Prof. Elizabeth Tallent
214 Margaret Jacks Hall
office hours: Tuesday 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday 1:00 – 3:00
and by appointment (email me & we’ll find a time)
English 65N: Contemporary Women Writers of Fiction
Tues/Thurs 3:15 – 4:45 pm
Thornton Center, Room 207
Because we will follow the same format each week (it’s described below), this calendar lists only the week’s text. Additional readings in handout form may be required; their intent will be to deepen our discussion as it evolves and illumine issues raised in seminar.
Week 1: Introductions and Overview of the Quarter
handouts (sent via email before class)
Week 2: O’Brien, In the Forest
Week 3: Munro, The Beggar Maid
Week 4: Messud, The Woman Upstairs
Week 5: Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes
Week 6: Gordimer, The Pickup
Week 7: Chang, Hunger: A Novella and Stories
Week 8: Latiolais, A Proper Knowledge
Meet with your partner to discuss final projects
Week 9: Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
Week 10: Thanksgiving break
Week 11: presentation of final projects
Weekly format for readings and posts
Weekly post: deadline 12 a.m. (midnight) Tuesday morning
Grading
Seminar participation = 50%
Online forum participation = 25%
Final project = 25%
What can you expect of this class?
You can expect to read, read, read—and then to talk, talk, talk about what you’ve read. The biggest part of your time commitment for this class will be in hours spent reading, and students who have taken a previous version of this class tell me the reading load is serious and demanding but not overwhelming and that they find it enjoyable (I hope that’s true, and I look forward to your feedback).
The writing you’ll do is a lighter commitment in terms of workload, but not lighter in seriousness. It’s meant to encourage originality and fearlessness in reading well as to prepare us for class discussion.
In an ideal freshman seminar, which this aims to be, mutual trust and high regard for originality in your reading and interpretation will encourage gains in confidence. We will read books that fascinate and provoke us, but none, I hope, that leave any of us indifferent. Please know that people come into this seminar with very different experiences of small discussion classes, and that this seminar seeks to create a level playing field for strenuous engagement with women’s writing, and requires no previous reading or knowledge. In reflecting on writing by women, this seminar will naturally involve itself with questions about women characters’ lives, loves, politics, and evasions of politics, but here again, no special preparation is necessary.
Seminar Participation
This seminar depends for its vitality on students' contributions, and each voice is significant and highly valued. Each participant is expected to contribute to our discussion consistently and meaningfully, in class and online. Absolute courtesy at all times is a requirement.
Participation determines a large share of your grade, yet students often feel unsure what a professor values in contributions to discussion. Thoughtful preparation, skillful close reading, and originality are my three main criteria, and I value comments that respond persuasively to what's been said before, that return us to specific passages in the text with fresh questions, or that suggest alternative approaches. The most valuable contributions open rather than close down discussion. At mid-term you will receive a grade for this aspect of the seminar, and I’m happy to work with you at any time to address any difficulties.
Attendance
Attendance is crucial for success in this seminar, and it's mandatory. If you foresee commitments or conflicts that will adversely affect your attendance or your ability to meet the course requirements, please consult with me before committing to this seminar. And during the quarter please account for any absences to me, or they may adversely affect your grade.
Partners
At various points throughout the quarter, students will work in pairs, responding to each other's work-in-progress and offering suggestions. Please arrange meeting times with your partner.
Tea with the Professor
Sometime during the quarter, you’ll have tea with me and we’ll talk about the course in general and your evolving sense of fiction by women in particular, and of course, I'm always glad to meet with you at any time during the quarter.
Posts
Each week a discussion prompt about the text will be posted on our blog site, and you’re asked to respond in a thoughtful but informal essay of 200 – 300 words. The deadline for these online responses will be 12 midnight on the Monday before Tuesday’s class. 7 posts are required for the quarter (meaning that you are free to choose which week you don’t post), and in order to foster continuity, your post should incorporate a minimum of 2 responses to your classmates’ posts: respond to some aspect of the post before yours, and to one other post. (If yours is the first post for the week, come back later to write your responses as comments on others’ posts). Posts will be graded either “credit” or “no credit.” A total of 7 “credit” posts made before the Monday deadline will equal an A for 25% of your final grade.
A natural question for you would be: what counts as an acceptable post? Essentially I’m looking for the same qualities that distinguish good writing wherever it appears: energy, originality, genuine engagement with the text. Wit is lovely, risk-taking held in high regard, and the posing of questions considered a hallmark of good seminar citizenship.
You are responsible for reading everyone’s responses before Tuesdays’s class meeting, and we will use them as a jumping-off place for seminar discussion.
Final Projects
You’ll exchange drafts of your final project with your writing partner and meet to critique each other’s work-in-progress.
Exploratory and creative rather than formal, these final projects, 3 -6 pages long, take as their starting point one of the posts you’ve done for our blog and expand your thinking into an essayistic piece. A good place to find examples of such pieces is the New Yorker. They often publish lively and informal essays with an emphasis on the writer’s voice, and those are qualities this project seeks to elicit. Meant to encourage audacity and intensity in your writing, this project further aims to subvert expectations that writing about literature must be formal or detached. If this works for you the way I hope it will, it should break ground for the interesting writing you will do in the next four years. For many of my students, even if they haven’t tried such a thing before, this ends up being a favorite aspect of the course. Final projects will be given letter grades.
My Philosophy
As a writer I incline toward a writerly approach to the novels and short-story collections on our syllabus, and am deeply interested in aspects of craft, or in how writers do what they do on the page.
As a teacher I see my role as furthering and deepening students' interests, particularly by helping first, intuitive readings to yield interesting questions. Often the most valuable consequence of a seminar like this is that a student acquires greater confidence not in coming up with answers, but in framing provocative questions. Close reading will be a crucial aspect of seminar discussion, and as instructor I will often ask you to clarify or enlarge on a point that's been made, to imagine a “counter” interpretation, or to suggest connections to other works we've read. Here, too, the value of questions comes into play. A truth I rely on is that in literature as in life compelling questions are in themselves a valuable achievement. If the right questions are asked of it, serious literary fiction can illumine the errant, the unforeseen, the glint of a deeper life within this life.
I should say, too, that I completely love teaching this seminar. I look forward with pleasure to meeting its members.