S.D. Blau English 10 Syllabus
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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Contents |
[edit] S. D. Blau, Fall 2001
[edit] Texts
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
The Story and Its Writer (5th Ed), ed. Ann Charters
Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
Additional readings, TBA
[edit] Reading Assignments
The readings assigned for this course will include a large body of work selected by the instructor and a somewhat smaller body of work selected by students. All of the instructor's selections and some of the student-selected work will become part of our shared syllabus and serve as common texts for discussions and critical experiments in class. This common body of texts will include representative poems and poets from various periods of English and American literary history; all the poems in Sharon Olds' The Gold Cell, a broadly representative selection of short stories; plus some additional readings assigned to provide critical and cultural contexts for the assigned literary works and to introduce particular theoretical or critical perspectives.
[edit] Writing Assignments
A. Reading Log. Every student will be required to maintain a reading log to record impressions of, responses to, and reflections on assigned and self-selected literary works as they are being read and studied and at the conclusion of each reading. These logs should be useful to you in several ways. First, they will help you to notice what you notice as you read -- the first step toward becoming an independent and powerful reader. Recording what you notice in your log will also help you discover the value of your own impressions, observations, questions, and other responses as starting points for discussions of literary works. Your log will also provide you with a place to do some low-stakes writing, experimenting with critical approaches and new strategies of analysis introduced to you in this course. Finally, the responses, reflections, and experiments recorded in your log will serve as a reservoir of ideas and first draft writing you can draw upon for the public and more formal papers you will be asked to submit during the quarter. Although your log is largely a private document, written primarily for your own use, you will be asked occasionally to share some entries with classmates and to allow your instructor to audit your logging work. Your log entries will document your reading for the course.
Your log will be of most use to you as a resource and as a record of your reading if you will carefully date each entry and make it clear what text or segment of text you are writing about. So that you might periodically turn in sections of your log, it is wise to use a loose-leaf binder for your log.
B. Papers:
1. A Reading Autobiography. An informal account of your history as a reader from your earliest experiences to your current reading practices, including observations about what and how you read and how you learned to do what you do as a reader. (Due Wed.Oct. 3)
2. Reading Process Research Report. This paper will be an informal research report on your own mental processes as you attempt to read and make sense of an assigned short poem. The idea will be for you to conduct an informal research study of yourself as a reader of a difficult text. Your paper will be an account of what you do as a reader from the first time you look at a poem until you complete what you regard as a satisfactory reading of it or the best reading you think you can manage in the time you are willing to give to it. Your report must also include a reflection on what your self-study reveals about you as a reader or about the particular demands of the work you are reading or about the reading process in general. A good research tool for you to use might be that of the think-aloud protocol, a transcript or portions of a transcript of a tape recording of you thinking out loud as you engage in the process of reading and trying to figure out a poem. In class we'll examine some ways of engaging in this sort of study. The poem to be used for this study will be announced in class. Additional guidelines for this paper will follow. (Due Mon. Oct. 15)
3. Commentaries. These are brief (1-2 pp.) observations, reflections, or critical comments (possibly built on log entries, but revised as more considered contributions to a class discussion) on selected literary works. Your first commentary will be written on a poem you will be nominating for inclusion in our syllabus (see below). Others will be required as the course progresses.
4. Two Interpretive/Critical Papers. These papers may be interpretive or critical or both. In an interpretive paper you might examine and attempt to illuminate any text or set of texts or portion of a text (a short poem or a short passage from a story, for example) that may be said to be interpretively problematic. The purpose of such a paper would be more to reveal and explore a problem rather than solve it, although solutions or possible solutions would be welcome. In a critical paper you might discuss how a particular work of literature (or two or more works considered together) achieves or fails to achieve its effects, or you might evaluate what it accomplishes philosophically, or analyze how it reflects or enacts or subverts particular cultural or aesthetic values or contexts. Further guidelines will be discussed in class. (Due dates TBA, approx wks 5 & 9).
C. Experiments and Exercises. We will conduct a number of in-class experiments in writing poetry and prose and responding to literary texts in a variety of ways. Save everything you write for possible use in a paper and for submission (revised or unrevised) with your portfolio (see below).
D. Portfolio. At the end of the quarter and at midterm time each student will submit for evaluation a portfolio of all written work produced for the course during the quarter. Portfolios will include introductions to the work submitted and retrospective reflections on the body of reading and writing completed. Midterm and final grades will be based largely on the quality and quantity of the material submitted in the portfolio. Guidelines for preparing portfolios for submission will be provided separately.
[edit] Contact Information
Sheridan Blau
Office: South Coast Writing Project
Blgd 402, Rm. 215 (Arts & Lectures Ticket Office Blgd.)
(805) 893-2510. For appointments call 893-3218 or 4422
<sherblau@aol.com>
<blau@education.ucsb.edu>
[edit] Assignments for First 3 Weeks
Wed. Sept 26. The Goldilocks Assignment. Select three poems from our poetry anthology: one that's too hard, one that's too easy, and one that's just right. Write entries in your log on all three poems and write an additional reflection on what makes a poem difficult. Bring the three poems to class and be prepared to discuss the reasons for their difficulty or simplicity.
Wed. Oct. 3. Reading Autobiography
Sept. 26-Oct. 8. Start looking in the first two weeks of class for two poems in our anthology that do not appear on the assigned list (below) but that you think deserve to be on our syllabus as poems everybody should read or will want to read. At least one of these poems must be new to you, one you have never studied before. You will undoubtedly have to read many poems to find two that you would recommend as required reading for all of your classmates. So use the opportunity to write about at least some of the candidate poems (surely those you select and some that you reject) in your reading log. Be prepared by Oct. 8 to introduce your top choice to other readers by helping them to understand the poem and why you selected it. (Don't hesitate to read other poems by the same poet and check the biographical note in your text for useful information you might want to provide). Turn your notes and ideas about your first choice poem into a short written introduction to the poem or commentary on the poem.
Turn in your written commentary on Oct. 8.
Mon. Oct. 15. The reading process research report.
Weeks 1-3. Read as many of the following 60 short poems (all from The Norton Anthology
of Poetry and listed here in approx. reverse chron order) as possible:
Li-Young Lee, "Persimmons"
Dionisio Martinez, 2 poems
Audre Lord, "Hanging Fire"
Gwendolyn Brooks, 9 very short poems
Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"
Stanley Kunitz, "Touch Me"
W. H. Auden, "Musee de Beaux Artes"
Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B"
Robinson Jeffers, "Carmel Point"
William Carlos Williams, 6 very short poems
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Richard Cory," "Reuben Bright"
A. E. Housemen, "To an Athlete Dying Young"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover," "Pied Beauty," "Spring and Fall"
Thomas Hardy, "Hap"
Emily Dickinson, #185, 241, 249, 254,303,435, 465, 1129
Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"
Wm Wordsworth, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "My Heart Leaps Up"
Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"
George Herbert, "The Altar," "Easter Wings," "Prayer I," "The Flower"
Ben Jonson, "On My First Son"
John Donne, "Song," "Woman's Constancy," "The Sun Rising," "A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning," "The Flea," "Elegy 19...," plus Holy Sonnets #5, #7, #10
Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
Sir Walter Raleigh, "The Nymph's Reply-," "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage"
Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee from Me"
Anon (15th Cent), "Western Wind"
