English 207 / Fall 2006
Prof. Scott Peeples

Office: 22-B Glebe St., Rm. 201 Phone 953-1993 E-mail peepless@cofc.edu
Web page: http://www.cofc.edu/~peeples/
Office Hours: MW 10:30-12:00, TR 1:00-2:00, and by appt.

Goals and Objectives:
The purposes of this course are to provide an overview of American literary history from the early seventeenth century to the present, through a selection of representative works; to develop students' close reading and critical thinking skills; and to improve students' ability to express themselves through speaking and writing.
Students in this course should demonstrate knowledge of the literary and cultural history of the United States, which includes (a) familiarity with topics, themes, and literary techniques of a representative selection of these works and an understanding of how the works reflect the eras and cultures in which they were written; and (b) familiarity with some of the ways these works of literature have been interpreted and appreciated by others. Students should demonstrate this knowledge through written exams and original essays in which they analyze and interpret literary texts.

Texts:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter 6th ed.)
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (Penguin)
Other texts available via Web-CT.

Graded Requirements:
Daily in-class writing 40 pts. approx.
3 short (3-4 pp.) essays 30 pts. each
Mid-term exam 40 pts.
Final Exam 60 pts.

Total 230 pts.

Policies and Other Information:

1. Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than three classes, I will deduct two points from your final grade for each additional class you miss. (For example, if you miss five classes and your numerical grade for the course is an 81, it would turn into a 77.) You should save the three absences you're allowed for illnesses and emergencies, because I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences when I calculate grades.

2. In-class writing: Almost every day, I will give a brief writing assignment to the class, the main purpose of which is to allow you to write without the pressure of a substantial grade, in order to generate ideas for discussion or for your essays. If you demonstrate adequate familiarity with the text and a sincere effort to develop an idea through your writing, I will give you full credit (2 pts.). For writing that shows little effort or little familiarity with the text, I will assign 1 point. No significant effort/familiarity, no credit. No make-ups.

3. Grading criteria for all other essays: I look primarily for content (evidence of original thinking, claims supported by textual evidence and logic), then effective organization of sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into a coherent essay. Next I am concerned with the clarity of your sentences, your ability to vary sentence structures, and the mechanical correctness of your writing.

Papers are due at the beginning of class on the due date. I will penalize late papers one letter grade (3 pts.) for each class period they are late, or each weekday they are late after classes end. Papers must be turned in directly to me. I will not accept any written work after the day of the exam. I will assign number grades to your essays and exams.

On a 100-pt. scale, A = 92 or above, A- = 89-91, B+ = 86-88, B = 82-85, B- = 79-81,
C+ = 76-78, C = 72-75, C- = 69-71, D+ = 66-68, D = 62-65, D-59-61, F = 58 or below.

If you want to improve your grades, talk to me about how you can write better exams and essays: that's what I'm here for. However, I will not allow you to retake an exam or do an additional assignment for extra credit.

Schedule (All selections can be found in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, except those marked with *, which will be available on Web-CT. Always read the author headnote before reading the selection on the syllabus.)

1: The New World

8/22 Christopher Columbus, Handsome Lake

8/24 John Winthrop: "A Model of Christian Charity"; William Bradford: from Of Plymouth Plantation

8/29 John Smith: from A General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, from A Description of New England; Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: from Letters from an American Farmer

8/31 Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

9/5 William Cullen Bryant: "The Prairies"; William Apess: "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man"

9/7 Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature"; Simon J. Ortiz, "Earth and Rain, the Plants & Sun," "Vision Shadows"

9/12 Carlos Bulosan: "Be American"; Claude McKay: "A Long Way from Home"* "America"; Gish Jen: "Who's Irish?"*

2: The Old World

9/14 Washington Irving: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"*; Mark Twain: from A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court*

9/19 Edgar Allan Poe: "To Helen," "The Fall of the House of Usher,"; William Faulkner: "A Rose for Emily" / Essay A due.

