Time Schedule:
Christopher John-F Martin
ENGL 111
Seattle Campus
Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays. Cannot be taken if student has already received a grade of 2.0 or higher in either ENGL 111, ENGL 121, or ENGL 131.
Class description
Short 'n sweet version:
Class focuses on fiction that attempts to blur the line between historical and imagined events.
The long version:
This course will challenge your thinking regarding literary analysis and reading and writing in different genres. The intent is to help craft your writing of academic arguments about literature. Throughout the ten-week course, we will read stories by exiled authors like Aleksandar Hemon and Danilo Kis, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and essays by influential critics whose writing is concerned with resisting art as objective and static, and whose purpose may be the decentering of linear and logical history for something else, which, throughout the course, we might come to define in part if not in whole.
In other words, we'll be critically examining literature and essays, then writing about them.
This class is built to emphasize literature is a tool for understanding ourselves and the world around us. A major question we will consider throughout the course is: "Why do these exile or emigre authors utilize fiction instead of non-fiction to tell or retell history, and why is their doing so significant?" We'll advance our writing through the exploration of these ideas and wrestle difficult questions about the nature of fiction, the validity of recorded history, and the nature of the self amiddlemost these concepts.
In this course, you will complete two assignment sequences, each of which is designed to help you fulfill the course outcomes. Each assignment sequence requires you to complete a variety of shorter papers leading up to a major paper. These shorter papers will target one or more of the course outcomes at a time, help you practice these outcomes, and allow you to build toward a major paper at the end of each sequence. You will have a chance to revise each of the major papers using feedback from my written comments, peer review sessions, and writing conferences with me.
Student learning goals
Create clear, complex claims.
Write for an academic audience, as well as for other audiences.
Write in different genres.
Analyze and extract that analysis for use in an intertextual, academic setting.
Revise.
Decide for yourselves how to use these abilities. Our fancy word is: Metacognition.
General method of instruction
Lecture and class discussion. I'm not really big on lectures, but there will be a few short ones. This is a Computer Integrated Classroom, so we'll be using fancy technology to bring the discussion of literature into the 21st century.
Recommended preparation
None. Just a desire to read, write, and think critically.
Class assignments and grading
5-6 short papers of approx. 1 1/2 pages.
2 longer papers of 5-7 pages.
Will read 2-3 short stories, 2-3 essays (mostly short ones), and a novel of ~ 300 pages.
Assignments are focused on the creating arguments, countering other arguments, analyzing literature and your own writing.
