Schedule

Final Schedule: Weeks 14-16

Week Fourteen Ralph Waldo Emerson: Texts, Contexts, Criticism

Individual conferences this week. The conferences are an opportunity for you to outline your work during the final two weeks of the semester. Your work will fall into two areas: completing the final essay on Emerson and “curating” the writing you have done throughout the semester so that your portfolio reflects your best work.

W April 20 Master Tropes: Literature, Poetry, and Imagination.

F April 22 Writing Process Workshop Brainstorm, Course Learning Outcomes

For next time: Two jobs: 1) Write two to three paragraphs of reflective writing on the concept of your essay. Think aloud, get your thoughts into a sequence of sentences and 2) Transcribe at least five quotations from Emerson’s writing that you are planning to use in your own essay. Post both of these on your thinking page

Week Fifteen

W April 27 Writing Process Workshop: Caityln and Mark will share examples of the essay writing process using examples from their own and others’ work.

For next time: Post on your writing page a few paragraphs (a draft opening or introduction) to your proposed essay. Include a working title, an epigraph (if you are considering using one). Make clear in your introduction the text(s) you are planning to work with in your essay.

F April 29 Writing Workshop: this class session will give you time to work on your essay. Mark and Caitlyn will be available for conversation and feedback. Bring your computers! Bring your books!

Week Sixteen

M May 2 Reading Day

F May 6 Final Examination Block 10:30-12:30 PM. No class. The final essay on Emerson and the portfolio of writing (your completed blog) is due by the end of the final Examination time block

*****

Schedule

Please bring your laptop or tablet to every class session

Please bring The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms to every class. Each student will introduce at least two terms during the semester

During the first half of the course, weeks 2-6, you will compose a 500 word essay after class on Friday. Please see the “Writing” page on this course web site for a description of these weekly writing exercises. Please post the essay on your “Thinking” page

During the second half of the course, following spring break, we will be doing a case study on the writing of of Ralph Waldo Emerson and we will talk before spring break about your responsibilities as a reader and a writer

There are eight longer writing projects. More on these essays as we go.

Week One The English Major

W January 20 Introduction to the class. Class introductions. Setting up your blog

For next time: Reread the posts on the course web site “Getting Started” and “Why a Blog” and take some time to become familiar with Word Press. Bring any questions to class

F January 22 Building your blog: the book list, the commonplace book, the reading journal. Discussion of visual rhetoric and writing conventions for print and the web

For next time: 1) Visit the web site of the English Department at Keene State College and come to class prepared to talk about what you have learned and to share questions about the academic field you have chosen to study in college. Consider the Mission statement, program objectives and learning outcomes, and course requirements in relation to your interests and goals as a student in the program;  2) Complete and post your first writing project, a narrative on writing in school; and 3) on Tuesday or Wednesday before class read the essays of your classmates and come to class ready to talk more about the essay as a form of writing

Week Two What is English?

M January 25 Due: Project #1, narrative on writing in school (posted on your blog by 5 PM)

W January 27: Discussion of the academic essay: expectations, discipline-based and generic conventions, forms of writing

For next time: Do a web search for English departments. Think about the ways undergraduate majors in English are designed. Consider the mission statements and the look again at the course requirements in English majors. What choices and values appear to be determining the English major at different colleges and universities? How do you make sense of the many areas of study that fall under the broader definition of English: linguistics and discourse analysis; rhetoric and composition; creative writing, literature and literary criticism; critical theory and cultural studies; English education, and so on? What might the history of English studies (philology, literary history, literary criticism) teach us about the current organization of the field? What might the emergence of writing and composition tell us about the past and current state of the field of study? What is literary theory?

F January 29 English is. . . .

For next time: Complete and post your second writing project on English studies. You are responsible for completing a  post-class essay on your “Thinking” page as well

Week Three Reading as a Writer 

“But every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading. . .gives us, little by little, the solution of this problem.” —Gaston Bachelard

M February 1 Due: Project #2 (posted on your blog by 5 PM)

W February 3 Reading as a Writer. Digital texts will be posted and/or print texts will be distributed in class

F February 5 Reading as a Writer. Digital texts will be posted and/or print texts will be distributed in class

For next time: You are responsible for completing the post-class essay on your “Thinking” page

Week Four Writing as a Reader

“Our talking about poetry is a part of, an extension, of our experience of it, and a good deal of thinking has gone to the making of poetry, so a good deal may well go to the study of it.” —T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

W February 10 Metaphor, Conceptual Metaphor, Metonymy

F February 12 No class (Mark off campus)

For next time: complete project #3 on Ways of Reading. You are responsible for completing the post-class essay on your “Thinking” page

Week Five Language and Figures of Thought 

“These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

M February 15 Due: Project #3 (posted on your blog by 5 PM)

W February 17 Poetry as Experience. Digital texts will be posted and/or print texts will be distributed in class

F February 19 Poetry as a Field of Action. Meet in the Keene State College Archives in the Mason Library to experience the Modern Poetry Archive

For next time: complete project #4 on writing about a book of poems. You are responsible for completing the post-class essay on your “Thinking” page

Week Six Poetry and Poetics

“Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved. (What makes this passage in a novel seem ironic? What makes us sympathize with this particular character? Why is the ending of this poem ambiguous?) Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations.” (61) – Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory:  A Very Short Introduction

W February 24 Poetics & Hermeneutics. Selections from Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction: read Chapters 1-4 (1-68) 

F February 26 Criticism and Theory. Problems in Literary Criticism and Theory; selections from Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction: read Chapters 5-8 (69-120) and have a look at the Appendix “Theoretical Schools and Movements.” Note how succinctly Culler is able to encapsulate modern theoretical movements in literary and cultural studies.