9/21 Henry James: "Daisy Miller"

9/26 Jean Toomer: from Cane; William Carlos Williams: "The Young Housewife," "Portrait of a Lady," "To Elsie," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Lear," "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

9/28 F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Babylon Revisited"; John Cheever: "The Swimmer"

10/3 Ernest Hemingway: "Soldier's Home"*; Alice Walker: "Everyday Use"

10/5 Mid-term exam

3: Economy

10/10 Benjamin Franklin: "The Way to Wealth," from The Autobiography (Part 2), "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker"* / Essay B due.

10/12 Henry David Thoreau: "Economy"

10/17 Frederick Douglass: from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

10/19 Herman Melville: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street"

10/24 Rebecca Harding Davis: "Life in the Iron Mills"

10/26 Willa Cather: "Paul's Case"*; Zora Neale Hurston: "The Gilded Six-Bits"

4: "Faith" is a fine invention

10/31 Anne Bradstreet: all poems in the anthology / Essay C due

11/2 Arthur Miller: The Crucible

11/7 Fall Break

11/9 Emily Dickinson: Poems 130, 185, 216, 448, 465, 1624, 1551*

11/14 Walt Whitman: "Song of Myself" (Sections 1-6, 8-11, 15-17, 24-29, 44, 51-52)

11/16 Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt: "We Two,"* "The Palace-Burner," "Answering a Child"; Robert Frost: "After Apple-Picking," "The Wood-Pile," "Design," "Desert Places"

11/21 Wallace Stevens: "Sunday Morning"

11/23 Thanksgiving

11/28 Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"; Philip Roth: "Defender of the Faith"

11/30 John Barth: "Lost in the Funhouse"*; Raymond Carver: "Cathedral"

12/5 Essay D due

12/9 Final exam

Essay Assignments for English 207: Survey of American Literature

You are required to turn in three of the following assignments. Each assignment has its own due date; you may not, for instance, turn in one of the Essay A assignments on the due date for Essay B. The length of each of these essays is 800 to 1200 words; run a word count and indicate the word count on the paper you turn in. I will penalize a paper for being too long or too short.

All papers should have titles, be double-spaced with one-inch margins, and most importantly, follow MLA documentation style for quoting and citing sources.

Documentation and Plagiarism: I will assign a grade of zero to any paper that is not adequately documented. For the specifics of MLA documentation, there's a link on my homepage to a documentation site; the library web page also includes easy access to MLA documentation guides, and copies of the MLA Handbook are available at the reference desk. I will turn over any paper that I suspect is plagiarized to the Honor Board, and if the student who submitted that paper is found in violation of the Honor Code, he or she will automatically fail this course.

Essay A, due Sept. 19

Option 1: Watch either Barry Levinson's film Avalon (1990) or Terrence Malick's The New World (2005). Compare the way old world/new world encounters are represented in the film to the way such encounters are represented in some of the reading we've done. I don't want you to review the film but to describe whatever insights you gained through comparing it to two or more of the texts we've discussed in class.

Option 2: I placed Bryant's "The Prairies" alongside Apess's "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" for reasons that should be obvious when we discuss them in class. I'd like you to create another pairing of texts, using one text on the syllabus (in the "New World" section) and one not on the syllabus. They may be from the same time period or not; they probably should not be by the same author. Write about what this pair of texts, taken together, reveals about an historical question, controversy, literary style, etc. Describe the ways these two texts "talk to each other" and argue that we can understand either of them better if we're familiar with both. Here are a few examples, which you're free to use for your paper: Columbus's journals and letters paired with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's narrative (selections in the Norton); William Bradford's history paired with Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (which I'll put on Web-CT); "Young Goodman Brown" with Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative (selections in the Norton).

