COURSE GUIDELINES

SOME WORDS OF ADVICE

What are the specific challenges of this correspondence course? Studying by correspondence has advantages as well as disadvantages, and we should briefly consider them. On the one hand, it's clear that literary studies have the advantage of being rather straightforward in terms of work requirements: all that's needed is the textbook, and the practices of careful, critical reading. In this sense, even classes conducted on campus depend upon students doing much of the work during periods of independent study, and so the advantages of on-campus or correspondence work are about equal. On the other hand, literary studies also flourish best in classrooms built around dialogue: environments where different interpretations of passages, texts, and even the era under study can be stated, questioned, and contested. The classroom environment is also ideal for instructors to use in bringing out background information. Historical, political, social and cultural contexts can suggest fruitful alternative approaches to those suggested by the text alone. This is where the professional training of university teachers serves students best, and in lacking it you will be disadvantaged.

What to do? Open a dialogue with the instructor. Use the opportunity with each written assignment to pose any questions you might have to your instructor.

GRADING POLICY

Your final grade will be determined by weighing the 31 assignments as 75%, and the Final Exam as 25%, of the course grade.

All work will be graded with regard to both the aspects of interpretive effectiveness and grammatical correctness, discussed above. Moreover, work on individual assignments and questions will be graded by how effectively it addresses specific learning objectives for the course, detailed earlier.

As always, an "A" grade signifies excellent work which, with only minor faults, exceeds basic expectations for success and achieves original insight; a "B" grade signifies good work which, though marred somewhat in argument or expression, demonstrates potential for original thought; a "C" grade signifies work which satisfactorily meets the basic requirements of an assignment; while a "D" grade is deficient with regard to those requirements; and an "E" signifies a quite general failure to understand what those basic requirements for success would involve doing.

SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS

You should read all of the introductory materials in your anthology, not only the general overviews of the literary periods, but those introducing the specific authors and texts under consideration. These are musts. You should also feel free to read any additional critical or historical material that interests you, and to use what you have read (with proper citation) in your written work for the class. But it isn't necessary. At the very back of the Norton Anthology is a section headed "Selected Bibliographies," which contains suggestions for further reading. Public libraries have many of these secondary sources, and college libraries will have still greater resources, such as scholarly journals with essays about the literary texts. Use them freely.

CITING SOURCES

In the written assignments submitted for this course, all usage of ideas, information, and actual wording from primary and secondary sources must be appropriately documented. When you employ a brief quote from a poem under study, or an idea from the introductory essays or footnotes, you should document its origin by providing a page number reference, in parenthesis, like this: (p. 1405). Material drawn from sources outside the anthology can also be documented in parenthesis, but in a longer format. You should provide, at a minimum, the author's name, the title of the work, and the date of publication, followed by a page number reference, like this: (F. Karl, American Fictions, 1984, p. 306). Failure to meet these minimum requirements for scholarly work can constitute plagiarism, and lead to a failing grade for the course.

COMPLETING YOUR ASSIGNMENTS

Do the assignments in the order the workbook presents them, carefully following all directions given for completing the assignment. For most of the assignments it will probably be wise to read the study questions through before reading the actual text. This will help to focus your work. Especially with the longer reading assignments, such as James's Daisy Miller or Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, you should familiarize yourself with the questions before starting, and develop the habit of taking careful notes as you read. Ideas, responses to specific passages, questions about details that puzzle you, your own statements of theme or judgments on issues of character and events, observations about the writer's style or patterns of imagery or metaphor that seem significant -- all of these should go into your notes, and from there be filtered into your responses to the study questions.

Study questions will vary in terms of the response they demand, thus in terms of the length expected. In some instances, a few sentences in direct response to a specific question is all that's needed. These brief questions typically involve matters of fact important to any further interpretation. Here, a successful answer is one that just gets the facts straight--a proof of careful reading. In most cases, though, a paragraph or two will be necessary for you to successfully answer the question. These instances will typically require you to make an interpretive claim about an aspect of the text, then to both develop and support that claim by referring to specific details of the text. Here, a successful answer is one that can reasonably support or defend its stance by effective reference to textual details.

Some of the assignments will call for a longer, more highly developed exposition: that is, an essay response. You will be given specific instructions as to the required length and form of these brief essays, when they come up. There are no unquestionably "right" answers to these questions. They will not be factual, to determine if you have read the work or not, but conceptual, to see what you can learn by analyzing the work. These questions ask you to use your skills in analysis, your creativity in interpreting your analysis, and your imagination to draw conclusions from your analysis and interpretation. Successful essays on literary topics develop a clear "reading" of the text under discussion. That is, the essay makes a broad claim about the meaning or "theme" of the text, and it argues in support of that general claim by organizing a set of more specific claims, each well supported by ample evidence from the text, just as you practice doing in each of the one- or two-paragraph responses.

