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English 2121 British Literature II
Dr. F. W. Brevik
147 Payne Hall
Office hours: MWF 08:00-12:00, MWF 13:00-15:00
Office telephone: 912.358.3344
E-mail: brevikf@savannahstate.edu
Course description and purpose:
This course is a survey of British literature from circa 900 A.D. up to 1789. As a course that intends to provide a breadth of knowledge rather than specialized and narrow depth, it will necessarily assume a fairly cursory nature in its treatment of more than two hundred years of literature. It goes without saying that a literature course such as this one requires a fair deal of reading and writing, and part of the intention behind this class is to instil the critical apparatus necessary for producing intelligent, critical analyses of literature. Having said that, I hope most of all that this course may serve English and non-English majors alike and that you will be able to enjoy the texts for their narrative and aesthetic quality.
Required textbooks and materials:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ninth edition. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt et alii. Vols
A, B, and C. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
A vanilla folder with your name on it, for record-keeping
Course policies:
Absences and attendance:
Beyond official university activities that demand your presence, there is no such thing as an excused or unexcused absence. If you miss seven, you fail. Note that late lectures and field trips with other classes are no valid excuse for showing up late for this class.
Behaviour:
This is a university, a place of higher learning, and the courses we take are studies at the university level. This means that a certain code of conduct is to be expected and enforced. To wit: when this class is in session, there will be no screaming, no stretching, no loud yawning, no jumping, no fighting, no dancing, no checking up of e-mails on your mobile phones, no use of laptop computers (unless you have a documented need), or any disruptive conduct whatsoever. If any of these rules are broken, I will ask you politely to leave the room for the remainder of the session. If you refuse to do so, I will call 911 and will report the matter to the University Police and Office of Student Ethics.
Competency and grading:
I expect you all to have mastered the basics from high school and will not spend time teaching you grammar and spelling. Such remedial issues must be dealt with at the ReWrite Centre, which I strongly advise for those who struggle or wish to improve. Note that professors are not paid to remedy such deficiencies and will therefore not teach them during class time, office hours, or any other time. For such issues, tutors can help and are the people to contact first. They can be found in the library, and they are paid to help.
This assumed competency, which is a fairly uniform standard across the nation, means that grading will be a lot harder than what you may be used to. Typically, those who have by their own testimony made A’s during High School now struggle to accept the fact that their work is merely competent, that is to say on the C level. Get used to this feeling!
Folder:
You need to buy a folder, put your name and the class numbers on it, and keep all your graded work in it. Every time you turn in work, it has to be submitted in this folder. At the end of the term, the whole folder will contain all the graded work and be turned in to me.
Marking and grades:
The grading rubric is in effect--again, do not expect high grades for shoddy work. Length, mechanics, spelling, grammar, MLA, elegance of language, citations, research, and content are ALL important. For the »A,« there must be no exceptions.
Furthermore, to save us a lot of time: the professor gives out grades but does not discuss them--instead, he refers students back to the rubric on the syllabus. The grades are a reflection of the work, an evaluation of the response to the assignment, and the alphanumerical value that is given to it on the transcript cannot, for reasons of fairness, be swayed by outside factors and certainly not by heckling and badgering. Unless some egregious error is politely brought to my attention, I see no reason why I should explain over again that which I have already explained in writing. If you disagree, drop the class.
Please note also that students are expected to know what they made on previous assignments and also to be able to calculate percentages. Hence, absolutely zero time will be spent on my part calculating whether you have a chance of making a certain grade in the class.
Papers:
All papers must be turned in stapled, typed in MLA format, double-spaced, and documented, and full-length, written in Times New Roman, 12pt. font. I will accept no e-mailed papers. I repeat: I will accept no e-mailed papers. Papers must be turned in first thing before class, in your folder, and may not be turned in after class, after one day, or in a different format.
Plagiarism:
See seperate sheets and quiz. The most important ting to remember is that all internet sources are forbidden, with only the following exceptions: Galileo database articles that are of a scholarly nature and peer-reviewed. Apart from those, stay 100% away from Google, Yahoo, .com sites, and even Wikipedia. I will flag even the least sentence as plagiarized--never assume that cheating is allowed if it is done just a little. Academic dishonesty is the greatest threat to the very worth of the university degree and everything we stand for. For this reason, papers or assignments, including presentations, that steal material from others without giving credit in citations will result in the student in question failing the entire course, possibly even suspension or expulsion.
Late work:
Late work will not be accepted. It will in fact automatically be given the zero grade. I repeat again: late work will not be accepted. And let me make it really clear: the dog did not eat your homework, your printer did not jam, your computer did not crash, the e-mail did not get lost, your hot-air balloon did not get stuck on Mount Everest, and all the other potentially damaging mishaps that could have prevented you from turning in your work did in fact never happen, but instead you actually took grown-up responibility by turning in the paper on time or even early. Why? Because it is the only chance you have at making a grade.