Essay B, due Oct. 10

Option 1: You have been asked to contribute a review to an online archive for undergraduates, aimed at helping them locate useful scholarship for understanding and writing about literature. Review one of the following articles, all of which are available in our library or on Web-CT. (I am not providing complete bibilographic information here because locating the articles is part of the assignment.) The first two-thirds of the review should summarize the essay, and the last third (approximately) should evaluate its usefulness for serious undergraduate students of literature.

Lloyd Daigrepont, "Ichabod Crane: Inglorious Man of Letters"

Daniel Hoffman, chapter on "The Fall of the House of Usher" in Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. (on reserve or on Web-CT)

Dennis W. Allen, "Horror and Perverse Delight: Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'"

Andrew J. Scheiber, "Embedded Narratives of Science and Culture in James's Daisy Miller"

William Boelhower, "No Free Gifts: Toomer's 'Fern' and the Harlem Renaissance" (on reserve or on Web-CT)

Option 2: [You may not choose Option 2 if you chose Essay A, Option 1.] Watch one of the following films: The Fall of the House of Usher (dir. Jean Epstein, 1928), The Fall of the House of Usher (dir. Roger Corman, 1960), The Swimmer (dir. Frank Perry, 1968), Daisy Miller (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1974), or, if you've read the whole book, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (dir. Tay Garnett, 1949). Construct an essay in response to the question, how does the film interpret the written text? Please note that I'm not asking how faithful or accurate the film is in relation to the original text or how good the film is; the question is: how does the film portray, present, and/or interpret the written text?

Option 3: The Halsey Gallery is planning an exhibit (not really) called "Fictional Images." The idea behind the exhibit is to show how we imagine what we read, what we picture in our "mind's eye." Select a single text and find one image or a sequence of images (photographs or paintings) that evoke the story, perhaps by suggesting a specific scene or written image. It might be something you would use for the cover of a book with that featured this story or poem. However, it should not be an image already associated with that story or poem, such as an illustration that accompanied the story in another book or an existing book cover. And it can't be your own artwork. Write an essay explaining you choice of images, and be sure to include copies of the images with your paper.

Essay C, due October 31:

Option 1: In the "Economy" section of the course, we've read mostly works from the second half of the nineteenth century. Write an essay with title "Why Should We Read _______ in the Twenty-First Century?" filling in the blank with the title of a text from the third quarter of the course. The essay should answer that question and suggest how we should read ________ in the twenty-first century as well (that is, how it might be usefully interpreted today).

Option 2: Same as Essay B, Option 3, but with the texts from the third quarter ("Economy") of the course. [You may not choose this option if you chose Essay B, Option 3 - in other words, if you've done it, you can't do it again.]

Essay D, due December 5:

Option 1: Same as Essay B, Option 1, but with this list of articles:

Wendy Schissel, "Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Miller's The Crucible: A Feminist Reading"

Jane Donahue Eberwein, "Emily Dickinson and the Calvinist Sacramental Tradition"

Michael Moon, "The Twenty-Ninth Bather: Identity, Fluidity, Gender, and Sexuality in Section 11 of 'Song of Myself'" (on reserve or Web-CT)

Lyle H. Smith, Jr., "The Argument of 'Sunday Morning'"

Martha Chew, "Flannery O'Connor's Double-Edged Satire: The Idiot Daughter versus the Lady Ph.D."

Emily Miller Budick, "Philip Roth's Jewish Family Marx and the Defense of Faith"

Option 2: Write an essay exploring how one of the following twentieth-century poets appropriates the work and image of an earlier poet: John Berryman in "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" (in the Norton); Allen Ginsberg in "A Supermarket in California" (in the Norton); Adrienne Rich in "I Am in Danger-Sir-"; Billy Collins in "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," or Maxine Kumin in "After the Poetry Reading" (I'll put them on Web-CT or help you find copies if you're interested). Your essay should not deal primarily with autobiography but should focus on how the later poet reads/interprets the earlier poet: for instance, who is Berryman's Bradstreet, or Ginsberg's Whitman? If you like, you may write on more than one of the Dickinson-related poems.