ASSignments

English 2110 World Literature, Fall 2020

Section 02: TR 9:30-10:45 a.m., Online

Section 03: TR 11:00-12:15 p.m., Online

Discussion Questions

In addition to participating in Zoom meetings of the entire class and small group activities in Zoom breakout rooms, you can also respond to questions on the GeorigaVIEW discussion forum Responses are due Sunday during the week in which the questions are posted; responding to discussion questions only counts as one way of participation in a given week.

Small Group Activities

In addition to participating in Zoom meetings of the entire class and the GeorgiaVIEW discussion forum, you can also work with small groups in Zoom breakout rooms.

Applying Ethical Questions to Literature

Here are notes summarizing John Deigh's Introduction to Ethics and Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today. Let's distill the most important concepts from the book and turn them into questions concerning characters' actions and literary themes you can ask as you read poetry and prose.

  1. What Is Ethics?
    • What questions does the work of literature pose about right and wrong, death, and/or happiness?
    • What does the work suggest about living the best life and/or practicing justice?
    • Is the moral system in the literary work derived from a social institution or from a universal standard such as ideal reason? What are the moral norms or conventional morality of the people in the work? How would you describe the moral community(-ies) of the work?
    • Do characters act out of a sense of (deontological) duty or in (telelogical) pursuit of an end or purpose?
  2. Egoism
    • Do the characters wisely pursue happiness (egoism) and have goodwill toward others? If not, what external obstacles or internal conflicts hinder their pursuit?
    • Is a character hedonistic, i.e., does she pursue pleasures as a means to achieve happiness? If so, is her hedonism problematic?
    • Is a character perfectionistic, i.e., does she excel at things worth doing as a means to achieve happiness? If so, is her perfectionism problematic?
    • Do a character's actions stem from a desire to promote her own interests, as in the case of psychological egoism?
    • Are a character's actions motivated by "a desire for pleasure or an aversion to pain" (37)? Does the work distinguish between desire and pleasure? Does the work distinguish between sensory pleasure or pain and happiness or unhappiness?
    • What does the work suggest about achieving happiness through cooperative standards of conduct (the Hobbesian program), or, by contrast, the happiness of cheaters, despots, and other free-riders?
  3. Eudamonism
    • Do characters pursue well-being (eudamonism) rather than just happiness (egoism)? If not, what obstacles or internal conflicts hinder their pursuit?
    • What is the relation between right action and the highest good in the literary work? Do characters wisely pursue their well-being in terms of intellectual and/or moral excellence? If not, why?
    • Do the characters live their lives beyond animalistic appetites and brute emotions, i.e. higher human powers and higher faculties? Do they sublimate their desires and emotions into higher pursuits, such as "reason, imagination, and morality" (66)?
    • Do characters "[achieve] the highest good through the development of a well-ordered personality" (63) whose "constituent parts, reason, spirit, and appetite, work together harmoniously" (71)? Further, does reason regulate and constrain appetite (71)?
    • Do characters live the good life by living justly? Do governments or other social institutions practice internal, domestic justice and external, foreign justice through wise, well-ordered governance?
    • Are characters rationalist, motivated by rational thought and action over against animal appetite and brute emotion, or naturalist, motivated by reason which exists in accord with natural forces and conditions (77)? Does education develop their reason and sublimate their appetites? Do they lead complete and fulfilling lives through the exercise of reason? If not, why not?
  4. Utilitarianism
    • Do the characters work for the general good of humankind (utilitarianism)? Following Jeremy Bentham, do they "act as to bring about as much happiness in the world as [they] can in the circumstances [they] face" (95)? If not, what are their aims and why?
    • Do the characters calculate for each projected net balance of happiness and good over pain and evil each action would produce and then identify the right action (act utilitarianism, 95, 114)? If not, what is the moral calculus behind their actions?
    • Following John Stuart Mill, do characters primarily follow the Principle of Utility and the Greatest Happiness Principle yet still consider secondary rules of morality like justice and honesty in determining the right action under their particular circumstances (103)?
    • Are characters' actions determined to be right or wrong by the institutional rules of society governing the right rules for people to follow (rule utilitarianism, 111)? Further, are these institutional rules for the benefit of the general good, or do they serve particular groups of people?
