ENGL 242 A: Reading Prose Fiction

ENGL 242:  Smith Hall 305

Instructor: Robert E. Abrams

Imagining the Extraordinary: The Critique of Everyday Reality in Literary Fiction

Office hours: By appointment, email me first.  (Virtual, via Zoom), Tues, 1-3: Link to Office Hours: 
https://washington.zoom.us/j/93705633616

Meeting ID: 937 0563 3616

Office: B 427 Padelford Hall

Email: rabrams@uw.edu

Tel: 206-765-0547

In this course we’ll explore selected works of literary fiction which transition from everyday reality into strange experiences—Alice’s plunge into “wonderland,” for example, and the metamorphosis of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa into a grotesque bug-- which somehow seem compelling and persuasive even if challenging credulity and violating the most basic assumptions.   What explains the persuasiveness and power of such texts?  In what sense do they reflect back in upon normal worlds such that the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life is challenged, and the underlying ground rules of reality itself begin to slip and slide?   In disorienting the mind, do these texts potentially reorient it as well?  We’ll explore this issue by reading narratives wherein plunges into psychosis, battlefield experiences, Gothicized households, and strange, dreamlike settings, as well as encounters with strange human figures, unsettle everyday frames of reference, challenge ethical assumptions, undermine communally endorsed taboos and forms of censorship, and are meant to linger in the mind long after one has finished reading narratives of this sort.   Our readings will include novels and tales by Lewis Carroll, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,  Franz Kafka, and Ralph Ellison.    All readings will be available in the “Pages” section of Canvas for convenience and to minimize the strain on student budgets.

                                                             ASSIGNMENTS

ASSIGNMENT ONE: GROUP REPORTS

READ THIS IMMEDIATELY AND CAREFULLY: You will be assigned to a small collaborative group (in most cases four persons), and the group will be expected to give approximately a 40-minute report to the class on a specifically assigned date focusing on the work of fiction assigned on that date. (See the Course Schedule located later on in this Syllabus once you have been assigned to your group; group reports will begin on April 11, some two weeks into the quarter, giving even early groups time to prepare, and conclude on May 25.) Each group will be assigned specific questions to cover in its report,  and questions for the various groups will be available in Pages in Canvas, under the file named “Group Questions.”  You will receive your group assignment on Tuesday evening, March 29 (check Announcements in Canvas), and on Wednesday, March 30, during the second hour of the class,  you should make every effort to be there, since at that time I will physically divide the classroom into the 10 assigned groups. You will then meet briefly with your group, and during this brief meeting you should trade telephone numbers, email addresses (whatever seems most suitable) and arrange with your other group members to follow through with two other, longer meetings,  somewhere on campus—or even off campus—or perhaps online through Zoom or through some other online device.  

Let me add that I’m providing special instructions about pre-report meetings to Group 1, since this group goes first, and is arguably vulnerable in ways which I hope to mitigate.  Group 1 should try to meet by the end of the first week to divvy up questions and issues  to be handled by individual members of the group, and these questions and issues can be found in Canvas, in “Pages,” under the title “Group Questions.”  Members of this group will then have until Weds, April 6, to finish reading “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and to prepare at least preliminary reports. (You’ll find “Alice’s Adventures” to be a short read—only 66 pages, including illustrations--and lots of fun to read as well.) On  Weds., April 6, I am devoting the entire session to meeting specifically with Group 1 in this class to offer a coaching session since this group gives their report first, on Monday, April 11.  This Weds. meeting will take the place of Group 1’s second extended pre-report meeting.

All other groups should plan briefly to meet during our class session on Wednesday, March 30, to arrange for two more extended meetings:

• Meeting One: this should take place no later than two weeks before when your group report to the class is scheduled, with the exception of Group 2, which should meet no later than Thursday or Friday of this week. (Let me add that the reading assignment scheduled for Group 2’s report is a relatively short one .) At this first meeting, group members should divvy up the questions and issues listed in Pages in Canvas, under the title “Group Questions,” such that each group member is responsible for preparation of 10-15 minute oral report on their specifically assigned selection of questions.  Immediately after this meeting, all group members should complete reading the short text assigned for their group report,  and should begin preparing for their portion of the oral report.
• Meeting Two: The entire group should then meet one more time shortly before their group reports to the class. At this meeting, each group member should share their report with others in the group and invite a critique of their proposed report.

