Fall 2004 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Fall 2004. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

Literature

[LIT-001]

1. Literary Interpretation

Instructor: Susan Gillman
Office: 306 Oakes
Office hours: M 11:00-12:30; W 2:00-3:00 p.m.
sgillman@ucsc.edu

Course Description

This course aims to give you an intensive introduction to critical reading and writing on literature. We will approach our texts, all written in English, from a global perspective and strive always to historicize. Lectures will focus closely on the texts, working with basic methods of literary analysis as well as placing the texts in historical and cultural context. Sections will concentrate on your writing, going over rough drafts, doing peer-editing, and working in small groups. Complementing the required readings is an extensive variety of writing activities: in-class free-writes, short papers ("close readings" focusing on selected passages from the text), and longer, formal essays, some on individual works, with others comparative and synthetic. Finally, you will have the opportunity to keep a journal, recording your ongoing responses to our readings, our discussions, and the issues raised.

Required Texts
Available at Bay Tree Bookstore and Slug Books Coop

• The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Mentor), ISBN 0451528247
• Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Dover), ISBN 0486264734
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (Penguin), ISBN 1400033411
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Penguin), ISBN 0140714154
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (Penguin), ISBN 0140433627 [or, if not available, ISBN 0141439475]

Course reader: available at Bay Tree

Recommended Texts

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Diana Hacker. A Writer's Reference (Bedford/St. Martin's)

Teaching Assistants and Discussion Sections

01A TuTh 06:00PM–07:10PM Kresge Acad 194; Jennifer Roscher
01B MW 03:30PM–04:40PM Kresge Acad 194: Julio Leal
01C MW 07:00PM–08:10PM Kresge Acad 194; Leigh Fullmer
01D TuTh 10:00AM–11:10AM Merrill Acad 132; Melisa Preud'Homme-Silver
01E TuTh 02:00PM–03:10PM Merrill Acad 132; Hilda Fernandez-Morales
01F TuTh 04:00PM–05:10PM Merrill Acad 132; Becky Woomer
01G TuTh 06:00PM–07:10PM Merrill Acad 132; Jake Thomas

Course Requirements and Policies

1. Class attendance and participation

Because this course integrates discussion and lecture, your preparation for, attendance at, and participation in each discussion section meeting and in each Monday-Wednesday class meeting are crucial in order for everyone, yourself included, to learn the maximum from the course. Sections will meet twice each week and will focus in detail on the process of reading and writing about literature. Attendance at both section meetings and MW lectures is mandatory; for the first three weeks, you will check in with your TA at each lecture, and for the rest of the quarter, your TA will take silent roll every day. Narrative evaluations will point out uneven attendance records. No more than two unexcused absences are allowed.

Your success in Lit 1 will depend upon your perfect attendance and punctual arrival at section meetings and your scrupulous adherence to deadlines for assignments. Finally, do not hesitate to bring up your concerns in class, in your writing, and in office hours: a course is only as good as the discussion it sparks.

2. Written work

The course involves a variety of writing activities: two short (2-3 page) essays, both exercises in close reading; two longer essays of 4-5 pages each; and two journal entries. Due dates are included in the syllabus.

• The journals will give you the chance to write informally, and semi-spontaneously, about literature. You may use your journal entries in a number of ways: to record your own responses to our readings and discussions; to articulate a set of discussion questions in preparation for section; and/or to brainstorm ideas for your essays (including your thoughts on the interrelations among the texts, the common problems, and differing solutions, posed by the texts).
• The rough drafts required for peer-editing in section (see syllabus) are intended to familiarize you with the editing process, both of your own and others' writing. As such, the rough drafts are a prerequisite for the essays and must be handed in together with the final version.
• Each of the essays will offer you the opportunity to examine, in detail, a well-focused textual issue, and to enjoy doing so. Please keep all your papers together in a folder, to be turned in at the end of the quarter. Your narrative evaluation will comment on these essays, which will represent the culmination of your reading, thinking, and writing at each stage of the course.

• Please note the following policies on all written work:
  Barring illness with medical documentation or family emergency, no late work will be accepted at any time. All essays must be typed and must adhere rigorously to MLA guidelines on paper format, quotation, citation, documentation, and style (see Hacker, A Writer's Reference, sections R2 & R3, on citing sources and integrating quotations, and section M on MLA Documentation). Each essay must follow MLA format and must be accompanied by a complete works-cited page. For any questions about grammar, punctuation, and the mechanics of sentence structure and spelling, please make use of the relevant sections in A Writer's Reference. The quality of your prose in this course should represent the quality of your ideas, just as your essays demonstrate your best writing ability and most creative thinking.

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Lit 1
Fall 2004
Instructor: Susan Gillman
Paper #1: 2-3 pages, due in class on Wednesday, October 6

This paper is a close reading of the passage in Frederick Douglass's Narrative in which he speaks "with an apostrophe" to the white ships on Chesapeake Bay (The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 388-89).

Note: An apostrophe is a rhetorical term meaning a feigned turning away from one's audience to address directly a person or thing, an abstract idea or imaginary object.

One of the fundamental tools of literary analysis, a close reading is an extended, careful ("close") interpretation ("reading") of a passage from a text. Close readings focus on how the text means, as opposed simply to what it means, or is "about." The how is demonstrated through the language and the structure of a passage, that is, how the content is expressed.

The following are a series of suggestions and questions to help your reading of the Douglass passage. Please don't feel compelled to address or answer all of them; they are intended as starting points to spark your thinking process.

In the Douglass passage:

• Note significant details. Circle words that stand out for you, and connect them with words and phrases that can be associated with each other, which point to similar themes or issues. For example: angels/hell, white robed/shrouded ghosts, moving, loosed/confined, man/brute, slave/free. Now you might try to label or define the pattern of references you've underlined.

• Note the changes in the image of the ships, and if there is a shape or pattern to the uses of the images. How do the "I" of the narrator and the "you" of the ships relate to one another, and does this relationship change? For example, follow the different kinds of movement Douglass associates with the ships and the kinds of stasis he associates with himself. How do these associations shift over the course of the apostrophe? What sort of "plot" or story does this unfolding series of images tell? Does this "subplot" (or subtext) deepen or contradict the overt plot, tracing the journey from slavery to freedom, of the Narrative? What would a discrepancy imply?

• Style: define the style and suggest a relationship between the style and the content (meaning) of the passage. For example: the apostrophe works like an elegant balancing act, moving rapidly through many, different oppositions between the speaker (Douglass) and his object of address (the ships). Yet his point is to lament, "with no audience but the Almighty" (388), his own fixed condition as a slave. Think about the structure, progress, and movement of the passage, and how they connect to the overall structure of the text.

• List the larger issues of the text as a whole that are important in this passage (for example: freedom as mobility vs. slavery as confinement; freedom as the word/expression vs. slavery as silence; freedom as manhood/personhood vs. slavery as animality/ inanimateness), and suggest how the passage is related to those issues. Does the passage subvert, reinforce, or add a new dimension to themes worked out in other parts of the text? How so? What connections can you make to the text as a whole?