Instructor: Paul Schacht | Office: Welles 219B | Phone: 245-5141 | Email: schacht@geneseo.edu | Fall 2006 Office Hours: M 11:30 - 12:15; W, F 1:30 - 2:15
Students who have completed English 213 will demonstrate:
The Engl 213-01 (Fall 2006) community will:
Behn, Oroonoko (Penguin)
Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin)
Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Riverside)
Greenblatt, et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2, 8th ed.
Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems (Dover)
Two 5-page essays - 25% each
Collaborative Writing (see below) - 10%
Midterm Exam, October 23 - 15%
Final Exam, December 13, 8-11 am - 25%
You are required to take part in conversation at the Virtual Coffeehouse. For each class meeting, I will post a question at the Coffeehouse to which every student must reply by 11:59 p.m. of the day before that meeting.
You are required to participate in collaborative writing at the Collaborative Writing Project, SUNY Geneseo's wiki (what's this?). Details will be provided in class. Collaborative writing will constitute 10% of your final grade.
SUNY Geneseo will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented physical, emotional or learning disabilities. Contact Tabitha Buggie-Hunt, Director of Disability Services to discuss needed accommodations as early as possible in the semester.
You must complete all assignments to receive a passing grade in this course.
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 p.m., Welles 123.
Aug. 28 - Introduction
Aug. 30 - Pope, Epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton; Essay on Man, Epistle I
Sept. 1 - Essay on Man, Epistle II
Sept. 4 - Labor Day
Sept. 6 - Pope, Essay on Criticism; "Ode on Solitude"
Sept. 8 - Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Sept. 11 - The Rape of the Lock
Sept. 13 - Behn, Oroonoko
Sept. 15 - Oroonoko
Sept. 18 - Oroonoko
Sept. 20 - Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Book I
Sept. 22 - Joseph Andrews, Book II
Sept. 25 - Joseph Andrews, Book III
Sept. 27 - Joseph Andrews, Book III
Sept. 29 - Joseph Andrews, Book IV
Oct. 2 - No Class
Oct. 4 - Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Barbauld, "The Rights of Woman"
Oct. 6 - Blake, "All Religions are One"; "There is No Natural Religion" (a and b); A Vision of the Last Judgment; Four Letters on Sight and Vision; Coleridge, selections from Biographia Literaria (Chapters 4, 13, 17); Lectures on Shakespeare; Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads; Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein
Oct. 9 - Fall Break
Oct. 11 - Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads of 1798; "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"; "My Heart Leaps Up"; "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"; "The Solitary Reaper"; Sonnets
Oct. 13 - Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Oct. 16 - Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Oct. 18 - Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"; "Frost at Midnight"; "Dejection: An Ode"; P.B. Shelley, "Ozymandias"; "Mont Blanc"; "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; "Mutability"; "A Song: Men of England"; "England in 1819"
Oct. 20 - Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"; "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"; "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"; Odes; "Sonnet to Sleep"
Oct. 23 - Midterm Exam
Oct. 25 - Tennyson, In Memoriam, A.H.H. (Prologue, nos. 3, 7, 50, 54-57, 118; Epilogue); "Tithonus"; "Ulysses"; "The Lady of Shalott"; Songs from The Princess
Oct. 27 - R. Browning, "Porphyria's Lover"; "My Last Duchess"; "Andrea del Sarto"; "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"; "Fra Lippo Lippi"
Oct. 30 - Arnold, "Lines Written in Kensington Gardens"; "The Buried Life"; "Dover Beach"; "Isolation. To Marguerite"; "To Marguerite. Continued"; "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"; "The Sudy of Poetry"
Nov. 1 - Brontë, Jane Eyre
Nov. 3 - Jane Eyre
Nov. 6 - Jane Eyre
Nov. 8 - Jane Eyre
Nov. 10 - Jane Eyre
Nov. 13 - Pater, "Conclusion to The Renaissance; Wilde, "Impression du Matin"; Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; excerpt from De Profundis; Hopkins, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"; "Pied Beauty"; "The Windhover"; "Carrion Comfort"
Nov. 15 - Hardy, "Hap"; "Neutral Tones"; "The Ruined Maid"; "The Convergence of the Twain"; "During Wind and Rain"; Yeats, "The Madness of King Goll"; "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"; "When You Are Old"; "The Trembling of the Veil"
Nov. 17 - Yeats, "The Second Coming"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "A Prayer for My Daughter"; "Among School Children"; Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Nov. 20 - "Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; "The Metaphysical Poets"; Lawrence, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"; "Why the Novel Matters"; "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is"
Nov. 22 - Thanksgiving Break
Nov. 24 - Thanksgiving Break
Nov. 27 - Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Nov. 29 - Heart of Darkness
Dec. 1 - Heart of Darkness; Achebe, excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Dec. 4 - Larkin, "Church Going"; Hughes, "Wind," "Relic," "Examination at the Womb-Door"; Heaney, "Digging," "The Forge," "Punishment"; Rushdie, "The Prophet's Hair"
Dec. 6 - Beckett, Endgame
Dec. 8 - Endgame
Dec. 11 - Conclusion and Review
Wednesday, December 13, 8 a.m. - 11 a.m.