  5. The Moral Law
    • Do characters or communities in the story derive their moral law through laws of nature arrived at by reason and conscience, or are they dutiful to God, arriving at the moral law, which establishes a peaceful and equitable social order, through revelation like reading scripture? Are characters' consciences conflicted, their sense of reason warped? Alternatively, are characters perverting the word of God and/or their duty to God?
    • Is the moral law in the literary text established through God's commands and prohibitions, as in divine command theory (128)?
    • Alternatively, is the moral law in the literary text established through self-evident fundamental standards of right and wrong known through rational intuition (134)?
    • Alternatively, is the moral law less speculative/theoretical as in rational intuition, and more practical and applicable, as in Kantian's imperatives, i.e., do characters apply principles of practical reason (141)? Do characters act out/upon principles which everyone faced in similar circumstances would act out/upon, i.e., the Kantian categorical imperative (145)?
    • Do characters follow maxims that exlude or include "references to cultural and legal aspects of their circumstances that people who are at home in the culture and accept the autority of government and the laws it enacts" (150)?
  6. The Ethics of Self-Determination
    • Do characters "find value in the satisfaction of their natural desires and personal interests" or are they "cognizant of the value that lawful action realizes" (Kant's sensuousness vs reasonableness, 159)? Are they conflicted between reason and sensuousness?
    • Do characters follow the version of the Categorical Imperative that states, "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end" (161)? Or, do they have trouble treating others as a means rather than an end (164)?
    • Do characters follow the version of the Categorical Imperative that states, "Act only from a will that makes universal law though maxims" (168)? Or, do they have trouble with "autonomy of the will," i.e., are their internal wills compromised by external forces?
    • Do communities within the literary text adhere to "Kant's ideal of a kingdom of ends in which all rational beings are legislative members" (174)? Or, do they exclude some members from the community and/or the ends? Is self-government the basis of moral authority within the literary text's world, or is there a conflict regarding self-government and/or moral authority? (179)
    • From an existentialist framework, do characters' beliefs and actions result from active minds, i.e., conscious choice? Or, are characters passive in their beliefs and actions, i.e., unexamined belief and unconscious action (181-2)? Do characters assume the burden of responsibility for their choices and actions, or do they avoid and flee (182)? Do characters decide to act based on a concrete situation or do they justify their actions with abstract theories (185)? Do characters act with regard to their freedom, i.e., their personal autonomy, or not (186)?
  7. Practical Reason
    • How do characters use reason to decide how to act, i.e., practical reason? (This is in contrast to speculative reason, the theorizing about which teleological ends to pursue, like Aristotle's pursuit of well-being and the good.)
    • How and why do characters choose to do what they do? How do they evaluate their circumstances and the contingencies surrounding their actions? What is the underlying reason of characters' actions?
    • Describe the ways in which the characters are rational agents and the intents motivating their actions.
    • Are characters' reason "the slave of the passions," as Hume suggests (217)? How do characters' desires motivate their reasoning about how to act in the world? How does their sense of reason operate on their underlying feelings to create their overall morality (225)?
    • Following Kant, are the characters motivated by pure reason alone and act upon practical reason, rather than Hume's belief of deeper desires and feelings (227)?

Close Reading Paper

In order to practice literary interpretation and working with textual evidence, you will analyze a key passage in a formal paper and presentation. Your essay should 1) do a line-by-line examination of the most important passage in the assigned work, interpreting it sentence-by-sentence through nuanced reading of (for example) figurative language, diction, connotation, and symbol, 2) argue the passage's centrality to understanding the core conflicts and overall theme of the work by explicating the fundamental conflicts with the particular lines of text, and 3) pose two or three questions for class discussion. Your essay should be driven by a thesis that argues the work's theme and logically organized by close reading of the text: unpack the tension and conflict, connotation and significance, idea and theme.

