Carol Siegel
English 366 — The
English Novel to 1900 – TTh
Office MMC 202S, office hours: TTh
Office (360) 546-9641, Home (503)
226-4272, E-Mail siegel@vancouver.wsu.edu
BASIC INFORMATION:
Attendance and participation: More than
three absences may lower your grade substantially. Because we cannot hope to discuss everything,
I rely on you to direct my attention to what interests you. Your participation will be reflected in your
grade.
Students with Disabilities: I am committed to providing assistance to
help you be successful in this course. Reasonable accommodations are available
for students with a documented disability. Please notify me during the first
week of class of any accommodations needed for the course. Late notification may cause the requested
accommodations to be unavailable.
Students needing accommodations must have them approved through the
Associate Director of Student Services, SSV, Room 203
Written Work: All written work must be
typed or printed, double spaced with one inch margins all around. Documentation must conform to MLA Works Cited
style.
Late Papers: Grades will be lowered, at
my discretion, as much as one degree (e.g. from A to A-), for each class day
that the paper is late. Revisions cannot
be turned in for credit after their due date.
èNOTE: No late work will be
accepted for a grade after December 7 under any circumstances.
Academic Integrity: As an institution of higher education,
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES: Two 6-8
page papers are required. You may write
on any topic so long as you focus on one or more of the texts assigned for this
class and follow the guidelines in the "Writing About
Literature" handout. Both papers
should be arguments in which you make an interpretive claim about a literary
text (or texts) and then devote the rest of the paper to supporting that
claim. Each paper will count as ½ of
your grade, prior to adjustment for attendance and participation. Work will be
graded on a twelve point scale (A+=12, F=0).
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Daniel Defoe, Moll
Eliza Heywood, Love in Excess
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Syllabus
Tuesday,
August 22: Orientation: Development of the Novel, Literary Traditions
Thursday,
August 24: Oroonoko
Tuesday,
August 29: Love in Excess,
Part One
Thursday,
August 31: Love in Excess,
Part Two
Tuesday,
September 5: Finish Love
in Excess
Thursday,
September 7: The Preface of Moll Flanders and through p. 84, up to "I came away for
Tuesday,
September 12: Moll
Thursday,
September 14: Finish Moll
Tuesday,
September 19: Paper #1 Due.
Lecture, The backlash against Romanticism
Thursday,
September 21:, Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1
Tuesday,
September 26: Sense
and Sensibility, Volume 2
Thursday,
September 28: Finish Sense
and Sensibility
Tuesday,
October 3: Jane Eyre,
Volume 1
Thursday,
October 5: Jane Eyre,
Volume 2
Tuesday,
October 10: Finish Jane
Eyre
Thursday,
October 12: READING DAY. No
Class will be held today, please use the time to get as far as possible into Vanity Fair.
Tuesday,
October 17: Vanity
Fair,
through Chapter XVIII
Thursday,
October 19: Vanity
Fair, through Chapter
Tuesday,
October 24: Finish Vanity
Fair. Final Day to turn in revision of paper 1
Thursday,
October 26: Film in Class
Tuesday,
October 31: Film in Class
Thursday,
November 2: David Copperfield, through
Chapter IX.
Tuesday,
November 7: David Copperfield, through
Chapter XXIV
Thursday,
November 9: David
Copperfield, through Chapter XL
Tuesday,
November 14: Finish David Copperfield
Thursday,
November 16: Paper #2 Due. Lecture on the movement toward
modernism.
Tuesday,
November 21: THANKSGIVING BREAK
Thursday,
November 23: THANKSGIVING BREAK
Tuesday,
November 28: Tess of the
D'Urbervilles, Phases 1 & 2
Thursday,
November 30: Tess of the
D'Urbervilles, Phases 3 & 4
Tuesday,
December 5: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Phases 5 & 6 & 7.
Thursday,
December 7: Last Day of Class. LAST DAY TO TURN IN PAPER #2 REVISION. (revision is optional.)
