Nov 22, 2010

Course Policies

Attendance
Classes like this are most successful when we build intellectual community and negotiate course concepts together; for that reason, attendance is required. Because several class days will be given over to individual research and archival work time, our remaining class time is quite valuable. However, you are permitted three absences for illnesses, emergencies, and family or university business. Each additional absence will lower your overall participation grade by one-third of a letter grade and may cause you to miss out on a quiz, discussion, or valuable preparation for the projects or final exam. If you miss class, it is ultimately your responsibility to find out what you missed. If extended hospitalization or military duty will call you away for a much longer period of time, you may be advised to drop the course.

Late Work
Unless otherwise specified, all assignments must be submitted by the beginning of class on the date they are due. Please plan ahead so that you can get them done on time. If you have a university-excused absence or severe illness and cannot attend class when something is due, you must contact me in advance to make arrangements for turning in your work. I will not accept it otherwise.

Intellectual Participation
Reading assignments must be completed by the date for which they are assigned. Please bring your anthology or classpak each day a reading is assigned. While you are in class, I hold you to professional forms of conduct, including arriving on time, staying engaged, being empathetic to one another, and contributing to conversation. Cell phones must be turned completely off while class is in session. While I want you to feel comfortable to initiate and facilitate great discussions in our classroom and on this blog, please remember that they are both performances spaces where we need to be committed to some good practices. At no time should you feel as if you are being evaluated on whether or not you like something that we read. You are being evaluated on how clearly and thoughtfully you can communicate your ideas about the complexities of what we read.

Keeping Apace with the Reading
I think you will find our combination of genres to be stimulating and worthwhile. Some of our readings will be more challenging than others, especially given that they fall into two general categories--the texts of the writers we are studying, and the theoretical essays that help us to contextualize those texts. Above all things, I want you to enjoy our reading this semester. But I offer you some strategies that my former students have realized for keeping apace:
  1. we all read differently, but most of us require a long chunk of time about 1-2 days before each scheduled discussion (a.k.a., the "long read");
  2. having access to a dictionary actually makes the reading go more quickly (the OED Online is a great source to call up on your iPhone);
  3. my most successful readers start "pre-reading" for 20 minutes a day about one week before each Symposium, skimming the critical articles for main claims, highlighting compelling examples, or getting used to the author's arrangement and voice. When they sit down for their "long" read, they can take more in.

Evaluation
Each assignment has specific evaluation criteria that we will discuss in class, with the exception of blog posts and quizzes, which I will grade on the "plus" system. If your work shows considerable thought and exploration of the topic, is focused, and of high quality, I assign it a (plus). If it demonstrates some thought and exploration of the topic, but lacks somewhat in development, I assign it a (check). If it is on topic but lacks in exploration, development, focus, and/or clarity, I assign it a (minus). Near the end of the semester, I will convert those scores to points. The final grade distribution is as follows:
  • Intellectual Participation - 100 points
  • Blogs, Quizzes & Writing Exercises - 150 points
  • Group Symposium - 100 points
  • Short Critical Essays (3) - 300 points
  • Investigative Archival Project - 250 points
  • Final Exam - 100 points

You should always feel free to meet with me if an assignment is unclear, if you get stuck, or if my graded response on an assignment is unhelpful. You should also feel free to meet with me at any time if you are unsure of where you stand in the course.

Academic Honesty
At IUB, we take academic honesty very seriously, and violations of it -- including all forms of cheating, misrepresentation, and plagiarism -- can result in automatic failure of the course (see the Code of Student Conduct for more information). Plagiarism literally means "the act of kidnapping" and occurs when you represent someone else's work as your own work in the following ways:
  • having someone write your paper for you or turning in someone else's work
  • purchasing someone else's work and using it as your own
  • simply copying and pasting published information into your paper
  • deliberately using sources without attributing them.

Doing so "accidentally" is as problematic as doing so deliberately. Even in a course such as this one, good source integration is paramount, beginning at the very moment you locate a source, and reflected in how carefully you read and take notes.

Writing Tutorial Services
This is not a writing-intensive class, although we will use writing, both as a kind of knowledge construction and as a way for you to perform what you learn in the class. You will be writing four formal projects that are expected to conform to certain academic conventions. If you decide that you would like more sustained help with or feedback on your writing at any point in the semester, or if you are wholly unfamiliar with the conventions these projects require, feel free to seek me out in conference or office hours. I also highly recommend that you visit WTS (located in BH 206) for feedback on your writing at any stage. Talking and thinking with others is extremely helpful, whether you are planning the project or editing the final draft.

