Purpose
of this Course: Even
though this is a course focused on American literature, its purpose is to teach,
support the development of, and provide opportunity to practice reading,
writing, and interpretive strategies; it is not a broad survey of the history
of American literature or an intensive look at a specific genre, author, or
literary movement. In other words, we
will focus on the process of making a text meaningful. We will, however, investigate diversity as a
theme in all the texts chosen for the course and examine textually represented
experiences of multiple ethnic groups as they “encounter America.” All texts represent, in various ways, the
experience of minority groups in the United States.
Course
Description: This
course will focus on discussion not lecture; it will also function as a
workshop, a place where we practice the routines, habits of mind, and reading
and writing conventions of the discipline of English. Our goal is to provide you with tools to make
meaning of a literary text independently via the exercise of reading
strategies, through collaboration and conversation with peers, and by
questioning and researching. Knowledge
in this class is not “teacher-owned.”
What you get out of the class will depend significantly on what you put
into it. Together, we will discuss
literary elements, the historical contexts of the texts we read, our personal
connections to the texts and their characters, and how our own cultural
background contributes to how we read.
Course
Goals: Course goals include:
·
Encountering textual representations of the
experiences of various American ethnicities, appreciating cultural difference,
developing tolerance, learning about the limitations of one’s own socioeconomic
framework.
·
Examining the cultural contact among minority
and majority cultures in the United States, analyzing values, priorities,
expectations, mores, and rules.
·
Developing tools, strategies, and skills to
interpret literary texts.
·
Encountering and appreciating texts representing
different cultures, different genres, and different writing styles.
·
Learning the conventions of English as a
discipline – literary terms, ways of reading and writing, habits of mind, etc.
Required
Texts: Sherman Alexie - Ten
Little Indians
Walter Mosley - Devil in a Blue Dress
Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club
August Wilson - Fences
Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees
Other
Selections…..
Writing Assignments: Required assignments will
be chosen by the instructor from among the following activities.
·
Reading log/journal/Cornell notes: A regular opportunity (daily, weekly,
frequently) for students to record responses to texts, to track characters,
themes, literary elements, author’s craft, to make connections among texts,
and/or to relate texts to personal experience.
·
Quizzes/quick writes/responses: A means for the instructor to make sure
students are reading attentively; quizzes might be short answer, quick writes
might be more extended although still fairly brief summaries or plot, analyses
of characters, identification of themes; responses might be longer analyses of
excerpts of text – all to make students responsible to the schedule for reading.
·
Oral presentations: A way to assess speaking and listening skills
as related to course expectations.
·
Blog Entries: A means for students to communicate their
interpretations of texts, characters, authors, and genres in a technological
format. This will also allow for
responses from fellow classmates, ensuring a more collaborative experience.
·
Literary analysis: A traditional “reading” of a text. This provides a way for students to
demonstrate their understanding of the conventions of English and how to convey
ways of reading, writing, and thinking about literature in proper MLA essay
format.
·
Exams: A representation of what students learned
from the course. Exams will be more
exploratory than objective, bringing to light reader-responses to topics of
diversity.
·
Multi-Genre Project: A way for students to creatively communicate
a variety of responses to a text or cultural group and to consider the most
appropriate genre in which to do so.
Students will compose a variety of genres to represent multi-faceted
responses to texts.
o
Analytic Writing
o
Narrative Writing
