EN11M : Texts and Contexts I
Fall Semester 2010
Monday and Thursday 11:00-11:50
Wednesday 10:00-10:50
Click here for the course syllabus.
Instructor: Robert Epstein
Office: 120 Donnarumma Hall
Office Hours: Tuesday and Friday 1:30-3:00, or by appointment
Office extension: 2787
E-mail: repstein@fairfield.edu
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The EN 11-12 sequence offers a full year course of study in the literary and language arts intended to help students develop facility with college reading and writing. Students will practice increasingly sophisticated reading of complex texts across a broad set of contexts and genres, learn to employ a variety of strategies for writing in different rhetorical situations, and use reading and writing to practice inquiry, reflection, critical thinking, and argumentation—competences critical to academic achievement across the core and major and, more broadly, to living productive lives in the new literate cultures of the twenty-first century.
ENGLISH 11 engages students in the academic life of college by teaching a variety of practices intended to foster effective reading, writing, researching, and critical inquiry. Students learn to draft, revise and edit their own texts, and respond effectively to the texts of their peers. The course offers practice with writing & reading assignments which call on different contexts, (purposes, audiences, forms or modes) as a means of introducing students to the many kinds of reading and writing they will do across the curriculum and beyond. Students will learn to foster their academic curiosities, practice reflection, and read deeply to join the conversation of ideas through the careful use of primary and secondary sources.
REQUIREMENTS
Students are required to attend all class meetings. If you have to miss a class for a foreseeable obligation, inform me beforehand. I also expect all students to have fulfilled the assignment and to be prepared to participate in class discussion. Attendance and participation will be factors in grading. Please bring the assigned texts to class.
The course is divided into three units: "Education and Language"; "Human Nature and Government"; "Brave New Worlds," focusing on an extended, close reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Each unit will lead to the production of an essay. Before each essay is due, a class period will be devoted to a thesis workshop, in which we will work together on thesis development and essay organization. The following class will be devoted to a draft workshop, in which students will work in small groups to critique their classmates' essays and their own. I will also read each students draft and return it with comments and suggestions, and students will have the opportunity to revise the essays before re-submitting them. There will also be a fourth essay, in which you will compare The Tempest to any one of the readings from the first two class units.
For most class meetings, in addition to a reading assignment, a response paper will be required. These informal essays, generally about 200-300 words in length, will encourage the students to organize and express their ideas about the assigned reading. They will not be graded directly. Instead, you are to send the response paper to me before class as an electronic file attached to an e-mail, and also save a copy in a folder on your computer. This folder will constitute your electronic portfolio. At the end of the semester, you will review your electronic portfolio and submit it in its entirety along with a summative essay evaluating your progress over the course of the semester, both in terms of your ideas on the discussion topics and of the progress in your writing and your views of the writing process.
Grades for the course will be determined according to the following formula:
FORMAT OF ESSAYS
All submitted papers should follow the Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines for formatting a paper. These guidelines can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed., which is available in the Reference Section of the library and in the Writing Center. They are also summarized on pp. 148-150 of Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, with sample pages on pp. 151-154. When commenting on your essays, I will refer to Hacker on matters of format and style.
As you write and revise your essays, please keep in mind that there are peer-tutors in the Writing Center trained to help students of any level develop work at any stage.
ACADEMIC HONESTY
Secondary critical sources are not required for the first three essays assignments in this course, but they will be required on the final critical research paper. On any assignment, however, you must fully cite any sources that you use. The source must appear in the list of works cited at the end of the essay, and each source must be cited on every occasion that you make use of its words or ideas. This is true if the source is your primary source (the text you are studying) or a critical source (an analysis of the work published elsewhere), and it is true if the source is printed or electronic, including internet sources. Follow the MLA style of in-text citation and lists of works cited described in A Pocket Style Manual, pp. 128-148.
The failure to fully cite sources within your submitted work is a form of plagiarism. Plagiarism is the appropriation of ideas, data, work, or language of others and submitting them as one’s own to satisfy the requirements of a course. Plagiarism constitutes theft and deceit. Special care should be taken, when cutting and pasting materials or when paraphrasing, to cite sources correctly and to use quotation marks around exact words from source materials. Actions that result in plagiarism may be intentional or unintentional. Consequently, students must understand the concept of plagiarism. When reading, processing, or using materials from any source, appropriate documentation is always essential.
The consequences of plagiarism may range from failure on the assignment to failure for the course and university disciplinary action. Resources such as the library (ext. 2178) and the Writing Center (www.fairfield.edu/writingcenter) are available on campus to assist you in your academic endeavors. You are encouraged to take advantage of these resources.
TEXTS
The required texts for the class are:
Other readings will be made available through class handouts and Electronic Reserves.