Course: Eng 118, Stories of Our World

Course: Eng 118, 20th-Century Literature

1. Date of Application: Oct. 15, 2012
2. Name, Department of Proposer: Barry Horwitz
3. Name of department housing course: English
4. Name of Chair: Carol Beran
5. How often is course taught: Yearly
6. Course prerequisites: None
7. Unit value of course: 1
8. Normal class size: 24
9. Number of sections expected to be taught in Fall 2013: 1
10. Number of sections expected to be taught in Spring 2013: 1
11. Is the course appropriate for first-year students: No
12. Relevant Learning Goals: Artistic Understanding
13. Chair will oversee submission of student work: Yes
14. Chair will oversee instructor participation in norming & assessment exercises: Yes

TEACHING

How the course will guide students toward achieving the learning outcomes:

1a. Explore works of art.

In "20th-Century Literature," students read, analyze, and discuss a selection of modern and post-modern works drawn from poetry, fiction, drama, or essays. The instructor may focus on one genre or several, to delve into aspects of the modern experience. These modernist and post-modernist works will cover a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and national contexts. Authors may include Tolstoy, Chekov, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Albert Camus, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, and Sandra Cisneros, among many others. Poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists can provide perspectives on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, race, and class. Whether the course focuses on one artistic form, such as poetry or short story, or a variety of forms, the students will learn to identify the structural elements of artistic forms. A typical assignment would include written analysis of a daily reading, and generating questions for discussion.

1b. Analyze/interpret form and meaning:

Students will produce critical questions and responses to the daily reading assignments. In order to explore the way poems, novels, plays, stories, or essays are constructed, they will use a critical vocabulary established for each genre. Among the terms of art to be employed are: free verse, stanza, metaphor; character, plot, development; exposition, climax, alienation; voice, theme, first person narrator—terms that can be applied to specific genres. In a modern short story-based version of the course, called "Stories of Our World," students will analyze the characters, action, and theme of a story, and connect them to the historical and cultural context in which it was written.

In the case of the first person narrative of Ralph Ellison's "A Party Down at the Square" (1930s), students will analyze the point of view and the cultural perspective of the African American youth who tells the story. Ellison uses the naïve speaker to explore the racism and violence of the southern U.S. in his time. By analyzing the limitations and the unconscious insights of the young speaker, students can open up the thematic and cultural context of the story.

1c. Apply discipline-based vocabulary:

Students will master the concepts of literary analysis including ways of presenting character, methods of constructing plot and action, and how to extract ideas and themes from a variety of texts. We will explore the basic forms of both modernism and post-modernism. In their critical essays, they will use the literary terms that are appropriate to the art form they are analyzing. They will also use critical essays written both by the writers themselves, and by professional literary critics. By noting and reacting to the artists' manifestos and the critics' analyses, they will use the terminology particular to one or more art forms. Special attention will be paid to the writers' attempts to expand and adapt their forms to modern conflicts and crises.

1d. Explore the significance of the artistic work in its cultural contexts:

The course considers an array of multinational or national traditions and voices from the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be able to properly situate the works intohistorical and cultural epochs. The selected texts may address issues representative of the cultural issues and changing demographics of current culture, such as American, European, and other cultures. The student can focus ona wide variety of themes such as: racial, religious, sexual, and gender identity, the changing dynamics of the family, or the politics of neocolonialism. Some iterations of the course can focus on European continental fiction, British and American poetry, or the post-modern novel. When they explore the limits of national, cultural, or geographic boundaries, students will encounter issues of social structure, economics, war, race, and gender.

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), students will note the disturbing dystopic elements in an ironically described "utopia." The disturbing emotional elements of the starving child in the basement alert readers to a profound conflict between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' in an otherwise affluent community, clearly reflecting the mid-century boom times and the anomaly of persistent poverty.

LEARNING

How coursework will be used to measure student achievement of the outcomes:

1a. Look at and read works of art:

The course is discussion based. In addition to poems, novels, short stories, plays, or essays, students read varieties of literary criticism. In class, students participate in discussion and support their points of view by referring to the text and to the writers' commentaries. Students will be assessed through their participation in classroom discussion, journal writing, and critical analysis, both written and oral. Coursework includes writing original essays based on each student's critical insights and research.

1b. Analyze/interpret form and meaning:

Students will write essays and reports, analyzing poetic forms and styles, narrative techniques and themes, or other formal elements of poetry, fiction, drama, or essays. Students will consider how the specific structures of individual works affect their meaning. Also, they will consider the interplay between the form and the ideas and points of view that emerge from the zeitgeist of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

In James Joyce's "Dubliners" (1914), the writer invents new forms of storytelling, such as the use of epiphanies, in order to develop his idea of "paralysis" in the modern world.

1c. Apply discipline-based vocabulary:

Discipline-based terminology will be measured by students' mastery of literary and critical terms, which they encounter and employ in criticism, discussion, and essay writing. Students are expected to use the technical language acquired in class and apply it in their writing, explaining the terms and how they operate in each specific work.

1d. Explore the artistic piece's significance within appropriate contexts:

Daily discussions and assignments explore the relationship of the text to its multiple origins in personal, historical, and cultural contexts. Successful students will interpret the text with regard to biographical, political, and social themes drawn from history and researchrelevant to each workin its time and place.