Support Services
Disability Services and The Adaptive Technologies divisions of the Office of Student Affairs can arrange for assistance, auxiliary aids, or related services if you think a temporary or permanent disability will prevent you from being a full participant in the class. Contact them via web or phone at 855-7578 with any individual concerns. Students with special needs must be registered with Disability Services before classroom accommodations can be provided.


Nov 20, 2010

Assignments and Projects

Quizzes and Writing Exercises
I will periodically administer in-class quizzes or writing exercises. These exercises are intended to help you focus in the first few minutes of class so as to gain more from our discussion. They will also help ground you in the reading and writing strategies needed for the critical papers and final exam. Your best preparation is to be thoughtful with how you read prior to class--annotate difficult passages, look up unfamiliar terms in the OED Online, and take note of where you do understand a writer's implicit or explicit meaning, or where you see interesting relationships begin to emerge between texts.

Group Symposium
In the first week of class, you will sign up, as a group, to lead a symposium on one of our longer texts. Using the reference books on reserve at Wells Library, the critical commentary in our anthology, and the theoretical essays assigned in each sphere, your group will present the terms and perspectives that you think best promote our understanding of how to read that text. The purpose of the symposium is not to place the whole burden of discussion on your group, but rather to invite you to develop expertise in a set of readings.

Short Critical Essays
Throughout the semester, you will write three short (~3 pp.) critical essays in which you respond to one of several prompts, which are intended as jumping off points. These prompts may ask you to analyze a literary device or illustrate a rhetorical concept at work in a particular text, or they may ask you to discuss how a perspective offered in one of our theoretical essays makes a difference in your interpretation of a particular writer's work.

Investigative Archival Project (Proposal and Paper)
This semester, you will explore an archival collection of rare texts by lesser-known women--including liberal free-thinkers and labor activists--and select one or more of their texts to be the basis of a longer investigative paper (~7 pp.). In this investigative paper, you will have the opportunity to formulate and respond to an original question based on the texts that you choose, by drawing on critical essays, secondary sources, or other materials related to the collection. We will dedicate several class days to this project, and you will submit a brief proposal (~2 pp.) in advance of the due date.

Discussion Blog
We will use this discussion blog for two purposes this semester: 1) following our archival work days, I will ask you to post your response to a brief question or problem-solving task that I provide to aid your exploration of our "collection"; and 2) from time to time, I may ask you to submit discussion questions in advance of a scheduled reading. Some posts will be individual, and others collaborative.

Nov 19, 2010

Course Description and Goals

In this course, we will survey the texts of women writers to investigate a range of rhetorical and poetic strategies that illuminate their participation in various "spheres" of social activity, beginning with responses to female autonomy in the English Renaissance and ending with treatises for labor reform in America, with special attention given to trans-Atlantic movement and racial uplift. In contexts as dire as martyrdom, segregation, lynching, class inequity, and even gender normalization and compulsory marriage, what made these women act through their writings when "action" wasn't a nom-du-jour? What movements did their texts help to promote? What definitions could they have helped to disrupt?

We will read in several genres, including polemical essays, short stories, novel excerpts, letters, and public address, drawing on feminist philosophy, feminist criticism, and rhetorical theory as investigative lenses on what we read. Part of that reading involves tracing key concepts that demonstrate how women wrote from the positionings they were assigned (and in some cases, assigned themselves) in order to effect social change. We will then put these concepts into conversation with other critical perspectives to better understand the issues represented in their writing and the intertextual dimensions to their work--that is, how their meanings, constructions, and social uses are shaped by, and help to shape, other texts. Specific course goals include the following:
  • gaining a deeper (critical and textual) understanding of the occasions in which women wrote, the perspectives that describe their participation, and the conventions that mark their work;
  • developing your foundational skills for literary interpretation and rhetorical analysis;
  • identifying and pursuing an original question based on primary texts;
  • articulating, supporting, and developing a critical response to that question by bringing secondary materials into conversation with primary texts;
  • considering the benefits, drawbacks, limitations, and consequences of establishing a "woman's literary tradition" in English.