Community College of Rhode Island

Fall 2015

ENGL1200, Introduction to Literature

Instructor: Beth O’Leary Anish

e-mail: *

Office: 1364, Flanagan Campus

Office phone # (voicemail): (401) 333-7139

Office Hours: Mon, Weds, and Thurs: 9-11 a.m. or by appointment

*the preferred method of communication for this course will be e-mail through the course Blackboard site. You will see a “Course E-mail” link on the menu in our course, as well as in the folder for each week. You should check for messages each day. Please use these other methods of contacting me only if you have problems accessing the site. You should print off this syllabus as a reference in case you are experiencing computer problems and need to reach me.

Course Description:

This course examines a variety of literary genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama) as expressions of the human desire to communicate philosophy, experience, and attitudes. Examples found in diverse literary cultures from ancient times to the present are the basis for reading, analyzing, and evaluating these forms of verbal expression. (Meets Literature elective and English concentration requirements)

Lecture: 3 hours (http://www.ccri.edu/catalog/cd-index.pdf).

Methodology:

I will post notes each week on terms and concepts that will help you improve your understanding of literature. We will discuss assigned readings on the discussion board each week in learning teams (each team will answer questions about one of the required readings). Assigned readings will come from our anthology, and will include fine examples of short fiction, poetry and plays. You will keep a reading journal in which you respond to one of the short stories or poems you read each week. You will be asked to interpret literature in writing more formally in two short papers, as well as on a midterm and final exam.

Instructional Objectives:

At the conclusion of this course, you should be able to:

-  recognize the main literary genres, terms and some modes of criticism

-  perform close readings of texts with varying levels of difficulty

-  write thoughtfully and critically about literary works

Required Text and Online Supplement:

Mays, Kelly J., Ed. The Norton Introduction to Literature, 11th ed. New York: Norton, 2013. ISBN#: 978-0-393-91338-5. (CCRI bookstore: http://bookstore.ccri.edu/store1/Home.aspx)

Technical Support:

If you are experiencing technical problems with this or any of your online courses, please see http://it.ccri.edu/forstudents.shtml for a link to frequently asked questions and contact information for IT support staff. If you are looking at a printed version of this syllabus and need technical help, call the CCRI help desk at 401-825-1112, or e-mail them at: .

Participation and Communication:

Though we do not meet face to face for this course, please do not feel that I am not available to you. We will meet here in cyberspace, perhaps more often than we would have in a traditional “on ground” course. The following are the ways we will interact this semester. As you will see, both you as student and I as instructor have responsibilities we must fulfill to make this a successful learning experience.

Weekly Letter:

Our course week will run from Mondays to Sundays. By Monday morning of each week you will see a “Week in Review” letter from me in your course e-mail, reminding you what we accomplished the previous week, and announcing our activities for the coming week. At this time I will also post the materials for the new week, including my lecture notes, required readings, discussion board questions, assignment guidelines, and a chronological list of assignments due.

Discussion Board Participation:

The discussion board questions I post each Monday morning will ask you to apply your interpretive skills to one of our readings. You will participate on the discussion board as part of a learning team, with each team responsible for a different one of our readings for the week. In your learning teams you will try to fully explore a work of literature each week, based on the questions I give you. I will jump in when I feel a team is far off an appropriate answer, as well as to commend you for getting it right!

Your participation on the discussion board is required each week in the following manner: 1) you must post a substantial reply to my initial question by Thursday at 11:59 p.m.; 2) you must post meaningful responses to at least two of your learning team members’ posts by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. You should continue the conversation until you feel you and the other team members fully understand the work of literature.

A “substantial” reply addresses the question I have asked, using specific details and examples from the work of literature in question to support your response. It will be at least 150-250 words long (approximately one or two paragraphs). If you wish, you can compose your post in MS Word to monitor your word count, then copy and paste it into the discussion board as a reply to my question.

A “meaningful” response to your team member’s post contains more than the words, “good point” or “I agree.” Such short responses do not move the discussion forward, and therefore will not be awarded any credit. You will be expected to reply in several sentences, mentioning specifically why you do or do not agree, as well as other thoughts that your team member’s post brought up for you. Thoughtful, detailed responses will be awarded full credit.

Other considerations on the discussion board are the tone and language you use. You should use appropriate language for a classroom (avoid internet abbreviations and foul language). While I will not grade the responses for proper grammar, I do expect you to write in clear sentences that your classmates and I can understand. Discussions should be conducted with civility and respect for all voices and opinions. You can reasonably disagree with your team members without attacking positions that differ from your own. You should carefully consider your team members’ views, and if still in disagreement, should present evidence for your own opinions without belittling the opinions of others.

Your discussion board participation is an integral part of your learning experience in this course. It will count for 25% of your final grade. Participation each week will be judged according to the following rubric, with 9 being the highest number of points earned each week, and 0 (for lack of participation) being the lowest:

3 / 2 / 1
Number of responses / One substantial reply to initial discussion question.
Two meaningful responses to team members’ posts. / One reply to initial discussion.
One or no responses to team members, or two responses to team members that are not detailed enough. / One reply to initial discussion.
Zero replies to team members.
Ideas / Expressed Ideas are clearly stated and supported by evidence from the text.
/ Expressed Ideas
are not always supported by evidence.
/ Expressed Ideas
Have little or no evidence for support.
Relevance / Comments are relevant and important to the discussion question.
/ Parts may be relevant but other parts may be off topic.
/ Comments have little or no relevance to the topic under discussion.

