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ENGL 277 American Literature I

Sponsoring Institution: Lewis Clark State College

3 Credits

Instructor Information

Course Instructor: Courtney Kammers

• Email: cskammers@lcsc.edu
• Office Hours: By email
• Copy the ISI office at indepst@uidaho.edu on all communications.

Course Description

English 277 surveys representative works of American poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (personal journals, sermons, autobiographies, memoirs, and essays) written during the period of about 1600 to 1870. These works are grouped into nine categories on the basis of chronology, authorship, and literary technique and theme. Each of these nine groups of works forms an assignment or an exam.

Prerequisites: Engl 102 or Engl 109

Course Learning Outcomes

Students are asked to study each work in light of:

• It’s intrinsic literary features
• It’s contribution to American literary history
• It’s reflection of outstanding “ideas” from the time
• It’s concern with particular human experiences that may be viewed as universal to humankind.

The course aims at balancing the acquisition of knowledge about American literature and American cultural history with practice of the basic skills of literary analysis and criticism.

By successfully completing this course you should gain:

• Knowledge of significant developments in American literary history, as well as how these developments relate to important cultural, social, economic, and political events of the period.
• Ability to read exemplary works of American literature with insight, understanding, empathy, and aesthetic appreciation.
• Ability to apply personal, historical, and critical perspectives to the understanding of individual literary works.
• Ability to identify a variety of literary genres ands sub-genres, recognize their structural elements, and understand how these all contribute to literary meaning.
• Critical perspective on the “myths” of American culture and how these function in the human situations depicted in American literature.
• Sufficient control over the thinking processes of comprehension, interpretation, analysis, application, synthesis, and evaluation to write clear and convincing responses to a variety of critical questions, which address outcomes 1-5 above.

Required Materials

ENG L277: American Literature I lectures (Available online from the Canvas website)

Anthology of American Literature, Volume I. 10th ed. McMichael, George; Leonard, James S.; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher; Bradley, David; Nelson, Dana D.; Csicsila, Joseph Longman, 2010. ISBN 10-0205779395. ISBN 13-9780205779390. (Copyright 2011)

Cooper, James Fennimore. The Last of the Mohicans (a library copy or paper edition).*

Melville, Herman. Typee (a library copy or paper edition).*

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin (a library copy or paper edition).*

*You are welcome to find an audiobook recording to listen to, however the exams are open-book, so a physical copy will benefit you in quoting or referencing direct excerpts.

Course Rules and Requirements

Assignment & Lesson Guidelines

• 6 graded assignments, 3 exams
• Students may submit up to 1 assignment in one week. This will enable you to use your instructor’s critique to improve your responses on the subsequent assignment. Do not submit assignments in groups OR with journals.
• Please identify the question you select to respond to by its number on the assignment: Question 1, as #1, Question 2, as #2, etc. It is also helpful to restate the question as well.
• Submit journals to Canvas on the day of taking your exams. Completed exams will NOT be forwarded to the instructor for grading UNTIL a journal is submitted on Canvas. Name the file as "Exam # – Journal and Exam Preparation."
• Submitting Assignments: Keep a copy of every assignment submitted. Write your name, V Number, and course number on every submission.
• Students will submit assignments and receive grades via Canvas. Assignments MUST be formatted as .doc, .docx, or .pdf files. No other file extensions will be accepted (.odt, .pages., .rtf, etc.).
• You will typically receive graded assignments within three weeks after the date of the receipt by the instructor.
• Complete the entire assignment (partial or incomplete assignments will receive a zero).
  • Submit assignments in sequence.
  • Do not submit all assignments at one time.

Exam Guidelines

• All exams require a proctor.
• At least 2 weeks prior to taking your first exam, submit the completed Proctor/Exam Request Form to the ISI office.
• ISI mails all exams directly to the proctor after receiving the Proctor/Exam Request Form.
• You must schedule the examination time with your proctor prior to each exam.
• The proctor administers the exam and returns it to the ISI office.
• Wait for grades and feedback on lessons prior to taking exams.
• Exams are OPEN book and CLOSED note. Students are NOT ALLOWED personal items or electronic devices, including cell phones. Graded exams will not be returned.

Personal Journal

To facilitate your personal participation in the literature, you are expected to record your initial thoughts and feelings about the assignment in a Personal Journal. Several journal questions are provided with each assignment to help you focus these responses. Be frank and honest in your responses. The object is to discover just exactly how the selection affected you. Did it involve you? In what specific ways? To what degree? If it did not, what apparently inhibited that involvement? What can you say about why?

Your journal responses do not have to be of any certain length. They should, however, reveal a thoughtful and conscientious effort to answer the assigned questions. Submit your journals to Canvas on the day of taking each exam. If your journal responses are conscientiously done, you can receive up to 12 points on your grade for each of the three exams. A thorough and thoughtful journal is thus critical to achieving an “A” grade on each of the exams.

Critical Reading Assignment

In the "critical" section of the assignment or exam, you are expected to shift from your personal perspective to a more detached, analytical, and evaluative perspective. Your role is now that of a "teacher" or "persuader", of someone writing from a position of understanding and insight. You are not writing to yourself now, but to an audience, one that either knows less about the topic than you do, or one whose view of the topic differs from your own. You may be asked to sort out an author's view on an issue and relate it to the view of another author. You may be asked to show how an author's ideas reflect religious, social, political, or philosophical views common to America of that time. Or you may be
asked to evaluate the effectiveness of one author over another; or to defend or refute a claim, either adulatory or derogatory, about an author's work. In general, you are expected to assume a position and convince your audience that it is well reasoned and based on accurate evidence.