This does not mean there are no inadequate answers to the questions asked. What it means is that inadequacy is determined by how thoroughly you present your analysis of the work in your written assignments, how carefully you justify your interpretation, and how persuasively you defend your conclusions. It also means that the questions are not asking for obvious, easy, or safe answers, and that more credit will be given to the answers that are based on more thorough and searching work. Always remember that your instructor need not be supplied with a plot summary or synopsis of the text under question. An analysis rather than simply a summary is what's required by the longer, paragraph- or essay-length, responses.

In addition, keep in mind that any reader of literary texts must be willing to grant the writer his or her subject. This is a way of saying that the job of critical reading does not involve liking or disliking the writer's subject matter-the what of the text. Whether it be adultery, industrial labor, communist agitation, or Protestant Christianity, the subject matter should neither be approved nor disapproved in itself, and students should generally rule out such evaluative responses. Yet the work of critical reading does involve critiques of the writer's effectiveness in handling that subject matter-the how of the text. How the writer overlooks certain things while foregrounding others, stylistically embellishes still other things, while startlingly arranging still others: these are the aspects of writing with which a critical analysis should properly concern itself.

Finally, all written work, should be typed, double spaced, and error free. All written work, from sentences through whole essays, will be held up to commonly accepted standards of correctness in grammar. Responses plagued by errors of word choice, spelling, punctuation, and basic sentence grammar will be graded down. Remember this is an English course! Always put only your best work in the mail.

EXAMPLES OF GOOD, AVERAGE, AND BAD STUDENT WRITING

Three student essays on irony in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Shadow."

Good:

Andersen uses irony bitterly to undercut Romantic social and literary assumptions. "I was in the anteroom of Poetry," the title character tells the Scholar, "And I will tell you everything" (p. 66). And in a way the Shadow does this, though he never answers a question directly. The Scholar, assuming that his Shadow would tell him of "The Good, the True and the Beautiful" (p. 67), questions him as to whether the court of Poetry consisted of the stock figures from Romantic narrative: knights of old, children playing and beautiful ladies.
However, though the Shadow answers the Scholar's questions evasively, he nevertheless gives his answer through his actions. He uses his lack of depth to make money though blackmail, and dresses well "for that is what makes the man nowadays" (p. 72), eventually becoming a public figure and consort of the Princess in a parody of the stock Disney ending. The Princess, "whose malady was that she could see too clearly" (p. 70), agrees that the Scholar, reduced at the end to making a living as the Shadow's shadow "for all gentlemen must have one" (p. 73), must be done away with lest the artist tell the truth to the world.
So Andersen takes the Romantic assumption that Poetry might have something to do with the "Good, the True and the Beautiful" and puts it to the test of mid-nineteenth century, middle-class values, which prefer images to reality. The Scholar, having made the trip to that Italy all romantics crave, cannot stand the sun and must stay inside, insulated from reality as Andersen suggests Romantics have always done.
While Andersen's irony employs the narrative pattern of the Romantics in that its form comes out in the brutality of his ending, and in his setting the story in the crass modern world, I don't agree that the Princess was cured at the end--she and the Shadow deserve each other, and the world deserves them. "You have a noble soul" (p. 73), she coos at her two-dimensional consort, and in Andersen's view, that's what sells these days. "All in all, the world's a wicked place" (p. 68).

This first essay has a lot going for it: the author is familiar with the story, going above plot summary. She begins with a clear statement and continues with specific references to the text, spliced in smoothly to their sentences. The writer uses real verbs and nouns, few pronouns and no passives. She puts the story in the context of Romanticism and combines fact with critical insight and personal opinion.

Average:

Hans Christian Andersen, the famous Danish writer, uses irony in his story "The Shadow" when the Scholar becomes the shadow of his own Shadow. This is ironical, because the Scholar is the one who is in search of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. He never finds it because he is locked in his room and is not able to be where Poetry is, though his shadow is able to do this. The Shadow finds out that the way to succeed is through lying, and becomes the husband of the Princess. They are married at the end and this is ironical too, because you would think a princess would want somebody better. They have to kill the scholar and this is certainly ironical for him, because he's dead now and can't tell the truth about the evil Shadow.

The second writer responds to the question, but does so in a dry, lack-luster manner, without specific references to the text. The bland style stems largely from the reliance upon flabby verbs and vague pronouns.

Bad:

Anderson's story is about a wise man who looses his shadow. The shadow goes across the street and visites Pottery, and then makes a lot of money. He comes back to the wise man and wants some more money but the wise man becomes his shadowe instead and they go to where the shadow marries a princess, but they need to kill the wise man because he knows too much.

Avoid this third style, with its mechanical errors and plot summary (inaccurate at that).