Office hours:
When you come to my office, you will come with a specific question of an academic nature. Since I am simply not interested in hearing any of the personal stuff that is going on in your life, you will spare me the details. If you come to complain about your grade, I will spare us all a lot of time by politely asking you to read the syllabus and grading rubric once more until you understand it and then ask you to leave so as to make room for people with actual academic-related questions. I will also spend no time rehearsing the lectures during my office hours--if you have missed a class, for whatever reason, ask a classmate to lend you the notes. As I am not a babysitter or a minder, it is not mine but in fact 100% your responsibility to catch up with missed sessions.
Records:
The gradebook I keep is the only one that matters--the number of absences and grades that go into it are what count--unless there is actual proof to show that I have made an error. Should you not have the incontrovertible proof of such a mistake, you will spend no time challenging the entries after the fact.
Responsibility:
It is 100% the responibility of the student to turn in work on time, to come to class, and to obtain information missed because of absences. It is of course also the responsibility of the students to know at any given time what their number of absences is and what they have made on tests and papers. I strongly suggest you keep close track of both your grades and your attendance. Coming to me to ask how many absences you have or what grades you have made thus far tells me that you do not assume this responsibility.
Tardies:
Come in on time--it is absolutely not difficult. If the door is locked, it is because I find late-comers disruptive to the class. The door will not be opened, and you are absent due to your coming late. The university’s policy on 15% is in effect, which means that you will fail the course automatically after incurring seven (MWF)/five (TR) tardies/absences. If you have a problem with this policy, I strongly suggest you find another section or give up university studies altogether.
Tests:
Material on the tests will come from the textbook, from classroom discussions, from student presentations, and from group discussions.
Topics:
Papers must be written on the topics set out on the assignment sheet or in the e-mail. Expect a grade of zero if you write on a topic that lies outside of the perimeters of the official topics. The paper’s title should indicate which topic you are writing on.
Textbooks:
Everyone needs to buy the textbook--no electronic versions will be accepted. If, after two weeks, you have not yet gotten the book, you will be turned away from class and counted absent. The book is the most necessary tools we use as a group, and it is important that we have the same version so as to avoid confusion and lack of participation. Since many receive vouchers and financial aid specifically towards books, these should be affordable for all.
Plagiarism and academic cheating:
All plagiarized papers, tests, and presentations will be referred to the Office of Student Ethics—no exceptions. The penalty for plagiarism is an automatic “F” for the entire course—again, absolutely no exceptions.
Academic cheating can typically include:
a) forgetting to enclose borrowed material in quotation marks (or properly indented
chunks to signify a block quotation.);
b) failing to mention the author or his/her ideas in your prose narrative;
c) taking any portion of an online project and presenting it as though it were your own.
d) copying down the answers of a test from the student sitting next to you.
e) collaborating with other students towards papers that are supposed to be completed
individually.
Note that I accept no internet sources towards any papers or presentations or assignments. The only exception to this rule is material found in online, peer-reviewed journals. When in doubt, please ask.
90% of plagiarism cases can easily be avoided thus: ALWAYS CITE.
Americans with Disabilities Act:
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, SSU consistently undertakes to provide, by every reasonable effort, assistance and appropriate accommodations to qualified students with disabilities. Students with disabilities are responsible for identifying themselves and for providing documentation from qualified and licensed medical or testing personnel to counselling services as soon as possible.
This following bit is from the catalogue:
Students with Disabilities or Other Documented Needs
A diagnosis of learning disability and/or physical disability must include evidence of a discrepancy between ability and achievement in the area affecting test performance and must be consistent with the definition and criteria for evaluation provided in Section 2.22 of the Academic Affairs Handbook. The documentation for each student is to be evaluated and maintained by the institution.
Students with Visual, Hearing, or Motor Impairment
An alternative means of exempting or examining students with visual, hearing, or motor impairment may be used. Such examination shall equal the standards of the Regents' Test. In most cases, a Regents' Test would be administered with accommodations determined by the institution on the basis of the student's needs. The Regents' Reading Test administration for a student with a visual, hearing, or motor impairment should correspond as closely as possible to the student's usual means of obtaining information from text. A visually impaired student, for example, could use the Braille, large-print, recorded or text-to-speech version of the Reading Test. If it is necessary for the Reading Test to be scored locally rather than submitted to the Regents' Testing Program Office for scoring, a test form designated by the Regents' Testing Program Office may be used. If a student with a visual, hearing, or motor impairment is unable to handwrite an essay on the regular Essay Test form for rating, the essay may be copied to the regular Essay Test form by a proctor and submitted to the Regents' Testing Program Office for rating. The Regents' Testing Program Office cannot obtain ratings for essays that are not written on the regular test form or that are otherwise identifiable as special administrations. The Regents' Testing Program Office does not have to be informed when a student with a visual, hearing, or motor impairment takes or passes an alternative test. However, the student record system must indicate that alternative procedures have been used. The documentation for each student is to be evaluated and maintained by the institution and summarized in the institution's Annual Report
on Learning Disorders.