For general policies on papers and exams, see The Fine Print.
A midterm exam, worth 15% in the calculation of your final grade, will be held on Monday, October 23.
The final exam, worth 25% in the calculation of your final grade, will be held on Wednesday, December 13, from 8:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Make-up exams will be administered for medical reasons only. You must supply documentation of all illnesses and accidents. (A note indicating merely that you were seen at the infirmary won't suffice.) Please do not request special arrangements to alleviate any of the following: a crowded exam schedule; a heavy workload; conflicts with employment, extra-curricular responsibilities, or job-hunting; familial celebrations (e.g., weddings or graduations); crises in other people's lives (e.g., severe depression of best friend's roommate); crises in your own life that are a normal and inevitable part of the collegiate experience (e.g., demise of relationship with boyfriend or girlfriend.) Fairness dictates that such accommodations cannot be made for one without being offered to all.
For help writing exam essays, consult Writing Essays Exams in the Geneseo Online Writing Guide.
Use the Submit a Topic page on this site to make suggestions for exam and paper essay topics. If your topic is chosen, think how well prepared you'll be!
You will write two papers for this course. Each should be approximately 5 double-spaced pages (1250 words) long and is worth 25% in the calculation of your final grade.
You may submit your own topics for papers as well as exams.
The "due-date" for each of the papers in this class is a one-week range during which you may submit your finished work. I grade and return papers in the order in which I receive them, so the earlier you submit, the sooner your work will be returned. The Online Writing Guide offers help on a wide range of essay-writing matters, including proper conventions for citation. In both papers for this class, you must follow MLA format for citations.
Due October 6-13 (no later than 11:59 p.m. on October 13)
Watch this space for topics.
Due November 20 (no later than 11:59 p.m. on November 20)
Watch this space for topics.
The two papers for this class must be submitted electronically by 11:59 p.m. of the last date in the due-date range (i.e., October 13, November 20). Receipt will be acknowledged within 24 hours. Be sure to save my acknowledgment email (by printing it if necessary), as it constitutes your only proof of submission. If you have submitted and received no acknowledgment, try again or notify me immediately. Late papers lose one-half grade per day.
To submit, please follow the steps below. You may also find it helpful to watch a tutorial video on how to submit your paper.
- If you have composed your essay using Microsoft Word:
- If you have composed your essay using another word-processing application:
Be sure to keep a copy of your work.
If you need help with this electronic submission procedure, contact the CIT HelpDesk. If they can't assist you, contact me.
I will return work electronically, in the order in which it was received, with corrections and comments included in the returned file. Please do not expect work submitted close to the deadline to be returned in less than 2-3 weeks.
I encourage you to use the internet resources below, as well as other sites on the web, to learn more about the topics covered in this class.
However, please keep in mind a few general principles about the use of internet resources for this or any other college course:
For information and links related to a huge array of literary topics, visit Voice of the Shuttle.
On 19th-century literature in general, an excellent source of information is The Victorian Web.
Listed below are a few sites related to particular authors on the syllabus:
You can access the MLA Bibliography and a multitude of other helpful resources through your very own Geneseo library.
For help writing papers, you may want to turn to the Geneseo Online Writing Guide. You can get human help with your writing at the Geneseo Writing Learning Center.
If you come across any interesting sites not listed here, please let me know about them. Watch this page throughout the semester for additions posted as you or I discover them.
During office hours I am available to talk with you about anything related to this class or to your studies at Geneseo. No need to make an appointment for an office hour; just drop in. I encourage you to come. I get to know you; you learn more from me. If you cannot make it to any of the scheduled office hours, we can set up a time to meet. During office hours, I am also available to chat online. Ask me for my AIM username. However, live visitors take precedence over those online.