Due: Project #4 (posted on your blog by 5 PM)

For next time: Find an example of the following literary forms: an anecdote and a parable. Post the anecdote and the parable on your “Thinking” page with a brief commentary on each example. The commentary will use each example to explain the two forms. Reread Chapter 6, “Narrative,” in Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory, 82-93. Narrative, Read William Carlos Williams, “The Use of Force,” and Italo Calvino, “Black Sheep.” You are responsible for completing the post-class essay on your “Thinking” page.

Week Seven Texts as Repesentation: Narrative and Narrative Forms

W March 2 Narrative: Anecdotes, parables, short stories

For next time: Read Italo Calvino, “The Man Who Shouted Theresa” and opening paragraph of Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler . Also read “Daughters of the Moon,” an unpublished text that is part of the Cosmicomics project. Salman Rushdie offers a useful commentary on Cosmicomics that will help locate this text in the literary project of which it is a part.

F March 4 Narrative: sudden fiction, short stories, narrative poems, the novel

For next time: Digital texts will be posted and/or print texts will be distributed this week. You are responsible for completing the post-class essay on your “Thinking” page.

Week Eight Texts as Representation: Drama and Dramatic Forms

W March 9 Before class, please watch the 2013 performance of Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” (1916) directed by Nancy Greening and filmed by Jasmine Castillo. In class we will read from the script of the play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer, and journalist Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948),  the founder of the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theater company. Also read the entries on “Drama,” 124, and “Play,” 385-86, in the Bedford Glossary.

F March 11 No class (Mark is out of town)

For next time: Begin reading Read Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you have the time and/or the inclination, read in the primary texts over break. When we return we will begin with Selected Early Addresses and Lectures, “The American Scholar,” 56–59 (all readings, unless otherwise noted, are in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry). No additional writing is required this week.

Week Nine

Spring Break

Week Ten Ralph Waldo Emerson: Early Writings

W March 23 Creative Reading Workshop: Reading the”The American Scholar”

For next time: Essays: First Series, “Circles,” 174–82; from Essays: Second Series, “The Poet,” 183–97, “Experience,” 198–213;“The Method of Nature,” 81–93

F March 25 Fall 2016 Course Registration Workshop. Reading Workshop on Creative Reading and Creative Writing

For next time: Complete Project #5 on Emerson’s “The American Scholar.” Read Emerson, Sermons, 3–26; Perry Miller, New England‘s Transcendentalism: Native or Imported?” (1964), 668–78; Barbara Packer, “Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1988), 725–38; Stephen Whicher, “Emerson’s Tragic Sense” (1953), 663–68; Joel Porte, “The Problem of Emerson” (1973), 679–96

Week Eleven Ralph Waldo Emerson: Texts and Contexts

Registration for fall 2016 classes begins!

T March 29 Project #5 on Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (posted on blog by 5PM)

W March 30 Writing Workshop: The Art of Quotation (I)

For next time: read “Quotation and Originality,” 319–30 and come to class with three sentences or passages that you find interesting, effective, productive

F April 1 Writing Workshop: The Art of Quotation (II)

For next time: complete Project #6 on Emerson and the Essay. Read in the Norton responses from the nineteenth-century, 584–656, note especially commentaries by Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Jose Martí

Week Twelve Ralph Waldo Emerson: Texts, Contexts, Criticism

T April 5 Project #6 on Emerson and the Essay (5 PM)

W April 6 Reading Workshop: Nineteenth-Century Reviews and Impressions

For next time: Read George Santayana, William James, John Dewey, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and A. R. Ammons; Stanley Cavell, from “The Philosopher in American Life” (1988), 738–42; Cornel West, from “The American Prehistory of American Pragmatism” (1989), 742–58

F April 8 Twentieth-Century Reviews and Impressions

For next time: Read Essays: Second Series, “Politics,” 213–21, “New England Reformers,” 221–33; from “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” 348–59, “Address to the citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law,” 359–72; Len Gougeon, from Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (1990), 758–67

Week Thirteen Ralph Waldo Emerson: Later Writings

W April 13 Emerson and Reform

For next time: Read from The Conduct of Life, “Power,” 279–89, “Illusions,” 289–96

F April 15 Emerson and The Conduct of Life. Looking Ahead: Final Essay Project discussion

For next time: Read Letters and Social Aims, “Poetry and Imagination, 297–319; from The Dial, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” 333–47

Week Fourteen Ralph Waldo Emerson: Texts, Contexts, Criticism

W April 20 Emerson and the Literary Arts.

F April 22 Writing Workshop on Final Emerson Essay

For next time: prepare for individual conference

Week Fifteen

Individual conferences this week

W April 27 Writing workshop (TBA)

F April 29 Writing workshop (TBA)

Week Sixteen

M May 2 Reading Day

F May 6 Final Examination Block 10:30-12:30 PM. No class. The final essay on Emerson and the portfolio of writing is due by the end of the final Examination time block