First Day

Welcome to your English 2132 course! I hope this semester will be both fun and challenging for you! Your professor's name is Dr. Matthew Horton (that's me!), but you can call him Dr. H. I have high hopes that this semester will help you improve your skills as a college-level reader and writer.

Click on these icons and see what you can do! This course is about reading great literature, but I also want to make you familiar with some useful technology that can help you discover new possibilities. Keep in mind, these tools are just for your benefit--the only required one is Google Drive:



Also, go ahead and look through some of the most important resources on this course website:

Read the syllabus
Check the calendar
Using Google Drive

Other resources are available by clicking the tabs across the top and various links in the right-hand margin. As much as you can, familiarize yourself with this course website. My contact info is in the right-hand margin at well, towards the top.

Syllabus - Fall 2015

Description of Course
English 2132 is American Literature II, a 3-credit hour course offered by the English Department in the College of Arts and Letters that fulfills the Area C "Literature" requirement. You must have earned a "C" in English 1102 before you can take this course.

In this course, you can achieve the following goals:

• Learn methods for measuring the value of selected works of American literature.
• Understand the intersection between appreciation, evaluation, and enjoyment.
• Apply characters and dramatic situations to important ethical questions:
  
  • How do we define human goodness and excellence?
  • In what ways do the standards of goodness and excellence shift and change?
  • What sorts of conflict between values give rise to ethical crisis?
• Interpret characters and dramatic situations as examples of ethical complexity:
  
  • What sorts of choices do characters or speakers make?
  • What sorts of values do characters or speakers defend?
  • What motivates them to make those choices or hold those beliefs?
  • Where does their confidence come from?
• Become proficient in responsible reading.
• Learn literary terms to help you engage with the literature we read
• Analyze works of literature with thoughtful and developed written responses
• Become proficient in identifying and describing various elements of film
• Develop confidence discussing literature with your classmates

Calendar

Reading Notes for assigned readings are due at the beginning of class on their deadline days. Quote Responses will be submitted through Google Drive. Click on each agenda item to read additional details (if any) about the assignment. Please be aware that printing this calendar will hide the details for each item, so be sure to check the digital calendar often.

Page numbers refer to The Norton Anthology required for this course. When online versions are available, I will usually let you know in the description. If the assignment is a handout, you can get it here.

Using Google Drive

Your quote responses this semester will be done on Google Drive. This online document creation and storage tool allows you to compose without any word processing software on your computer. The sharing feature allows you to collaborate with me and your classmates as you write your assignments.

In order for this tool to work for us, we will all have to cooperate, learn some new skills, and follow some rules. It might be a steep learning curve for some of you, but I think you'll be pleased with the results!

First, you'll need a Google account. If you have a Gmail account, then you already have a Google account, so all you need to do to get started is to sign in to Google Drive! If you don't have a Google account, the easiest way to start one is to sign up for Gmail! This link will allow you to designate a username for a Gmail account--I recommend using something like "LastName.FirstName" for your username.

Once you have your Google account, sign in to Google Drive so that you can configure some things. If you need any help along the way, just let me know. We'll go over some of this in class also:

1. Edit your Google profile and make sure your display name is "FirstName LastName"
2. In Google Drive, create a folder called "Lastname.Firstname.2132.Assignments.F15"
3. Share the folder with me and grant me "edit" privileges (I'll give you my sharing address during class)
4. Create a document in that folder called "Lastname.Firstname.My.Expectations.F15"
5. Now open this document and write a 300-word response answering both of these questions in as much detail as you can about your expectations for this course: Which elements of the course are you most looking forward to (read the website to learn about the course)? Which elements of the course are you most afraid of? Why?
6. When the time comes to do your first Quote Response, go to the template and "Make a copy" of it. Drag the copy into your assignments folder and rename the document "LastName.FirstName.QR1.F15"
7. Whenever you do a new Quote Response, you'll make a copy of the template, rename it appropriately, and move your new document into your assignments folder. Required Quote Responses will be "QR1, QR2, etc." and optional ones will be "Opt.QR.TitleofWork" like this: "LastName.FirstName.Opt.QR.TheAwakening.F15"

Quote Responses

On days indicated on the calendar, you will submit a quote response on an assigned work. I say "submit," but because you will be writing these assignments in Google Drive, I will be able to see your work on them even before the due date. So the deadline is actually when you should be finished so that I can evaluate your writing.

The goal is to think about a work we are reading and write short paragraph responses to three different quotations. The exercise, therefore, has three sections. To earn credit for the assignment, please follow the requirements and guidelines. If the quote response is optional, you will not be penalized for not doing it; however, a higher grade on an optional Quote Response can replace a lower grade on a required one. However, optional quote responses cannot replace zeros on required quote responses.

Responsible Reading

Some of you will be familiar and concerned with the following question:

How should I live my life?

If this question matters to you, then you can consider yourself, on some level, a responsible person. You are responsive to the world around you, the people you interact with, the influence you have on your environment, etc.

To be a responsible reader, you have to adopt a similar mindset about the language and ideas of an artist of words. You will ask a similar question:

Reading Notes

For this course, instead of quizzes, I require note-taking on the reading assignments so that you can demonstrate that you have done thorough reading of each work. Also, they will help you remember more of what you read, making you more confident during class discussions. When you come to class, please bring with you a substantial set of hand-written notes on standard notebook paper about the reading assignment on the calendar for that day.