Individual or Collaborative Option

You may either write the paper and deliver the presentation on your own, or you may pair up to collaboratively compose the paper and presentation.

Parameters

Sign Up

Sign up here either individually or in pairs for an assigned text for which to compose a close reading. If you select an author with multiple or multiple discussion days, select a significant passage from the noted short story or chapter range.

 

Date Author 9:30 Section Students 11:00 Section Students

T, 8-25

Conrad

 

T, 9-1

Márquez

1 Max Wolverton

Casey Tom

Naipaul

 

Mathew Gordon

R, 9-3

Kincaid

2 Bailey Dodson

 

Diaz, Drown

3 Claire Strickland

Samantha Barich

Diaz, How to

4 Karen Jarrard

Jaime Regan

R, 9-8

Neruda

5-6 Alyssa Harrison and Thomas Donohue (group)

 

R, 9-17

Walcott

7 Danielle Frazier

Mason Winkler

T, 9-29

Allende, Chapters 4-6

8 Karleigh Woodward

Meghan Hankla

R, 10-1

Allende,

Chapters 7-10

9 Macy Atkins

Katy Arrowood

T, 10-6

Allende, Chapters 11-Epilogue

10 Hunter Payne

Jack Linzey

Katie Payne

R, 10-8

Wa Thiang'o, Wedding

11 Jhalen Billingslea

Olivia Bowen

Wa Thiang'o, Meeting

12 Jada Popkoski

Alisha Philpot

R, 10-15

Achebe, Chapters 9-16

13 Cam Shaw

Jayla Lawrence

Karla Rodriguez (group)

T, 10-20

Achebe, Chapters 17-25

14 Drew Stanley

Michelle Murdock

R, 10-22

Aidoo

15 Anna Pettit

Alexus Taylor

Head

16 Cole Landreth

Rory Doran

T, 11-3

Coetzee, Chapters 10-17

17 Valeria Portela

Sarah Hobby

R, 11-5

Coetzee, Chapters 18-24

18-19 Ashleigh Black and Klaire McDonald (group)

Jada Strickland

T, 11-10

Mahfouz

20 Brooklynn Honeycutt

 

Pamuk

21 Kody McClary

Hayden Schlenker

T, 11-17

El Saadawi

22 Rose Wagner

Ty Bentley

Al-Shaykh

23 Alli Beam

Cole Krucke

Ethics Paper

The close reading paper asks you to determine the core conflict and overall theme of a literary work based on a rigorous analysis of a significant passage, the research project requires you to conduct literary research and summarize ethical issues of a literary work, and the exams give you options for comparing and contrasting issues in multiple works of literature. In order to practice applying your understanding of ethics, you will write a paper that interprets a work of literature through an ethical lens.

 

The ethics paper requires you to write a sustained analysis of an ethical issue in a single work of literature we've read. Some questions your paper should consider include but are not limited to: What is the central ethical issue of the work? What are the two (or more) forces of the ethical conflict? How does the work resolve (or not) the ethical conflict? What resulting ethical message does the work convey? John Deigh's An Introduction to Ethics provides ethical concepts that I have translated into a series of ethical questions to ask literary works, and Lois Tyson's questions that postcolonial critics ask can easily be modified to highlight their ethical concerns.

 

For instance, Deigh's chapter on self-determination asks the abstract question of who should be self-governing. Self-governance is the central issue of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, as the Igbo's customs come into conflict with the white men's religion, government, and education. You could discuss what message about colonial control that the book conveys.

 

Your MLA formatted, well-organized, and thesis-driven paper should analyze textual evidence from both the work of literature and Deigh's An Introduction to Ethics or Tyson's "Postcolonial Criticism" and argue the ethical conflict, theme, and significance of the work.

 

The paper is due anytime on Thursday, October 29. Instead of a regular class period, office hours will be held during class time so you can ask last minute questions about the paper.

Parameters

Research Project

While the close reading paper focuses on your analysis of the primary text and the ethics paper focuses on your understanding of the ethical issue of a text, the research paper requires you to practice research to augment your literary and ethical understanding.