Marked original MUST
accompany revision. This is the FINAL
DATE for me to RECEIVE late work, if it is to be read for credit. Retrospective. Evaluations.
A SHORT GUIDE TO
WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
Resources: The
Form: To be accepted for a
grade, papers must be either typed or printed on a computer printer. No hand-written or hand-printed papers will
be read for credit. Papers must have all
the usual attributes of college essays: a TITLE, an introduction, unified and
coherent body paragraphs, a conclusion, and standard documentation of
quotes. Standard grammar and usage are
also expected. All references to events
that occur within texts should be in present tense. Any grammar and composition handbook will
answer most of your questions about grammar and usage.
Organization/Structure: Papers should be organized in a standard,
reader-friendly manner. The thesis
should appear in the introduction. Each
paragraph in the body of the paper should be focused on one main claim in
support of your thesis, and everything else in the paragraph should develop or
support that claim. After the
introduction, all claims should be followed by support form the text. The conclusion should sum up the main points
made and connect them to the thesis.
The Topic: Choose your own topic, but make it conform to the following
guidelines.
1. The topic should focus on the assigned reading, not on
things in your experience or observation that the reading made you think
about. How your own life resembles that
of David Copperfield, for example, although obviously interesting, would not be
an appropriate topic for an essay on that novel. Also inappropriate, would be an essay on the
topic of why Jane Eyre does
not accurately portray 19th century English experience, because to support such
an assertion you would have to do a great deal of research in social
history. Nor will an essay work that has
as its thesis that Moll Flanders shows an ignorance of what love really
is since implied in such a statement is the idea that only you know what love
is. Instead, you might want to discuss
how the novel conveys its standards for evaluating different kinds of romantic
relationships according to how "true" the love is. An appropriate topic for such a discussion
would be Defoe’s use of specific incidents in Moll's life to suggest how social
ideologies create conflicting values and their impact on human relationships.
2. The
topic should not treat fictional characters as real people or what happens in
fiction as real events. Much of our
pleasure in reading comes from understanding things this way as we read. But analysis demands that we mentally stand
back and think about how effects are achieved.
That Marianne in Sense and Sensibility should throw caution to
the wind and take more risks is not an appropriate topic for an essay because
it dismisses what the novel actually tells us and substitutes a story based on your
concept of what should happen in real life.
Likewise, you should not choose a topic like Becky Sharp in Vanity
Fair will no doubt be punished more severely later for her bad
behavior. That topic implies that she is
a real person with an existence that continues when the text is over. Instead you might focus on how the text
defines what success in life is and how the depiction of the character's fates
at the conclusion relates to this definition.
3. The
topic should be limited to fit the scope of the paper and should give your
reader direction. Don’t try to say
everything possible about any text. The
title of the text you are discussing cannot also be the title of your paper since
this implies that you are going to say everything that can be said about the
text. Successful topics are found by
focusing on one particular aspect of a literary work or group of works. You might choose to write about any ONE of
the following: how certain types of relationships between people are depicted, how
social issues are handled, how certain images (from nature, for example) or
colors are used to create, how material is structured, how two texts that seem
in many ways similar differ in one crucial way--or vice versa, tensions in the
text where contradictory ideas are presented and seem unresolved. Many successful papers explore the ways that
content (what the text is about) and form (the way the contents are presented)
either work together or at cross purposes.
If you aren’t sure whether your topic will work, please discuss it with
me.
