you will find a copy of “A Rose for Emily” under “Files.”  In a paper of 4-6 pages, do a psycholanalytic, structuralist, or deconstructive reading of “A Rose for Emily.” For this paper, as long as you are not using any other sources besides the text of the short story, you do not need a “Works Cited” page or footnotes, but note the page numbers for your quotations from the short story in parentheses in the text of your paper.  I encourage you, about a week before the paper is due, to submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) to me by email; if you do so by the date noted in the course schedule below, I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis.  Your PAPER 2 will be evaluated according to the same criteria as PAPER 1.

PAPER 3.  In Canvas, you will find two critical essays on The Goat:  Or, Who Is Sylvia? under “Files.”  Choose one of the critical essays and one of the theoretical approaches that we have studied this semester (but not the same approach that you used in PAPER 1).  In a paper of 4-6 pages, do a reading of The Goat:  Or, Who Is Sylvia? using your chosen theoretical approach and responding to the critical essay that you have chosen from Canvas.  You must include a “Works Cited” page with this paper and use proper MLA documentation format.  I encourage you, about a week before the paper is due, to submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) to me by email; if you do so by the date noted in the course schedule below, I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis.  Your PAPER 3 will be evaluated according to the same criteria as PAPER 1, plus

      1. Does the paper respond meaningfully to the critical essay(s) but at the same time focus foremost on its own argument and thesis?  Do references to the critical essay(s) fit neatly into the logic of the paper’s argument?  Does the paper enter into conversation with the critical essay(s) and make a significant contribution to that conversation?  Does the paper avoid the pitfall of slavishly agreeing with the critical essay(s)?  Does it avoid the pitfall of belligerently disagreeing?
      2. Does the paper summarize the argument of the critical essay(s) accurately, fairly, concisely, and logically?  Does the paper focus on that argument’s main points (rather than on minutia or throwaway comments that are not central to the argument)?
      3. Does the paper use proper MLA documentation format?

PAPER 4.  Choose one of the theoretical approaches that we have studied this semester (but not the same approach that you used in PAPER 2).  In a paper of 4-6 pages, do a reading of “A Rose for Emily” using your chosen theoretical approach and responding to at least two one critical essays (published since 2000) that you have researched and found yourself.  You must include a “Works Cited” page with this paper and use proper MLA documentation format.  I encourage you, about a week before the paper is due, to submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) to me by email; if you do so by the date noted in the course schedule below, I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis.  Your PAPER 4 will be evaluated according to the same criteria as PAPER 3, plus

      1. Does the critical essays used in the paper represent a good choices in terms of their its scholarly credentials and the relevance of their its arguments to the paper’s own thesis?

DOCUMENTATION EXERCISE.  Below is an exercise that asks you to create in-text citations and bibliographic entries in MLA format for various kinds of sources.  You are to submit the completed exercise by “sharing” it with me as a Google Doc.  Be sure to grant me “editing” or “suggesting” status when you share the Google Doc with me (so that I can comment directly on it).  If your submission is not 100% correct, I will ask you to revise it.  If your revision is not 100% correct, I will ask you to revise again.  You will continue to revise the exercise and resubmit it (as a shared Google Doc) until it is 100% correct – as many times as it takes.  It is your responsibility to submit the assignment in a timely fashion and to revise and resubmit it as necessary.  Once you have succeeded in getting the exercise 100% correct, you will receive all the credit that the assignment is worth (100% or A+ for 5% of your final grade).  If you do not succeed in getting the exercise 100% correct by the last day of class, you will receive a zero for 5% of your final grade.

Here is the exercise that you must complete:

TASK 1:  Examine the three situations described below.  For each situation, retype the sentence exactly as it should appear in a paper, complete with the parenthetical citation appropriate to the situation (if a citation is needed).  You should use the MLA Formatting and Style Guide.

        • The following sentence appears in a paper:
          Again, a study performed by Grennan, concentrating on male and female police officers’ confrontations with citizens, revealed that the inborn or socialized nurturing ability possessed by female police workers makes them “just as productive as male officers in the handling of a violent confrontation.”

Do you need a parenthetical citation in this sentence?  The quotation comes from page 84 of an article published in Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1987 and written by Samuel Grennan.  The article appeared on pages 78-84 of the first issue of volume 15 of the journal.  The article’s full title was “Findings on the Role of Officer Gender in Violent Encounters with Citizens.”

        • The following sentence appears in a paper:
          In a 1987 study by Vega and Silverman, almost 75% of male police officers felt that women were not strong enough to handle the demands of patrol duties, and 42% felt women lacked the needed assertiveness to enforce the law vigorously.

Do you need a parenthetical citation in this sentence?  Matthew Vega and Immanuel Silverman wrote the article used here, called “Female Police Officers as Viewed by Their Male Counterparts.”  It was published in the first issue of volume 5 of Police Studies in 1987.  It appeared on pages 31-39 of the journal, and the percentages in the sentence above appear on page 32.  Police Studies is published in Chicago.

        • The following sentence appears in a paper:
          Who returns a questionnaire can affect results, as happened, for example, with one study in which “78% of the former students in the top percentile of their class returned the questionnaire, while only 28% from the bottom percentile returned the questionnaire.”

Do you need a parenthetical citation in this sentence?  This quotation came from a 1999 article by R. L. Griffey, called “The Personalization of Questionnaires” with the subtitle, “A Longitudinal Study.”  The article appeared on pages 83-93 of volume 14, issue number 2, of the Journal of Survey Techniques.  The quotation is on page 83.

TASK 2:  A paper uses the following sources, plus the ones in #1, #2, and #3 of TASK 1 above:

        • our textbook for The Road,
        • our textbook for The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, and
        • the article by David Collings in our textbook for Frankenstein.