Allowable Accommodations and Restrictions
The accommodations that may be made are limited to the following:
-extended time
-separate room for test administration
-large-print test format
-use of a word processor, typewriter, or scratch paper for composing the essay (The student must handwrite the essay on the regular essay form for grading, or, if the student's diagnosis indicates an inability to copy the essay, the test administrator or proctor must copy the essay as written by the student with no changes and send both the original and copied essay to the Regents' Testing Program Office.)
-Specialized software may be used to read an essay to the student (If the student's diagnosis indicates a visual processing deficit that prevents the student from reading his or her own essay accurately, the proctor may read the essay aloud exactly as written while the student makes corrections to the essay.)
-transcription of reading test responses to the scanner sheet
Essays must be rated through the usual rating process, which does not allow for the provision of any information about the student to the raters. Raters cannot be asked to take a student's disabilities into account when rating an essay. Instead, appropriate modifications in the test administration process must allow the student's essay to be rated through the usual process.
Academic Information
All test administrations must meet the following conditions
The essay and Reading Test responses must be submitted to the Regents' Testing Program Office for scoring. The product submitted must be in the standard format for grading: the essay must be handwritten on the regular essay form with no extra paper, and the Reading Test responses must be recorded on the student's scanner sheet. Except as indicated above under allowable exceptions for students who are unable to copy or read their own essays, the product submitted for grading must be produced by the student with no assistance provided or changes made by any other person. Tests must be administered under secure conditions, and all work must be completed under supervision. Accommodations other than those described above may be made only upon recommendation of a Regents Center for Learning Disorders. The Center will make recommendations for students with learning disabilities or acquired brain impairment. The procedures used by the Center are described in Section 2.22. The Regents' Reading and Writing Skills courses may not be waived for students with disabilities. However, appropriate accommodations will be provided.
In case of fire or other emergency:
Emergency escape routes are indicated on the classroom walls.
Grading rubric:
Descriptions of Essays Exhibiting Adequacy
Thesis and Analysis
Have a thesis statement that makes a focused, analytical (or interpretive) claim (not just an observation).
Offer an analysis of only one text.
Offer an analysis grounded in close reading and careful observation of specific details, using these to support your thesis’ claim about the text.
Body Paragraphs and Flow
Use each body paragraph to support the thesis; at the C level the nature of the connection between a body paragraph and the thesis might not be articulated as completely as it should be, perhaps leaving too much interpretive work to the reader.
Maintain paragraph coherence (by keeping each paragraph to a single topic).
Provide specific supporting evidence for each claim; body paragraphs’ topic sentences will generally offer a claim; the evidence you should offer will usually be a short quote or a paraphrase, though occasionally a summary will be an effective piece of evidence; longer quotes (four or more lines long) will almost never be appropriate to papers five or fewer pages long.
At least begin to explain the analytical connection between the detail being offered in evidence and the claim it is meant to support; at the C level, this kind of explanation may be less consistent that it ought to be.
Use transitional words, phrases, or sentences to signal your reader through logical or topical shifts.
Document and Citation Formatting
Apply correct document formatting, as described on the handout available on eLearning; no errors in document formatting are acceptable in a passing paper; additional penalties may be given for formatting errors.
Use quotation marks to set off short quotes; use correctly-formatted indentation to set off longer quotes, if longer quotes are used.
Provide a parenthetical reference at the end of every sentence in which quoted or paraphrased (or otherwise borrowed) material occurs.
Include a citation, on a works cited page, for every text from which material is drawn, whether for quotation, paraphrase, or background information.
Generally be correct in all aspects of MLA citation, though minor errors that do not interfere with a reader’s understanding of where the borrowed material begins and ends may be present at the C level.#
Style
Usually use words for their specific meaning, avoiding vagueness and generalization; papers not meeting this level will have so much nonspecific diction that the reader struggles to see the point of two or more sentences per page, on average.
Avoid awkward sentence structures (such as short, choppy sentences or long, wandering sentences) for the most part; at this level, one or two sentences per page, on average, may be awkward, but no more than this.
Mechanics
Usually avoid errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar; such errors as are present may interfere with clarity or style but will not interfere with a reader’s understanding of the sentence’s meaning; at this level, no more than half a dozen such errors should be present per page. To move from adequacy to effectiveness, a paper will additionally need to:
State the thesis clearly, making obvious to the reader not only which sentence is the thesis but also precisely what that thesis means.
