ENG 379
American Women Writers
First summer session 2006
Professor Stephen Arch
Office: 114A Morrill Hall
Phone: 355-1629 (office)
email:
http://www.msu.edu/~arch
Office hours: Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:00 pm, and by appointment
Texts:
Sandra Kemp (ed.), Feminisms
Linda Wagner-Martin (ed.), The Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (WW)
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Willa Cather, Coming, Aphrodite!
I have tired to keep in mind the fact that summer school is a blur. Weekly assignments are manageable, even for slower readers. Most writing assignments are less-formal “response” papers, though there is one formal critical essay. Please do keep in mind that you “owe” the course a minimum of 12 hours of work per week, in addition to the 6 hours of class time.
Requirements: 8 one page “response” papers (20%)
final exam, two hours, essay format (30%)
4-6 page critical essay (30%)
attendance and participation (20%)
· Response papers are due at the beginning of (almost) every class period. (We have 13 class periods; subtract the first day and the last day [final exam] and there will be 11 different possible opportunities to write response papers. You must complete response papers on 8 of the 11 opportunities. Completing more than 8 response papers will not help your grade! I will grade the first 8 that you turn in.) Response papers must be printed in 12 point type, double spaced, on one side of 8 X 11 paper. Use as many words as you wish, within those constraints; shoot for 200 words, minimum. “Prompts” for the next response paper will be discussed in class at the end of each class period, and sent via email to the entire class within one hour after class ends.
· The critical essay will be an analysis of a published, scholarly essay on one of our authors. A worksheet for this assignment will be distributed in Week 2.
· The comprehensive final exam will be given during the final class period. It will consist of one question on feminist theory and one question on Cather’s The Professor’s House, but it will also ask you to discuss others authors/texts from the syllabus.
· Participation is based on contributions to class discussion, general attentiveness in class, input on email, and conversations during office hours. Participation will be, in large part, self-assessed.
· Attendance: Students who miss more than 3 entire class periods (for ANY reason, barring exceptional circumstances, of course) will automatically fail the course. The class will be run as a seminar, and your presence and participation are required. Hence, you don’t get credit for simply attending class, but you can fail the course for failing to attend.
Reading schedule:
May 15 Intro: poems by Louise Glück and Rita Dove
May 17 Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills” (WW, 197-228); Feminisms, 3-22, 112-120
May 22 WW, 9-55, 63-82; Feminisms, 135-170
May 24 WW, 83-196; Feminisms, 188-206
May 29 no class, Memorial Day
May 31 WW, 286-310; Feminisms, 216-226, 241-250
June 5 WW, 379-406; Feminisms, 250-258, 278-299
June 7WW, 407-440; Feminisms, 308-325, 339-345
June 9 Critical essay due by 5:00 pm in Dr. Arch’s mailbox (201 Morrill Hall)
June 12 Willa Cather, Coming, Aphrodite!, pp. 1-80; Feminisms, 345-384
June 14Willa Cather, Coming, Aphrodite!, pp. 81-176; Feminisms, 385-435
June 19 Cather, My Ántonia (Books 1-III); Feminisms, 435-467
June 21Cather, My Ántonia (Books IV and V); Feminisms, 58-96
June 26 Cather, The Professor’s House
June 28Final exam (in-class)
Course goals:
This course serves two quite different groups of students: 1) English and Language Arts majors for whom it is a required “diversity” course; and 2) other majors for whom it is an English elective. The course goals are the same for these two groups:
· to improve close-reading skills
· to write regularly and insightfully in “conversation” with the texts and with colleagues
· to become more sensitive to issues of gender (and race, class, and sexual orientation) as they are figured in literary texts
· to become familiar with some of the most important and influential women writers in American literary history, and with some of the questions engaged by feminist theory
Class periods:
I will occasionally lecture, but by and large the course will be run as a seminar. We will take a 15 minute break during most class periods, from 7:20 – 7:35 pm. Feel free to stop the professor at 7:25, if he hasn’t indicated that it’s time for a break! Also, we will usually read and analyze a short lyric poem in the middle of each class period, as a way of breaking up the discussion.
ENG 379
Worksheet for 4-6 page critical essay
Below, I’ve listed five articles by feminist scholars on works of fiction that we have read this semester. They are all available through the MSU library electronic resources databases. Go the MAGIC home page, and click on “electronic resources.” Under “Search electronic resources by title,” enter the name of the appropriate journal. Enter into that journal’s database and locate the volume number and appropriate issue number. You will then be able to see a facsimile of the printed article. Note: you must have the Proxy Server enabled on your home computer to be able access these articles! See the library home page and click on “Proxy Server: Off Campus Access” if you don’t have it enabled.
Please write a critical analysis of one of these essays. I would suggest that you choose the essay that analyzes the story you like best.
Your essay should discuss these aspects of the essay:
· what is the author’s argument about the story?
· what method of analysis does the author employ to understand the story?
· what kind of evidence does she employ to make her case (either evidence from the story or evidence from elsewhere)?
· if the essay is feminist, what kind of feminism does the author ally herself with?
· what weaknesses do you see in the argument?
· does the essay teach us how to read the story differently?
These bulleted points are not meant to be followed bullet-by-bullet; they are guidelines for thinking about what you need to explain in your essay.
Your essay should be between 1000 and 1500 words in length, no more and no less. Completed essays must be turned in to my mailbox in 201 Morrill Hall by 5:00 pm on Friday, June 9. They may, of course, be handed in earlier.
______
Joanne S. Frye, “Placing Children at the Fulcrum of Social Change: Antiracist Mothering in Tillie Olsen’s ‘O Yes’,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18:1 (1999): 11-28.
Elizabeth Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 470-498. [on Morrison’s “Recitatif”]
Martha J. Cutter, “Frontiers of Language: Engendering Discourse in ‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’,” American Literature 63 (1991): 279-291.
Sheila Hassell Hughes, “Between Bodies of Knowledge there is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills,” American Quarterly 49 (1997): 113-137.
Paula A. Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3 (no.1/2, 1984): 61-77.
“Reason in women is a practical reason which enables them to easily discover how to arrive at a given conclusion, but which does not enable them to reach the conclusions themselves. Women can not discover principals, a man can, but they have a better head for details.”
“The entire education of women must be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to be loved and honored by them, to rear them when they are young, to care for them when they are grown up, to counsel and console, to make their lives pleasant charming, these are the duties of women at all times, and they should be taught them in their childhood. To the extent that we refuse to go back to this principle, we will stray from our goal, and all the precepts women are given will not result in their happiness or our own.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762)