Create the appropriate “Works Cited” page exactly as it should appear at the end of the paper (with all six sources).  You should use the MLA Formatting and Style Guide.

MIDTERM EXAM.  The exam in this course is an assessment of how well you are learning, understanding, and retaining the material in class.  The exam includes quotations from our course 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 exam assesses your retention of important character names, settings, critical terms, and concepts by asking you to identify and describe them.  Finally, the exam offers 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.

LANGUAGES ACROSS THE CURRICULUM.  A quarter-unit (one-credit) Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC) independent study may be added to this course for students who have intermediate-level proficiency in another language and who wish to complement the work in this course by utilizing their language skills. Students should complete this Enrollment Request Form (https://forms.gle/NCbYWWRVxfogTv5T7) to enroll in the LAC independent study by Tuesday, January 23. Please contact the LAC Director, Dr. Holly Didi-Ogren (holly.didi-ogren@tcnj.edu) with any questions.

PROFESSOR’S AVAILABILITY.  My office is Bliss Hall 216.  My in-person office hours this term are 2-4:50pm on Mondays.  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 – just let me know.  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 and ideas 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 about it. If something is said or posted in class (by anyone, including me) that makes you feel that your identity is being targeted, stereotyped, 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.

SCREENS.  I encourage you to use screens (laptops, phones, ipads) as little as possible in this class.  In the last decade or more, there has been a ton of research that shows that screens are bad for learning – that you are less likely to remember what happens in class if you take notes on an electronic device rather than with pen and paper, that you are less likely to comprehend and remember what you read if you read it on a screen rather than in a printed format, that you are more likely to be distracted and miss things in class if you use an electronic device during class time.  I am not a Luddite (someone who despises all technology); I love my screens and use them a lot.  But I have watched a lot of students over the last few years perform much worse in my classes than they could (or should) have performed, because they used screens for taking notes and reading.  And my anecdotal experience with students over the years is nothing in comparison with the towering tsunami of research that shows just how bad screens are for students.

For that reason, while I do not forbid you to use screens in and for class (because you are adults, responsible for your own choices), I nevertheless encourage you – with every fiber of my being – to consider taking the “minimal screens” pledge below:

In order to maximize my learning in this class, I pledge

          1. to take notes in class with pen and paper,
          2. to read assignments in print format if at all possible,
          3. to keep all electronic devices out of sight during class (unless needed for a reading assignment or to look up information requested by the professor), and
            if I do use an electronic device during class time for any reason,
          4. to avoid the temptation to “multitask” by opening only the programs, websites, and apps that I specifically need for class.

I can almost guarantee that you will do better in class – participate more, learn more, retain more – if you take this pledge and follow its guidelines than if you do not.

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.  This schedule is subject to revision at the discretion of the professor.  Changes in the schedule made after the first day of class will be shown in red.

Dates Assignments
T Jan 23 Introductions
F Jan 26 Critical Theory Today, pp. 1-8, 43-69
The Road, pp. 1-48
T Jan 30 Critical Theory Today, pp. 70-120
The Road, pp. 49-93
F Feb 2 Critical Theory Today, pp. 121-148
The Road, pp. 94-167
T Feb 6 The Road, pp. 168-287
F Feb 9 Critical Theory Today, pp. 410-462
The Bluest Eye, pp. 1-32
T Feb 13 Critical Theory Today, pp. 149-181
The Bluest Eye, pp. 33-80
F Feb 16 The Bluest Eye, pp. 81-206
Thesis paragraphs for PAPER 1 due by email before 11:59pm
T Feb 20 Critical Theory Today, pp. 9-42
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #60-#65
F Feb 23 MLA Formatting and Style Guide
PAPER 1 DUE in Canvas before 11:59pm
Critical Theory Today, pp. 182-213
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #66-#70
T Feb 27 Critical Theory Today, pp. 182-213
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #66-#70
MLA Formatting and Style Guide
PAPER 1 DUE in Canvas before 11:59pm
F Mar 1 Critical Theory Today, pp. 214-241
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #12, #15, #21, #26, #37, #50, #53, #55
T Mar 5 The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #4, #17, #20, #22, #29, #33, #42, #71, #87, #93, #99, #101, #108, #136, #189
F Mar 8 The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, #1, #11, #13, #25, #34, #46, #49, #56, #77, #89, #94, #113, #128, #161, #188
T Mar 12 NO CLASS (Spring Break)
Thesis paragraphs for PAPER 2 due by email before 11:59pm
F Mar 15 NO CLASS (Spring Break)
T Mar 19 The Minutes
PAPER 2 DUE in Canvas before 11:59pm
F Mar 22 Frankenstein, pp. 19-105
M Mar 25 Last day to withdraw from this course with a W
T Mar 26 Frankenstein, pp. 105-189
F Mar 29 NO CLASS (Good Friday)
T Apr 2 MIDTERM EXAM
F Apr 5 NO CLASS (Sigma Tau Delta conference)
T Apr 9 Frankenstein, pp. 360-380
F Apr 12 Frankenstein, pp. 323-339
Thesis paragraphs for PAPER 3 due by email before 11:59pm
T Apr 16 Frankenstein, pp. 469-480
F Apr 19 library search, JSTOR, Project Muse, and MLA Bibliography
PAPER 3 DUE in Canvas before 11:59pm
T Apr 23 Acts 1-3 of Measure for Measure
F Apr 26 Acts 4-5 of Measure for Measure
T Apr 30 NO CLASS (Celebration of Student Achievement)
F May 3 Find and read one academic article on Measure for Measure.
Thesis paragraphs for PAPER 4 due by email before 11:59pm
ASSIGNED FINAL EXAM PERIOD PAPER 4 DUE in Canvas