Backpack literature 5th edition online

Required texts:

X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, 5th edition. Pearson/Longman, 2016.

English 102-02

Fall 2017 Calendar

8/21 syllabus; introduction to class; writing sample

8/23 writing about literature and the importance of literary reading (group exercise); Midterm Essay assigned

8/25 introduction to short fiction: “The Appointment in Samarra” (online, W.

Somerset Maugham translation); “Godfather Death” (12)

8/28 introduction to drama: Oedipus the King (686-711)

8/30 introduction to poetry: “In a Station of the Metro” (432); “Driving to Town Late

to Mail a Letter” (443)

9/1 archetype: from Dr. Faustus (Act 2, Scene 2) (657-662); “The Negro Speaks of

Rivers” (594)

9/4 LABOR DAY HOLIDAY

9/6 point of view: “The Tell-Tale Heart” (40)

9/8 “Cathedral” (85)

9/11 character: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (579)

9/13 dialogue: from The Importance of Being Earnest (665-669); “Girl” (56)

9/15 objective description (the objective correlative): “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

(151)

9/18 irony: “The Gospel According to Mark” (123)

9/20 “Mending Wall” (583) and “Birches” (585)

9/22 metafiction/metatextuality: “Happy Endings” (256); “The Gift of the Magi” (271)

9/25 “Out, Out—” (371); “Loves Calls Us to the Things of This World” (427)

9/27 the Gothic: “Young Goodman Brown” (260)

9/29 setting: “The Storm” (104); “The Story of an Hour” (179)

10/2 symbol: “The Chrysanthemums” (206)

10/4 “A Rose for Emily” (32)

10/6 “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (229); “The Lottery” (235)

10/9 Midterm Essay due; review for Midterm Exam

10/11 Midterm Exam

GRADING RUBRIC

for CLASS ESSAYS

Content: (points indicate DEDUCTIONS)

Adequate length (points are deducted fractionally, depending on how far the essay falls short of the length, before any other point deduction is even considered)

Unclear thesis statement (10 points)

Extensive plot summary (20 points)

Poor organization, focus, and/or paragraphing (10 points)

“Padding” (10 points)

Nonexistent conclusion (10 points)

Weak and/or repetitive conclusion (5 points)

Missing quotes WITH citations (10 points)

No Works Cited page (10 points)

Style: (points indicate DEDUCTIONS)

Grammar/mechanics (2 points per incident, or 10 points if consistent/rampant)

Repetition (2 points per incident, or 10 points if consistent/rampant)

Word choice (2 points per incident, or 10 points if consistent/rampant)

Spelling (2 points per incident, or 10 points if consistent/rampant)

Punctuation (1 point per incident, or 5 points if consistent or rampant)

MLA format: (according to example provided in the syllabus) first-page header, last- name pagination (at the header, or half-inch, top margin), double-spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, parenthetical page citation (5 points)

Your Last Name 1

Your Name

Instructor

Course

14 December 2008

Wright’s Uncanny North: The Great Migration as the New Frontier in Native Son

According to Leslie Fiedler, American literature, of all the fiction of the West, is

“bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and

melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29).

He hits upon a nagging consistency—that there is a lot of shame in our literature, a repressed

guilt for past colonial sins, present even while those sins were being committed. This is

evidenced by Charles Brockden Brown, who is arguably credited for first defining the American

gothic, thus differentiating it from the European gothic, in the introduction to his 1799 novel

Edgar Huntly:

Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the

materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the

perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable; and, for a native of

America to overlook these, would admit of no apology. (641)

Brown recognizes that this only recently established new nation has a lot on its psyche, with very

real terrors and uncertainties that are only minimally and temporarily soothed by myths of

exceptionalism and destiny—terrors and uncertainties that are, in fact, created, fed, and

perpetuated by such myths. The persistence of this awareness, however conscious or

unconscious, sees its way through American literature of the nineteenth century—with

Hawthorne’s inescapable Puritan legacy, Poe’s overtones of racist paranoia (especially in “Hop-

Frog” and “The Black Cat”), and Melville’s anti-slavery overtones, plus the brutal realism of

slave narratives—and into the twentieth century, with the profound disenchantments of

Your Last Name 2

modernism providing perhaps an even more shuddering retrospection.

It is in the twentieth century that we get Richard Wright, a late American modernist who

also happens to be an African-American writer. Like the writers of the slave narratives in the

nineteenth century, Wright’s migration narratives put him in a curious position within American

literature; he is both defined by and rebelling against his white canonical “colleagues.”