Use the thesis and introductory paragraph to indicate the significance (the “so, what?”) of the interpretive claim made in the thesis: why does it matter that you’ve understood this thing you’re trying to explain?
Make the role each paragraph plays in advancing the thesis clear (consistently showing how each paragraph relates to the thesis) and unique (showing how the claim made in each paragraph supports the thesis in a different way that the claim made in the other paragraphs).
Consistently offer explanatory analysis showing your reader something of how each piece of evidence you offer can be understood to support the claims you are making.
Use transitions that not only signal that shifts are happening but also help the reader to understand the nature of the shift (are we going deeper into the same topic, moving to a related topic, going to a similar place elsewhere in the text you’re analyzing, etc.?).
Be absolutely correct in citation, from the use of quotation marks to the presence and content of parenthetical references to the content and format of the works cited page.
Be precise in diction and avoid awkward sentence structures, with only one or two exceptions in the whole essay.
Have no more than one or two errors of spelling, punctuation, or grammar per page. Moving up from effectiveness to excellence will further require a paper to:
Offer a thesis that makes an interpretive claim which is noteworthy in its creativity, nuance, insight, or daring.
Provide comprehensive analysis in explaining the manner in which the evidence supports the claims being made in each paragraph.
Use transitions that guide a reader through the logic of the argument without calling undue attention to themselves; these will often be transitional sentences which link one paragraph’s main idea to the next paragraph’s main idea.
Consistently have precise diction, avoid awkward sentences, and be perfect with regard to spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
________________________________________
“D” papers fail to achieve adequacy in one or more of the above points. To receive a passing grade, your paper must attain at least a passing level in each grading category. If your paper in any way falls below the standards for a C, it will not pass, even if other aspects of the paper are successful.
“F” papers are inadequate in a larger number of these points or egregiously fail to attain adequacy, such as by being off topic, outside of the required length, too riddled with errors to follow for one or more paragraphs, or so faulty in citation practices as to suggest that borrowed material was actually original to the paper’s author (this, by the way, is one of the more egregious forms of plagiarism).
Grades:
A—91-100 (Excellent)
B—81-90 (Above average)
C—71-80 (Competent)
D—61-70 (Deficient)
F—60 and below (Failing)
How the final grade is weighted:
Oral participation—15 %
Three in-class essays—45 %
Quizzes: 10 %
Midterm exam—15 %
Final exam—15 %
Tentative schedule, subject to change:
1st week: Introduction
12 August: Introduction to course policies.
14 August: The Venerable Bede; The Dream of the Rood; Caedmon’s Hymn
16 August: Marie de France, Lanval
2nd week:
19 August: Beowulf
21 August: Beowulf
23 August: Beowulf
3rd week:
26 August: First in-class essay
28 August: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; the General Prologue
30 August: The General Prologue continued
4th week:
2 September: Labor Day—no classes
4 September: The Miller’s Tale
6 September: The Miller’s Tale cont’d.
5th week:
9 September: John Skelton, selected readings
11 September: Sir Thomas Wyatt, selected readings.
13 September: Wyatt cont’d.
6th week:
16 September: Saint Thomas More, Utopia
18 September: Utopia continued
20 September: Second in-class essay
7th week:
23 September: The English Bible, readings TBA
25 September: Roger Ascham, “The Schoolmaster”
27 September: Student presentations
8th week:
30 September: Drake, Adamas & Barlowe, Hariot
2 October: Midterm exam.
4 October: Fall Holiday—no classes
9th week:
7 October: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act I
9 October: Acts II and II
11 October: Acts IV and V
10th week:
14 October: Film: Prospero’s Books.
16 October: Film continued.
18 October: Film continued – discussion.
11th week:
21 October: John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book One
23 October: PL con’t.
25 October: Milton’s “Areopagitica”
12th week:
28 October: Introduction to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.
Read John Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe.”
30 October: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
1 November: Olaudah Equiano, selected readings
13th week:
4 November: Read Jonathan Swift, 2298-2299; Gulliver’s Travels, part one.
6 November: Read Gulliver’s Travels, part two.
8 November: Read Gulliver’s Travels, part three.
14th week:
11 November: Read Gulliver’s Travels, part four.
13 November: Read Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”
15 November: Third in-class essay.
15th week:
18 November: Read Alexander Pope, excerpts from An Essay on Criticism.
20 November: Read Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock.”
22 November: Read The Earl of Rochester, The Disabled Debauchee,” “The
Imperfect Enjoyment,” 2162-2165.
16th week:
25 November: Read about Mary Wollstonecraft at
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wwollstonecraft.htm,
and the Author’s Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman here:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mw-vind.html.
27 November: Thanksgiving Holiday
29 November: Thanksgiving Holiday
17th week:
2 December: review for final exam; summing up the semester
Final exam: TBA
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