Micro-Essay Assignment

Each micro-essay should be planned as a single integrated paragraph. Your paragraph should be constructed around a controlling idea that is insightful, rather than obvious. Subordinate ideas should be clearly related to your main idea and develop its most significant aspects. Evidence (details or examples) from the literature should be used to support your argument, but used circumspectly. Do not quote at length to provide support. One or two short and succinct quotations are about all that can be used effectively in a 200-word paragraph. A carefully organized and clearly reasoned paragraph is the goal to strive for on each of your micro-essay answers

Micro-essay characteristics for an "A"

• Confident understanding of the question.
• Consistent "critical" perspective.
• Appropriate sense of the assigned "audience." (Me and your peers in the class)
• Ideas that reveal a clear understanding of the text(s), clear sense of the relationships between parts and wholes, and clear distinctions between literal and inferential meanings.
• Perceptive controlling idea, broken down supporting ideas that develop the main idea with logical explanations and/or strategic examples/details from the text(s).
• Supporting quotations which (if used at all) are succinct and strategic to development of the argument.
• Sophisticated word choice and variety of sentences.
• Almost no errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Micro-essay characteristics for a "C"

• Satisfactory grasp of the question, but with some misunderstanding, avoidance, or indirectness.
• "Critical" perspective that is sometimes confused with "personal" perspective.
• Sense of audience that is confused enough to partially interfere with the audience's learning the answer to the question.
• Ideas that show satisfactory understanding of the text(s) and the relationships between parts and wholes, but weaker distinctions between literal and inferential meanings.
• Satisfactory controlling idea, broken down into at least three supporting ideas.
• Supporting ideas that satisfactorily explain and/or illustrate the main idea, but with some ambiguity or vagueness.
• Quotations which (if used) show some weakness in relevancy or are too long to be strategic.
• Correct sentences and word choice, but without variety or sophistication.
• Some errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Micro-essay characteristics for an "F"

• Answer which avoids answering the question and/or shows little or no understanding of it.
• Critical perspective that is confused entirely with personal perspective.
• Absence of sense of assigned audience.
• Ideas that show little attempt to understand the assigned texts.
• Main idea either unfocused or so obvious as to justify little interest from a reader.
• Supporting ideas, examples, or details disconnected or irrelevant; "tells the story" without any attempt to re-conceptualize it.
• Quotations which (if used) are used as unrelated "padding."
• Distracting number of errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling, or sentence structure.

Grade Information

The course grade will be based upon the following considerations:

Students are expected to write several personal journal entries and four micro-essays on each assignment and exam. You should be prepared to respond to all of the questions on the exams.
Journal responses are mandatory. Journals must be submitted to Canvas on the day of taking the exam. Your journal entries up through the first exam are due on the day of taking exam 1 (the same procedure applies with exams 2 and 3). Your instructor will evaluate your journal responses and award you up to 12 points on your micro-essay exam score for exam 1. For example, if you earned the maximum possible score of 88 points on your four exam answers plus the maximum 12 points for your journal responses, your final score for exam 1 would be 100.
Since your journal comprises 12% of each possible exam score and since exam grades are weighted almost twice as heavily in computing the final course grade, completing a conscientious journal on each assignment can affect your course grade significantly.
The four micro-essay answers on each of the six assignments can earn up to 25 points each, for a possible total of 100 points. The four answers on Exams 1, 2, and 3 can earn up to 22 points each for a possible total of 88 points, plus 1-12 journal points.
There will be five micro-essay question options for each of the three exams. You should be prepared to respond to all of those five options on the exam. However, you will only be assigned four of the options to write on.
You may use your textbook as a resource during the exam, but no notes, outlines, or other materials are allowed. Your exam must be written on the pages that come with the exam. You will have 80 minutes to write your responses, which means you should plan on 20 minutes per question. See the following specific exam sections for further information.
Assignment grades are also weighted on a gradually ascending scale, so as to give you additional credit for improving your critical skills throughout the course sequence.

• Assignment 1 = 8% of grade
• Assignment 2 = 8% of grade
• Assignment 3 = 9% of grade
• Assignment 4 = 9% of grade
• Assignment 5 = 10% of grade
• Assignment 6 = 10% of grade
• Exam 1 = 14% of grade
• Exam 2 = 15% of grade
• Exam 3 = 17% of grade

Points and Letter grades

• A: 90-100 points
• B: 80-89 points
• C: 70-70 points
• D: 60-69 points
• F: Below 60 points

The final course grade is issued after all assignments and exams have been graded.

Course Policies

Academic Integrity

Acts of academic dishonesty, including cheating or plagiarism are considered a very serious transgression and may result in a grade of F for the course.

Plagiarism is the dishonest representation of language from another source as your own—phrases, sentences or paragraphs, without indicating in quotation marks and a citation in your text, what your source is, whether print or internet.

The penalty for plagiarism in this course is SEVERE. ONE example of your use of language from another source without acknowledging it in quotation marks and the citation of the source will earn you a failing grade in this course. Note: only one example is all it takes.

In case of such a determination, you will receive notice from your course instructor of a pending failing grade in the course. You will have 3 das to respond to this notice before your grade will become final.