Unavoidably influenced by them, he pays begrudging homage while revising and reacting to

their ideas and tropes through various intertextual echoes and inversions. Likewise, Bigger

Thomas, the troubled protagonist of Wright’s Native Son, possesses a certain fated American-

ness. Wright himself acknowledges this in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” when he explains the

novel’s title; Bigger is “a native son” because he is “an American product” (446). There is

indeed in the progression of Bigger’s actions something uncanny, that term so virtually

synonymous with the gothic (especially American gothic), defined by Freud as “that class of the

frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (930), the recognized

resurfacing of something repressed that arouses dread and horror. Quintessentially, this

recognition comes in the form of the double, not only as an actual, mirroring being but as a

repetition of events, taking the transgenerational form of a curse. The repeated images of black

and white which virtually litter Native Son are both dueling and symbiotic, and they provide

doubling to an extent that is both ridiculous and fitting.

The novel is a post-Great Migration narrative of urban segregation on the South Side of

Chicago during the Great Depression. The myth of racial innocence in the North—one of the

many hopes for better prospects which inspired African-American migrations from the South—

has been long disproven; they were met with a new kind of slavery in urban segregation.

Furthermore, the sense of loss, confusion, and disenchantment felt by the ghettoized migrants

runs parallel—or rather, perpendicular—to that felt by white Americans upon the closing of the

frontier; the mythical North becomes a mere extension of the mythical West, a tragically farcical

Your Last Name 26

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1966.

Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Trans. Alix Strachey. Ed. William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, Barbara Johnson, Vincent B.

Leitch, John McGowan, and Jeffrey J. Williams. New York: Norton, 2001. 929-952.

Print.

Smethurst, James. “Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in

Native Son.” African American Review 35.1 (2001): 29-40. Academic Search Premier.

EBSCOhost. Auburn University Library. 1 Nov 2008 . Digital.

English 102 Midterm Essay: 4 Options

Choose ONE of these four options—

OPTION 1 (Character Analysis):

Assignment: Choose THREE different characters from three different works—one short story, one poem, and one play—COVERED IN CLASS. Comparison and contrast should certainly play a part. Using CITED examples and quotes from the chosen works, analyze the character(s) keeping the following criteria (not necessarily ALL of them) in mind:

· point of view

· roundness (vs. flatness)

· dynamism (vs. stasis—i.e., dynamic vs. static)

· involvement

· the limits/biases of their perspective (mental state, physical state, gender, race, etc.)

· setting (not just place, but time/history)

· symbolism/representation

Be especially sure to keep in mind how the author goes about bringing such details/revelations about a given character STYLISTICALLY.

OPTION 2 (The Gothic and Its Influence):

What is the typical gothic subject matter? The dark. The horrible. The grotesque. The mysterious…

In a nutshell, the persistence, threat, and resurfacing of PAST sins—that is, how they are hidden (“buried”) and perpetuated in the present (which often fools itself into thinking the influence of those past sins is dead, gone, and can no longer touch them).

How does this tend to manifest itself? Perversion, insanity, murder, sadism (persecution, torture), grotesquerie.

Keep in mind that gothic works have proven to be strongly and arguably universally influential in literature and others arts; works that might be considered less obviously gothic or not gothic at all often still utilize the tropes (thematic and stylistic patterns) of the Gothic.

Assignment: Compare the style and approach of how THREE different works COVERED IN CLASS that could be considered Gothic. Make sure that ONE of the works could arguably be a less obvious example than the other

OPTION 3 (Imagery):

Refamiliarize yourself with CONNOTATION and IMAGERY (see pages 421-422, 431, 433, and 446).

Assignment: Discuss, via comparison and contrast, how WORD CHOICE and IMAGERY contribute to the common thematic goal of THREE different works—one short story, one poem, and one play—COVERED IN CLASS.

OPTION 4 (Archetypes):

Refamiliarize yourself with what an ARCHETYPE is; read it on pages 542-543 and 557 of your anthology.

Assignment: Consider an archetype discussed in class or argue for the existence of a particular new, undiscussed one of your naming. Discuss how THREE different works COVERED IN CLASS approach a similar archetype differently.

Length: 3 to 5 pages, MLA style

This is what individual anthology entries on your Works Cited page (completely separate page, with MLA-style pagination at top right) should look like: (the formula, then examples)

Last Name of Author, First and (if any) Middle Name of Author. Title of Work within

the Anthology (in quotation marks if a short story or a poem, underlined or

italicized if a play). The Full Name of the Anthology (underlined or italicized)

followed by the edition. Translator (Trans., only if the original work was not

written in English; first name first; if more than one, alphabetical by last name).

Editor (Ed., first name first; if more than one, alphabetical by last name). City

of Publication: Publishing Company, Latest Copyright Date. Pages that the

work occupies within the anthology (numbers only). Medium (“Print” or “Digital”).

(Notice how the entries are listed alphabetically according to the author's last name, and how they are reverse indented; that is, indented the opposite of how you indent a paragraph, with only the first line NOT indented.)

Works Cited

Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,

Poetry, Drama, and Writing 5thed. Trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Ed.

Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy. Boston: Pearson, 2016. 690-732. Print.