As for your attendance at group meetings, I will refrain from becoming the professorial version of a helicopter parent, hovering over meetings to ensure full group attendance and participation, but let me caution that, when it comes time for your group reports, I will be listening carefully to make sure that each member gives a solid, informative, 10-15 minute report which indicates that the report has been well prepared, and coordinated with other reports in the group. In most cases I anticipate awarding a “satisfactory” grade for your portion of the group report.  However, if your portion of the report is in my judgement an excellent one, I will award you a 4.0 grade, and that will count for 1/3 of your total course grade.  If your report is disorganized, too brief, sub-par in other respects, and shows signs of poor preparation and poor coordination with the rest of the group,  I will grade you anywhere from a 2.7 downward, and that will also count for 1/3 of your overall grade.  (Let me add your grade for your portion of the group report will be offered to you privately.)  Finally, if for some reason you do not show up for your report to the class, your make-up assignment is as follows:  submission of a 2-page, well-written, single-spaced essay, in 14-point font, 1 inch margins all around, covering your share of group questions assigned to you, and submitted as an attachment in Word to my email address, rabrams@uw.edu, by 9 PM on the last day of class, June 1,  in order to receive credit and a grade.  

During your group reports, I will likely break in to ask questions, or to offer commentary, and the class will be invited to do so well.  Thus it may very well be that the duration of the reports will actually consume the full class period on any given day.

Let me emphasize this important point.  What happens if, in seeking to give your portion of the group report, you find that some portions of the text you are considering leave you feeling bewildered, puzzled, and thus anxious about delivering your report?  In that case, by all means freely admit to members of the class that you are stumped (you will probably find that they sympathize with you), and open up discussion  to the class such that—hopefully—a conversation will ensue, and others in the class will chime in.  I will not discount your grade for the report if you handle difficult aspects of your reading assignment in this way, and ask meaningful questions, provided that you at least to try to offer approaches of your own, and to answer at least some of the questions to be found in “Group Questions” in Pages.

It’s true that you will be spending quite bit of time meeting with your group and preparing you portion of the group’s report outside of normal classroom hours.  However,  if you look at the syllabus, you will notice that between the dates of May 4 and May 16, you will need to meet personally with me simply for an 11-12 minute meeting, during which I will offer you a personal critique of the first draft of your term paper.   In addition, most of you need not attend class on Weds., April 6, since I will be meeting with Group 1 on that date in this classroom in order to coach them before their report on April 11.  This adds up to a serious portion of time in which you are not required to meet in-person in class. You should thus regard the time you spend preparing for your group report as a kind of trade-off in which you are released from significant stretches of scheduled class time in order to engage in “asynchronous learning,” as it is called, outside of regularly scheduled classroom hours. Also, no group reports have been assigned until Monday April 11, which falls a full two weeks into the quarter, giving even the earliest groups time to prepare for their reports.   You should also bear in mind that all assigned readings in this class are not unduly long, and they are all easily available for your convenience in Canvas.  Only one novel—Invisible Man—will be assigned toward the end of the quarter, and even in that case, we will be reading portions of the novel only rather than the whole text. 

ASSIGNMENT 2:  TERM PAPERS (NORMALLY YOUR TERM PAPER WILL COUNT FOR ½ OF YOUR TOTAL GRADE, WITH THE EXCEPTION, SEE ABOVE, THAT IF YOU RECEIVE A NUMERICAL GRADE FOR YOUR SHARE OF YOUR GROUP REPORT, YOUR TERM PAPER WILL COUNT FOR 1/3.   IN THAT CASE, ALL THREE ASSIGNMENTS WILL COUNT 1/3.)

Since this is a course in which you earn “W” (Writing) credit, you will be required to write a term paper, the first draft of which you will be required to submit to me by 11 PM, Monday evening, May 2. (Members of Group 7, which will give their report on this date, are not obliged to submit the first draft of their essays until 11 PM, Wednesday evening, May 6).  At a scheduled time between May 4 and May 16 (look for this in Announcements in Canvas), you will be required to attend an individual conference with me during which I will go over your first draft with you with an eye to your preparing a revised, final draft of your essay, due by 9 AM, Thursday, June 2. The paper will be 10-12 pages in length, double-spaced, in 14-point font, with 1-inch margins on all sides. This is very important: submit all essays to me (both first and final drafts) as files in Word, sent to me as attachments to my email address: rabrams@uw.edu.    I will not accept .pdf copies of your essays.