As with all written assignments, late discussion posts will lose credit (1 point off for each day the post is late), and will not be accepted at all after 10 days late. On the other hand, you will earn an extra point if your discussion posts and responses are done on time, for a total of 10 possible points each week.

If you do not complete your discussion posts each week, you are not only jeopardizing your grade and missing out on a key part of this learning experience, you are also letting your group mates down. You have a responsibility to yourself, to your group, and to me to do the assigned readings and discussions each week.

Though you only need to discuss one work of literature with your discussion team each week, you are responsible completing all of the assigned readings, and for reading the discussions of all the other learning teams. This will be important when it comes time to write your interpretive essays, and on the midterm and final exams.

Email:

If you have private or personal concerns, you should e-mail me within our Blackboard course site. You may email me at any time, and I will respond within 24 hours on weekdays, and within 48 hours on weekends. Please note that Blackboard works with its own internal mail system, which means all messages are sent, stored and read within the course, not through your own external mail. To access mail, you have to log on and go to your course, and click on the mail icon on the menu on the left side of your screen (or within our weekly unit folders). I call this internal messaging system “Course E-Mail.” It is recommended that you check your Course E-Mail at least once a day, so that you don’t miss important course information. There will be no alert telling you that you have received an e-mail.

General Course Questions/Concerns:

If you have general questions about the course, its assignments, readings or lecture notes, please feel free to post them as a discussion question in the “General Course Questions/Concerns” forum. By posting a general question here rather than e-mailing it to me privately, you allow other students to benefit from the response. They may be wondering the same thing! If you e-mail me a general question, I will reply to your e-mail and ask if I can post the question and response for the rest of the class to view.

“Water Cooler”:

While discussion board posts should stick to our course topics, it is nice to have a place in an online course where students can get to know one another as you would in a traditional classroom. I have set up the “water cooler” forum for you to have conversations with your classmates that do not relate to our course material. During the first week of the semester you should post a brief introduction of yourself there, stating some of your interests, hobbies, and why you are taking this course online. I will post my introduction first as an example. Posts in the water cooler area will not count toward your discussion board participation grade, and, aside from the first week’s introduction, are not required. Though this is a place for social gathering, the language used here should still be appropriate for the classroom.

Course Requirements/Grade Breakdown:

Journal assignments: 20%

Short essays: 30% (2 essays at 15 % each)

Midterm Exam: 10%

Discussion Board: 25%

Final Exam: 15%

Your schedule for written assignments is as follows:

Assignment / Date Assigned / Date Due
Discussion board participation / Each Monday / Initial post by Thursday, and response to 2 team members’ posts by the following Sunday of each week.
Journal entries / 8/31 / One entry posted by Sunday of each week; will be graded twice during semester (10/11 and 12/6)
Interpretive Essay: Short Fiction / 9/21 / 10/11
Midterm Exam / 10/12 / 10/18
Interpretive Essay: Poetry / 11/2 / 11/15
Final Exam / 12/7 / 12/13

Discussion Board Participation (25%)

As outlined in Participation and Communication above, 25% of your grade will be based on the quality and quantity of your postings to the Discussion Boards. Please see the Participation and Communication for further details about this assignment.

Journal Entries (20%)

Journal entries should be submitted weekly through the discussion board journal feature. These entries are private; only I can read them when you submit them. I will read them each week, so they must be submitted by each Sunday night for full credit, but I will only assign grades twice during the semester, once during week 6 and once during week 14. You will have a total of 12 journal entries for the semester. Your entries will be about one of the required works of literature you read each week. It must be a different work than the one you discuss in your learning team. This will give you the opportunity to explore two works in writing each week. To help guide your response, you can consider questions I have asked the other learning teams. You can also consider what your response was to the work of literature: did it make you think of some of your own experiences, or other things you have read? How? Explain these connections in your entry, which should be at least 2-3 paragraphs long.

Short Essays (15% each, for a total of 30%)

Over the course of this semester you will be required to write two short essays, about 2-3 pages in length each (typed and double-spaced, with 1” margins and size 12 font). You will submit the essays as MS Word documents (.doc or .docx) or rich text files (.rtf) via the Assignment Drop Box tool on the course site. Each of the essays will be worth 15% of your final grade. You will have two weeks to complete each of the essays from the dates I assign them. For information on how these essays will be graded, please see the general Rubric for Literary Papers. The first essay will ask you to interpret a short story or stories we have read for class, while the second essay will ask you to interpret poetry. For each assignment I will give you a choice of topics, and questions to focus your writing. You may be asked to compare and contrast characters from two short stories, or two poems that address a similar subject (more detailed assignment sheets will be available on the dates the essays are assigned).

Exams (25%)

The Midterm exam will be worth 10% of your final grade, while the Final exam will be worth 15% of your final grade. You will have nearly one week to complete each of these open book exams.