 

Discuss the ethical questions and moral issues of a selected writer, research the writer, compose an annotated bibliography of scholarly criticism of the writer, and present their findings to the class with a word-processing or presentation document that includes

Individual or Collaborative Option

You may either complete the research project individually or you may work in groups of 3-4. Individual annotated bibliographies should consist of at least 5 sources; group annotated bibliographies should consist of at least 15 sources.

Parameters

Note: Groups presenting on poets (Neruda, Walcott, and Darwish) should inform the professor if there are poems outside our textbook that they would like the class to read one week before the presentation so the professor can upload the poems to GeorgiaVIEW.

Sign Up

Sign up here either individually or in groups of 3-4 for a research project that is at least two weeks before or after your close reading presentation.

 

REVISE DATES

Date Author 9:30 Section Students 11:00 Section Students

R, 9-10

Neruda

  

 
   
   
   

R, 9-17

Walcott

1 Anna Pettit

2 Rose Wagner (group)

1 Casey Tom
 

 

  

 

  

T, 10-6

Allende

3 Bailey Dodson

2 Cole Krucke

4 Alli Beam

3 Jada Strickland

5 Claire Strickland

4 Rory Doran

6 Kody McClary

 

7 Cole Landreth

5 Sarah Hobby

T, 10-20

Achebe

8 Danielle Frazier

6 Meghan Hankla

9 Allyssa Harrison

7 Michelle Murdock

10 Ashleigh Black

8 Katy Arrowood

11 Thomas Donohue

9 Olivia Bowen

12 Karen Jarrard

10 Hayden Schlenker

R, 11-5

Coetzee

13 Brooklyn Honeycutt

11 Ty Bentley

14 Valeria Portela

12 Mason Winkler

15 Macy Atkins

16 Hunter Payne

17 Karleigh Woodward

(group)

13 Jayla Lawrence

14 John Linzey

15 Karla Rodriguez (group)

18 Klaire McDonald

16 Alicia Philpot

T, 11-24

Darwish

19 Cam Shaw

17 Samantha Barich

20 Drew Stanley

18 Katie Payne

21 Jada Popkoski

19 Jaime Regan

22 Max Wolverton

20 Alexus Taylor

23 Jhalen Billingslea

21 Mathew Gordon

Midterm Exam

The exam will test your ability to make connections and distinctions among texts and their meanings.

 

In the first exam you will write 2 thesis-driven comparison/contrast essays selected from 5-6 questions written by the professor based upon topics generated by the class on Tuesday, September 15.

 

Here is a suggested study plan:

  1. For each literary author read, compose notes that include the main characters, the core conflict, and the theme(s).
  2. Using Deigh's Ethics: An Introduction, determine which ethical issues the literary work explores. (Note that not all ethical theories apply to all texts.)
  3. Note what, if anything, the literary work says about the exam topics generated by the class, below.

Here is a list of who we have studied in the first half of the course:

  1. Celan, poetry
  2. Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  3. Márquez, "Death Constant Beyond Love"
  4. Naipaul, "One Out of Many"
  5. Kincaid, "Girl"
  6. Diaz, "Drown" and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie"
  7. Neruda, poetry
  8. Walcott, poetry

9:30 Section Topics and Questions

Here are the topics generated by the 9:30 section on Tuesday, September 15:

  1. applying ethics and morals to literature
  2. imperialism and colonialism
  3. race/class/gender (shame or insecurity)
  4. comparing and contrast two ethical theories
  5. dehumanization (for example, sexual violence or colonial violence)

Here are the questions for the 9:30 section:

  1. ethical evaluation: First, briefly explain one ethical concept (either egoism, eudamonism, or utilitarianism) as illustrated in John Deigh's An Introduction to Ethics; then, discuss how that issue plays out in texts by two authors we've read. Evaluate the actions of the story's characters (or poem's speakers) based on the ethical concept.
  2. cultural oppression: Compare and contrast the effects of cultural oppression, for example but not limited to colonialism and imperialism, in the works of two authors we’ve read. What are some distinctive messages we’ve learned about cultural oppression from world literature so far?
  3. race, class, gender, sexuality: Discuss the attitude and representation of either race, class, gender, or sexuality in two of the works we've read. For example, is it positive and proud or insecure and shameful, and what is the cultural significance of these portrayals?
  4. ethical theory: Using two literary works we've read as practical illustrations, compare and contrast two ethical theories (egoism, eudamonism, or utilitarianism). Define the theories; discuss their similarities and distinctions; and exemplify your exploration with literature. Note that the ethical theories must not be the one used if you answered question 1 ethical evaluation.
  5. dehumanization: Compare and contrast how dehumanization functions culturally and thematically in the works of two authors we've read. You could discuss sexual violence or colonial violence, for example.

11:00 Section Topics and Questions

Here are the topics generated by the 11:00 section on Tuesday, September 15:

  1. applying ethics and morality
  2. imperialism and colonialism
  3. mortality
  4. literary conflicts (man vs nature, man vs self, man vs man; and human nature)
  5. sexuality and/or sexual violence

Here are the questions for the 11:00 section:

  1. ethical evaluation: First, briefly explain one ethical concept (either egoism, eudamonism, or utilitarianism) as illustrated in John Deigh's An Introduction to Ethics; then, discuss how that issue plays out in texts by two authors we've read. Evaluate the actions of the story's characters or poem's speaker based on the ethical concept.
  2. cultural oppression: Compare and contrast the effects of cultural oppression, for example but not limited to colonialism and imperialism, in the works of two authors we’ve read. What are some distinctive messages we’ve learned about cultural oppression from world literature so far?
  3. mortality: Compare and contrast how characters or speakers in two works we've read respond to mortality. How do characters or speakers deal with death?
  4. conflict: Compare and contrast how the main characters or speakers respond to personal and/or political conflict. How do characters (or speakers) deal with adversity?
  5. sexuality: Compare and contrast the attitude toward and representation of sexuality in the work of two authors we've read. For example, is it positive and romantic or violent and shameful, and what is the cultural significance of these portrayals?

Parameters

Do not use an author or text in more than one essay (in other words, if you discuss Naipaul's short story in one essay, you may not analyze it in another essay; and you must discuss the work of four authors across the two essays). Not all works are appropriate for all essays. Choose works which afford adequate material to address the question at hand. Have a controlling idea, an interpretation, a thesis that bridges the works. Organize essays by argument and analysis. Make connections and distinctions among the works; compare and contrast the works' key ideas. Support your points with textual evidence; avoid plot summary. The OWL provides additional suggestions for essay exams. You will be graded on your interpretive understanding of the texts as well as your ability to compare and contrast meanings and issues.

Final Exam

While the first exam covered the first half of the course, the second exam covers the second half of the course. The class will brainstorm topics on Thursday, November 19; and the professor will generate comparison/contrast essay questions from those topics on Tuesday, November 24.

 

Answer 2 of the 6 questions below. Do not use an author in more than one essay; use two different authors' works in each essay, for a total of four authors covered across two essays. Not all authors' works are appropriate for all essays. Choose works which afford adequate material to address the question at hand. Have a controlling idea, an interpretation, a thesis that bridges the works. Make connections and distinctions among the texts; compare and contrast the works' key ideas. Support your points with textual evidence (pertinent quotations); avoid plot summary. Organize essays by argument and analysis. You will be graded on your interpretive understanding of the works as well as your ability to compare and contrast meanings and issues.

 

Here is a list of who we have studied in the second half of the course:

  1. Allende, The House of the Spirits
  2. Wa Thiang'o, "Wedding at the Cross" and "A Meeting in the Dark"
  3. Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  4. Aidoo, "Two Sisters"
  5. Head, "The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration"
  6. Coetzee, Disgrace
  7. Mahfouz, "Zaabalawi"
  8. Pamuk, "To Look Out the Window"
  9. El Saadawi, "In Camera"
  10. Al-Shaykh, "The Women's Swimming Pool"
  11. Darwish, poetry

9:30 Section Topics and Questions

11:00 Section Topics and Questions

Parameters

 

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