For your term paper, select one or two of the texts assigned in this course, and in this text (or texts), explore how the literary plunge into an extraordinary reality outside habitual, everyday experience becomes a learning experience for the reader and, in many cases, for the main character as well in the text or texts which you have selected.  In writing your essay, feel free to review “Group Questions” in “Pages” (including specific issues and questions keyed to the text or texts you have selected) for helpful pointers on how to write your essay.  Also, to save time in your busy lives, you are welcome to write on the text which your group (see Assignment One, above) has been assigned for its report to the class. The only exception here is if, for one reason or another, you are unable to join your group for your share of its scheduled in-class report.  You are then required to write your term paper on a text or texts other than the text covered by your group’s report.  This is because, as indicated earlier, failure to offer your share of the group report in class will require you to write a  make-up essay (see Assignment One above) on the text assigned to your group.

I am required to enforce an early May 2 deadline because of the requirement, in a “W’ course, that you be given a chance to revise the first draft of your essay, thereby submitting a second draft in the light of my initially indicated revisions. Given the quarter system here at the UW, this means that you should decide upon the text or texts that you want to explore fairly quickly, and to begin you writing of your term paper by or a bit after mid-April.  Late submissions of your first draft may preclude my being able to offer you a personal conference between May 4 and May 16.  At best, if this is the case, I will try to provide you with a short written response to your first essay, offering you guidance in the completion of your final draft.  But it's far, far better for you to submit the first draft of your essay in time, and to show up for your individual conference between May 4-16. 

In this “W” course, writing clear, grammatically polished, and well-punctuated prose will become an important factor for me to consider in the grade that I assign to your term paper.  For this reason, if you know yourself to be a weak writer, I seriously suggest that before submitting even the first draft of your essay, you take advantage of the help available to you through the following link, which will facilitate a meeting with a writing tutor:

https://www.lib.washington.edu/ougl/owrc (Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.)

ASSIGNMENT 3: FINAL EXAMINATION. (NORMALLY THIS WILL COUNT FOR ½ OF YOUR TOTAL GRADE, WITH THE EXCEPTION, SEE ABOVE, THAT IF YOU RECEIVE A NUMERICAL GRADE FOR YOUR SHARE OF YOUR GROUP REPORT, YOUR FINAL EXAM WILL COUNT FOR 1/3)

You will be required to take an open-book final exam at the end of the quarter covering all readings.  The exam will consist of a series of short questions specifically testing how well you have read each assigned text.  These questions will ask you to identify a episode, character, or passage by author and by text, and to comment on its significance, and to answer other short questions on all texts that have been assigned.

Attendance:  your regular attendance at class sessions is expected, although I recognize that issues may emerge requiring you to skip a class every and now then. If, however, I begin to encounter classes which are sparsely attended, I will immediately change my policy, and will begin to take attendance. Your attendance in class will then count as “participation,” and I will grade you on your attendance for the remainder of the quarter, my specific policy governing how to count that grade to be decided depending on when, in the quarter, I feel obliged to take attendance. You are required to check “Announcements” in Canvas on a regular basis to check if and when I revert to this policy, which I by all means hope to avoid.  So please try to attend class regularly.

A NOTE ON PLAGIARISM:

NOTE CAREFULLY:  YOUR WRITTEN WORK IN THIS COURSE SHOULD REPRESENT YOUR OWN THINKING AND WRITING.  IN OTHER WORDS, YOUR WRITTEN WORK SHOULD NOT BE PLAGIARIZED.  PLAGIARISM IS A VERY SERIOUS OFFENSE, AND ALL CASES OF PLAGIARISM IN THIS CLASS WILL BE REPORTED TO THE UNIVERSITY FOR APPROPRIATE DISCIPLINARY ACTION. 

The following statement was prepared by the Committee on Academic Conduct in the College of Arts and Sciences. It amplifies the Student Conduct Code (WAC 478‐120).

One of the most common forms of cheating is plagiarism, using anotherʹs words or ideas without proper citation. When students plagiarize, they usually do so in one of the following six ways:

• Using another writerʹs words without proper citation. If you use another writerʹs words, you must place quotation marks around the quoted material and include a footnote or other indication of the source of the quotation.
• Using another writerʹs ideas without proper citation. When you use another authorʹs ideas, you must indicate with footnotes or other means where this information can be found. Your instructors want to know which ideas and judgments are yours and which you arrived at by consulting other sources. Even if you arrived at the same judgment on your own, you need to acknowledge that the writer you consulted also came up with the idea.
• Citing your source but reproducing the exact words of a printed source without quotation marks.