The Thesis:
Every successful essay has a clear thesis. Don’t confuse the topic with the thesis. Your thesis is the main point you make about
your topic. Your thesis cannot be “The
difference between Love in Excess and Tess
of the D'Urbervilles.” That is a
topic. A successful thesis derived from
this topic could be something like this: “While both Love in Excess and Tess of the D'Urbervilles use depictions of
romantic triangles to convey opinions about the nature of love and marriage,
the authors’ treatment of their material reflects their different attitudes
about the gendering of virtue. Moreover, both novels suggest a link between sexual
passion and death. However, Hardy seems most
interested in demonstrating a pessimistic view of the impact on individuals of social/cultural
concepts of what is sexually appropriate, while Haywood seems most interested
in providing a wish-fulfillment fantasy of poetic justice that rewards romantic
devotion. Thus in her novel, individual
feelings can prevail against social restraints and, in fact, seem destined to
do so. (Note that a thesis for a paper
longer than 4 pages is rarely one sentence long.)
Your thesis must make a different point about your topic than
the author makes. That is, if, for
instance, your topic is the way Aphra Behn depicts slavery in Oroonoko,
your thesis cannot be that slavery is wrong because it forces good, noble
people into untenable situations. That
is Behn’s own point, so if you were to develop it as
your thesis, you would just be repeating, in your own words, the plot of the novel. Instead, you might look at how Behn contrasts Oroonoko's belief
system the behavior that results to that of the majority of the novel's
Christians in order to call into question the ethics of slavery. Keep in mind that your thesis must be
complex enough to give you material for a paper of the required length. A paper thesis needs to include two or more
subtopics, the development of which will structure your paper. In choosing a thesis, ask yourself not only
what ideas the text conveys but how they are conveyed. Remember that your reader already knows what
is said in the text. In trying to find
something interesting to say about it, ask yourself what details cause you to
interpret the text as you do and what about the way it is written gives you
specific impressions.
Supporting
Evidence: As much as you need to present your
own ideas, you need to convince your reader that they are reasonable and worth
considering. You do this by presenting
supporting evidence for your claims.
There are three ways to do this in an English paper.
1. While
it isn’t required for either paper, you may do research. If you do, keep in mind two things:
(A) Expert opinions are still
just opinions, consequently they can never prove
a point. Therefore, when you quote a
literary critic's idea about a text, you have not shown that this is the
correct view to have. If you agree with
the critic that is very nice, but you still have to explain what in the text
being discussed causes you to agree.
Sometimes the critic will present evidence that supports your idea. If the evidence is factual, that is, if it
consists of a reference to something that actually occurs in the text or to a
verifiable feature of the text (such as that it is divided into six stanzas
each on a different topic) then you have proof. If you agree with the critic, you must sum up
the argument and add your own ideas in an effort to convince your reader.
Remember that you can also include views that you disagree with in order to
argue with them.
(B) If you and a critic say the same
thing, mention this in your discussion.
2. You
may, and in most cases should, quote from the text you are discussing. When quoting, avoid providing too much
material (words or phrases that are irrelevant to your point) or providing too
little material (so that your reason for thinking this supports your assertion
is unclear). When it is not clear why
you think that a quote supports your claim, you must explain how it does. The most common fear among students in
English classes is that they will explain something that does not need to be
explained. This almost never
happens. When in doubt, explain.
3. You
may summarize or paraphrase. When you do
either of these things remember that you should be supporting a claim, not
refreshing the reader’s memory about what happens in the story. Don’t introduce your idea about a specific
scene with a summary of the events leading up to this scene.
GUIDE TO REVISION
1) The revision must
be turned in with the marked and graded original. No exceptions.
2) Appropriate changes must be made in response to EVERY
comment on the original. If more than 3
comments are not responded to, I’ll stop marking the paper. If you don’t know what a comment means or how
to respond to it, ask. If you can’t see me about it, see the
3) For much improvement in your grade you need to respond
with thorough revision to general comments about conventions, such as reminders
to use present tense throughout or to follow MLA Handbook documentation
style, and to general comments about development such as to tighten paragraph
focus throughout or to relate ideas back to the thesis.
4) Correct all grammar error and
typing errors, even if they were not marked. Part of revising is going over
your work extra carefully.
5) Revisions must be turned in by the due dates on the syllabus -- no
exceptions