Course Overview

This memo and the attached materials are designed to give you a sense of the subject and structure of 350:220. Please read them carefully before you design your syllabus and order texts. I will schedule an orientation meeting for all first-time instructors (and any continuing instructors who wish to attend) before the end of the semester. In the meantime, please feel free to call or e-mail me with any questions you might have regarding the course.

The Subject of 220: "Principles of Literary Study II" (350:220) is a required course for all English majors. It is a course in the close reading and analysis of narratives. Its goals are to introduce majors to some of the assumptions, terms, and techniques that shape the study of narrative and to give them extensive practice in close reading and rhetorical analysis. Given the proliferation of approaches and schools of criticism within the discipline, there can perhaps be no consensus regarding which assumptions, terms, and techniques are foundational. But certain preoccupations--with the sequential form of narratives and master narratives, the play of discourses, the shaping of worlds, the representation of others, the constructing and deconstructing of arguments, and the embedding of texts in historical and literary contexts--inform the study of narrative in the discipline today.
The goal of 220 is not simply to expose students to "readings" generated by such preoccupations and practices. Our task is to help students make such practices their own. The subject of the course, in other words, is not the texts we teach but rather the assumptions we make about these texts, the questions we put to them, the techniques we use to analyze them, and the language we use in discussing them. And the goal of the course is to give students the ability to work effectively with some of these assumptions, questions, terms, and critical strategies. It is for this reason that the course is structured around the study of a limited number of texts and the writing of several short (5-7 page) papers.

Course Structure: One way to structure the course so that students get a thorough grounding in several foundational strategies of critical reading is to use the "Critical Terms and Concepts" archive of citations attached to this letter. This archive can also be copied to your floppy disk from the computer in Carol Hartman's office; this makes it possible to revise the archive to suit your own pedagogical priorities. I distribute the archive at the beginning of the semester and assign specific sections at different moments. Thus, for instance, I will ask students to read the section on discourse analysis before we read Jane Eyre, and then use the novel to practice this approach in close readings of specific passages and broader attempts to name the discourses and discursive contests that inform the novel. When I turn to the next text, I will introduce a new analytical template, but we will continue to read for discursive form as well.

A second approach to teaching the course would be to use an anthology such as Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, edited by Michael Hoffman and Patrick Murphy (Duke UP). Focused on the rhetorical analysis of fiction, rather than on historical issues, this volume contains a range of essays on sequential form, spatial form, point of view, voice, and the discrimination of period genres. (See, for instance, Peter Brooks' "Reading for the Plot" and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "Breaking the Sentence," two extremely useful treatments of sequential form.) I have not used this text to organize discussion of critical strategies, but I can easily imagine doing so. Be aware, though, that if you do assign it you will have to teach your students how to read critical essays as well as how to approach narratives.

Obviously, it is only possible, in a single course, to help students become proficient in a limited set of critical methods. Please plan to focus on a short set of concepts and skills. And please keep the primary focus on these concepts and skills, rather than turning attention to the methods and goals of a particular critical school, whether poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, or culturalist. To do the kind of analysis required by such schools, students must already possess the skills and habits of close reading and rhetorical analysis that many of our students sorely lack and that 220 is designed to teach.

Reading Assignments: Students should read four novels (at least one of which should be an eighteenth or nineteenth century work) or three novels and a set of shorter works. Beginning with several short narratives makes pedagogical sense: it gives students a chance to get a clear sense of narrative structures before they dive into the vastness of the novel. And if the shorter works exemplify a single form of narrative--I have worked with spiritual biographies--it becomes possible to introduce the concepts of genre, convention, and intertextuality. It does not make pedagogical sense, for some of the same reasons, to take on extraordinarily demanding texts such as Ulysses, The Ambassadors, or Gravity's Rainbow. The goal of the course is to enable students to use a range of critical tools, not to test their readerly endurance and acumen.

Writing Assignments: Students should write four 5-7 page essays, distributed across the semester, or three essays and a series of exercises keyed to the shorter narratives. (I generally set the first two or three assignments myself and then challenge the students to produce interesting topics for the last papers.) You may want to supplement the paper assignments with journal-keeping, in-class writing, or other short exercises. But if you wish to revise the reading or assignment structure of the course in any more substantial manner, you should check with the coordinator before proceeding.

Pedagogical Challenges: 220 offers a number of singular pedagogical challenges. While it is advertised as an introductory course for majors, many students do not take it until they are juniors or even seniors. It is wise, then, to emphasize that 220 is an introduction to narrative rather than an introduction to the major. And you must be prepared to face a class in which the range of critical sophistication varies dramatically.
Since 220, like 219, is designed to give students practice in class discussion as well as in critical writing, instructors also face the challenge of promoting class participation. To this end, it is important to ensure that students keep up with the reading assignments. One way to do this is by asking them to be ready, each day, to take the class to a particular passage from, or issue related to, the day's reading. In-class writing and quizzes are also effective. It often helps, as well, to take students to a particular passage and ask them to analyze it closely, exploring its sequential and spatial forms, point of view, discursive elements, and style, as well as its function in relation to the larger text.