This makes it appear that you have paraphrased rather than borrowed the authorʹs exact words.

• Borrowing the structure of another authorʹs phrases or sentences without crediting the author from whom it came. This kind of plagiarism usually occurs out of laziness: it is easier to replicate another writerʹs style than to think about what you have read and then put it in your own words. The following example is from A Writerʹs Reference by Diana Hacker (New York, 1989, p. 171).

o Original: If the existence of a signing ape was unsettling for linguists, it was also

startling news for animal behaviorists.

o Unacceptable borrowing of words: An ape who knew sign language unsettled linguists

and startled animal behaviorists.

• Borrowing all or part of another studentʹs paper or using someone elseʹs outline to write your own paper.

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Important Notice:

Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Faculty Syllabus Guidelines and Resources. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form available at: https://registrar.washington.edu/students/religious-accommodations-request/.

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Course Schedule:

March 28:  Introduction to the Course

March 30: During the initial 40-50 minutes, I will deliver a lecture on the relationship between “reality’ and ‘the imagination."  Assignments of students to groups charged with giving classroom reports on assigned readings will be available in “Announcements” on Tuesday evening, March 29, and will also be announced in class during the second hour of today's session, which you should make sure to attend.  During the second portion of the class, students will meet with others in their group, and at that point they will decide how to communicate with one another.  The purpose of these smaller group meetings is to determine the dates, times, and places of two more group meetings. (See what these group meetings will entail earlier in this syllabus, under “Assignment 1: Group Reports.")

April 4:  Ahead of time, in "Pages," open the file entitled "Group Questions," which consists of a detailed and, hopefully, a helpful guide to the sorts of things you should consider when writing your term papers and when giving your in-person class reports.  We'll go over this guide fairly extensively in today's session.  My hope is that with this background, you'll have a good idea of how to approach your group reports and your term essays.                                                                                                                                                                                                   

April 6:  I’ll meet in our classroom to coach Group 1, which has been assigned to deliver its report on Alice in Wonderland, in consideration of the fact that members of this group will be giving the first report of the quarter.  All other students are not required to attend this class session.

April 11: Group #1 reports on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

April 13: Group #2 reports on Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown.”  The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

April 18: Group #3 reports on Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

April 20: Group #4 reports on Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

April 25:  Group #5 reports on Poe, “The Descent into the Maelstrom.” The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

April 27:   Group #6 reports on Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle.” The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

May 2: Group #7 reports on Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.  The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

Important: with the exception of the members of Group #7, the first draft of your term paper is due on this date, by 11 PM. Submit your essay as an attachment to an email in Word, not .pdf, sent to my university email address: rabrams@uw.edu. Members of Group #7 will have until 11 PM, Weds., May 6, to submit the first draft of their essays to me for review.

May 4, 9, 11, 16:  Individual conference sessions with students.  Check Announcements in Canvas for the date and time of your individual conference with me in which we’ll go over the first draft of your term paper.   These conferences will be arranged to provide you with feedback on the first draft of your paper and to offer instructions for improvement in converting your first draft into a final essay, due June 2, 9 AM. 

May 18: Group #8 reports on Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

May 23: Group #9 reports on Kafka, The Metamorphosis. The rest of the class should complete reading this text by this date.

May 25: Group 10 reports on Invisible Man: The Prologue plus Chapter 1 and 2 only,  with special attention to: (1) the odd, hallucinatory string of events which “Invisible Man (as the narrator of this novel is anonymously named) experiences in the Prologue; (2) Chapter 1—especially the significance of the Battle Royale and the dream of one envelope inside another at the close of the chapter; (3) Chapter 2 with special attention to Trueblood's dream and to Norton's response both to the dream and Trueblood's tale of incest with his daughter.

May 30: Holiday

June 1: Course Conclusion.

June 2: Revised final draft of your essay due by 9 AM.  Submit your essay as an attachment to an email in Word, sent to my university email address: rabrams@uw.edu

Your take-it-at-home, open book final examination will be available on Canvas as what Canvas calls a “Quiz” beginning Tuesday, June 7, 9 AM and ending Weds, June 8, 6 PM.