From time to time I will need to communicate with the class as a whole or with you individually by means of email. When communicating with the class as a whole, I will use the class listserv address. Since emails sent to this address will come to students' Geneseo email accounts, it is absolutely imperative that you either regularly check your Geneseo email or have it automatically forwarded to the account you prefer to use. To set up automatic forwarding, go to http://webmail.geneseo.edu from any internet-connected computer, on campus or off. Log in with your Geneseo username and email password. In the left-navigation bar, click "forward account" and carefully follow instructions.
All members of the class are welcome to use the listserv address to communicate with the class as a whole on any matter related to the class. (Do not use the listserv to advertise parties, cars for sale, etc.)
Please feel free to email me at schacht@geneseo.edu on any matter related to the class or to academics generally. I will reply to whatever email address you send from; if the email comes back to me as undeliverable, I will reply to your Geneseo address.
Attendance is your responsibility. Please do not phone or email just to explain why you weren't in or won't be in class on a particular day. On the other hand, if sickness or genuine crisis keeps you from the classroom for any length of time, of course I want to know. Conflicts with other classes or your personal life (weddings, friends who've just broken up with boyfriends/girlfrieds, etc.) must be resolved by you. I regret that I cannot make special arrangements to accommodate them.
As a courtesy to your classmates, be sure that your cellphone is off or set to "silent" or "vibrate" before class begins. In general, it is prohibited to take phone calls during class. However, if you know before class begins that you must be prepared to take an important call, you may sit near the door and take the call outside the classroom when it comes. If you have a laptop computer, I encourage you to bring it to class in order to take notes or consult appropriate knowledge sources online. However, there may be times when I ask all laptop users to close their screens in order to promote maximum concentration on live discussion.
Be sure to proofread your paper closely for faulty grammar or usage, spelling errors, and typos; you are being graded partly on your ability to produce presentable work, an ability that matters both in the classroom and in the world beyond it.
All papers must be submitted electronically by 11:59 p.m. of the due date. Receipt will be acknowledged within 24 hours. Be sure to save my acknowledgment email (by printing it if necessary), as it constitutes your only proof of submission. If you have submitted and received no acknowledgment, try again or notify me immediately. Late papers lose one-half grade per day.
To submit, please follow these steps:
- If you have composed your essay using Microsoft Word:
- If you have composed your essay using another word-processing application:
If you need help with this electronic submission procedure, contact the CIT HelpDesk. If they can't assist you, contact me.
Be sure to keep a copy of your work.
I will return work electronically, in the order in which it was received, with corrections and comments included in the returned file. Please do not expect work submitted close to the deadline to be returned in less than two weeks.
Though committed with alarming frequency and dispiriting casualness by people in high places, plagiarism is still a serious academic offense. You are committing plagiarism any time you
If it is discovered that you have plagiarized on an assignment for this class, you will certainly fail the assignment and probably fail the class. In addition, the Dean of the College will be notified that you have committed an act of academic dishonesty, and you may face disciplinary measures from the administration. No excuses. No second chances. Not even for graduating seniors.
Examples of plagiarism:
Since other students' papers and Cliff's or Sparks Notes are not appropriate sources for a college essay, you should avoid them altogether.
There is no such thing as accidental plagiarism. If you are unsure of the proper conventions for documentation, see me and I will tell you how to find the information you need. Better yet, consult the reference librarian at Milne.
If you think for yourself and use sources properly, you will not run into trouble. But remember, in questionable cases you are unlikely to receive the benefit of the doubt. If you err, be sure it is on the side of caution.
You must supply your own blue books for all exams.
Make-up exams will be administered for medical reasons only. You must supply documentation of all illnesses and accidents. (A note indicating merely that you were seen at the infirmary won't suffice.) Please do not request special arrangements to alleviate any of the following: a crowded exam schedule; a heavy workload; conflicts with employment, extra-curricular responsibilities, or job-hunting; familial celebrations (e.g., weddings); crises in other people's lives (e.g., severe depression of best friend's roommate); crises in your own life that are a normal and inevitable part of the collegiate experience (e.g., demise of relationship with boyfriend or girlfriend.) Fairness dictates that such accommodations cannot be made for one without being offered to all.
Your grade reflects my honest and considered evaluation of your work. You have the right to question it. I have the right to stick by it, and that is what I invariably do (with certain obvious exceptions, such as miscalculation of an exam score). Total objectivity is no more possible in grading writing than in making any other judgment of value, but I do my best to maintain consistency and adhere to clearly defined standards. I base my grade on my opinion of your work, not on my opinion of you. If you have a question about your grade on an assignment, I encourage you to see me during office hours or schedule an appointment. I welcome the opportunity to explain to you why you got what you did.
In grading papers and exams, my reference point is the "B."