Assignments

English 4665/5665: American Literature from 1920-Present, Fall 2012

Section 01: MW 5:30-6:45PM, Arts & Sciences 368

Scheduled Assignment Sign Up

Use the following table to sign up for scheduled assignments: the undergraduate literary biography (bio), the undergraduate close reading paper and presentation (close, note that you will be working on this assignment in pairs), and the graduate presentation (present).

 

Graduates should sign up for one slot (present).

 

Undergraduates should sign up for one literary biography (bio) and one close reading (close) spaced out at least two weeks for the other two slots they've signed up for.

 

Written Due Date Presentation Due Date Author Student
S, 8-19
W, 8-22

Roth

 bio 1 Natalie Sharp
M, 8-27 M, 8-27

Roth

 close 1
close 2
NA M, 8-27

Roth

 present 1
S, 8-26
W, 8-29

Butler

 bio 2 Brandon Dudley
W, 9-5 W, 9-5

Butler

 close 3 Natalie Sharp
close 4 Kristin Karschner
W, 9-5 W, 9-5

Butler

 present 2
F, 9-7
M, 9-10

Baker

 bio 3 Fred Serpico
W, 9-12 W, 9-12

Baker

 close 5 Ashley Howard
close 6 Fred Serpico
NA W, 9-12

Baker

 present 3
F, 9-14
M, 9-17

Acker

 bio 4 Whitney Cutler
W, 9-19 W, 9-19

Acker

 close 7 George Hulbert
close 8
NA W, 9-19

Acker

 present 4 Brandon Nelson McCoy
F, 9-21
M, 9-24

Pynchon

 bio 5 Les Bessenger
F, 9-21
M, 9-24

Coover

 bio 6 Erin Kelly
S, 9-23
W, 9-26

Wallace

 bio 7 Matt Thompson
M, 10-1 M, 10-1

Wallace

 close 9 Les Bessenger
close 10 Jessica Diamond
NA M, 10-1

Wallace

 present 5 Tabatha Harris
S, 9-30
W, 10-3

Ashbery

 bio 8 Rebekah Autry
W, 10-10 W, 10-10

Ashbery

 close 11 Whitney Cutler
close 12 Erin Kelly
NA W, 10-10

Ashbery

 present 6 Fred Parker
F, 10-12
M, 10-15

Waldrop

 bio 9 Taylor Green
W, 10-17 W, 10-17

Waldrop

 close 13 Taylor Green
close 14 Rachel Freeman
NA W, 10-17

Waldrop

 present 7
S, 10-21
W, 10-24

Mackey

 bio 10 Kristin Karschner
M, 10-29 M, 10-29

Mackey

 close 15
close 16
NA W, 10-29

Mackey

 present 8
S, 10-28
W, 10-31

Albee

 bio 11 Jessica Diamond
F, 11-2
M, 11-5

Shepard

 bio 12 Rachel Freeman
S, 11-4
W, 11-7

Hwang

 bio 13 Ashley Howard
M, 11-12 M, 11-12

Hwang

 close 17 Matt Thompson
close 18 Brandon Dudley
close 19 Rebekah Autry
NA M, 11-12

Hwang

 present 9 Lori Campbell
S, 11-11
W, 11-14

Parks

 bio 14 George Hulbert

Paper and Author List

Use this table to remind yourself of what authors you studied and wrote about previously. The comparison/contrast paper, research paper, and exam must be written on authors not previously written about in the course.

 

Student Close/Present
Compare
 Research

Rebekah Autry

 Hwang

Butler

Coover

Albee

Les Bessenger

 Wallace

Barth

Coover

  

Lori Campbell

 Hwang

Atwood

Butler

 Ellis

Whitney Cutler

 Ashbery

Butler

Coover

Albee

Jessica Diamond

 Wallace

Butler

Shepard

 Hwang

Brandon Dudley

 Hwang

Mailer

Roth

 Hwang

Rachel Freeman

 Waldrop

Baker

Retallack

Butler

Taylor Green

 Waldrop

Acker

Coover

Retallack

Ashbery

Ashley Howard

 Baker

Butler

Hwang

 Waldrop

Mac Hulbert

 Acker

Ashbery

Waldrop

 Hwang

Kristin Karschner

 Butler

Acker

Mailer

 Coover

Erin Kelly

 Ashbery

Coover

Roth

 Hwang

Brandon McCoy

 Acker

Mailer

Thompson

 Albee

Fred Parker

 Ashbery

Roth, Ghost

Roth, Zuckerman

 Nordan

Fred Serpico

 Baker

Mailer

Wallace

 Mackey

Natalie Sharp

 Butler

Coover

Wallace

 Parks

Matt Thompson

 Hwang

Mailer

Roth

Baker

In Class Activities

1. Closely Reading Mailer

To prepare for the undergraduate close reading paper, today we're going to break into groups and practice an abbreviated close reading of a significant passage. Here are the passages:

  1. Because he was full of American rectitude and was fearless, and savage, savage as the exhaust left in the wake of a motorcycle club, gasoline and cheap perfume were one end of his spectrum, yeah, this Marshal loved action, but he was also in that no man’s land between the old frontier and the new ranch home—as they, yes they—the enemies of the Marshal—tried to pass bills to limit the purchase of hunting rifles, so did they try to kill America, inch by inch, all the forces of evil, disorder, mess and chaos in the world, and cowardice! and city ways, and slick shit, and despoliation of national resources, all the subtle invisible creeping paralyses of Communism which were changing America from a land where blood was red to a land where water was foul—yes in this Marshal's mind—no lesser explanation could suffice for the Knight of God light in the flame of his eye—the evil was without, America was threatened to the core of his sanity by any one of the first fifty of Mailer's ideas which would insist that the evil was within, that the best in America was being destroyed by what in itself semester next best, yest American heroism corrupted by American knowledge—no wonder murder stood out in his face as he looked at the novelist—for the Marshal to lose his sanity was no passing psychiatric affair: think rather of a rifeman on a towere in Texas and a score of his dead on the street. (144-5)
  2. He had written for years about American architecture and its functional disease—that one could not tell the new colleges from the new prisons from the new hospitals from the new factories from the new airpots. Separate institutions were being replaced by one institution. Yes, and the irony was that this workhouse at Occoquan happened to be more agreeable architecturally than many a state university he had seen, or junior college. There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications—the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. (176)
  3. He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane. The country had been living with a controlled, even fiercely controlled, schizophrenia which had been deepening with the years. Perhaps he point had now been passed. Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, the son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. The average American, striving to do his duty, drove further every day into working for Christ, and drove equally further each day in the opposite direction—into working for the absolute computer of the corporation. (188)
  4. It was to a degree incredible, as every paradigm of the 20th century is incredible. Originally the demonstrators were saying in effect: our country is engaged in a war so hideous that we in the greatest numbers possible, are going to break the laws of assembly in order to protest this impossible war. The government was saying: this is a war necessary to maintain the very security of this nation, but because of our tradition of free speech and dissent we will permit your protest, but only if it is orderly. Since these incompatible positions had produced an impasse, the compromise said in effect: we, the government, wage the war in Vietnam for our security, but will permit your protest provided it is only a little disorderly. The demonstrators: we still consider the war. outrageous and will therefore break the law, but not by very much. // Each side was compromised, each side was, on the face of their professed attitude, absurd. Yet each party had the most pressing practical concerns to force them into collaboration.

    (240)
  5. No, the difficulty is that the history is interior—no documents can give sufficient intimation: the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historic inquiry. So these limits are now relinquished. The collective novel which follows, while still written in the cloak of an historic style, and therefore, continually attempting to be scrupulous to the welter of a hundred confusing and opposing facts, will now unashamedly enter that world of strange lights and intuitive speculation which is the novel. (255)
  6. Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars controlled the locks. // Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? Or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Brood on that country who expresses our will. (288)

Here are the issues each group should discuss:

  1. What is the overall conflict of the book?
  2. What is the overall meaning of the book?
  3. What is the core conflict of the passage?
  4. What is the meaning of the passage?
  5. Analyze one sentence of the passage in terms of connotation, imagery, symbolism, and/or figures of speech.
  6. How do core conflict and meaning of the passage broach or connect with the overall conflict and meaning of the book?

2. Analyzing a Short Story Collection

Although our discussion of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men will focus on a few short stories, we'll also explore the thematic and stylistic connections among the stories in order to understand how they work together as a collection. To that end, individually respond to the following questions on your assigned story and be ready to report to the class:

  1. What are the key issue and main idea of the story?
  2. How do you describe the story's format and literary style?

Here are the assigned stories; boldfaced names are responsible for two very short stories:

 

0 A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life: Rebekah Autry, Erin Kelly

1 Death Is Not the End: Les Bessenger, Brandon McCoy

5 Forever Overhead: Lori Campbell, Fred Parker

17 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Whitney Cutler, Natalie Sharp

35 Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI): Rebekah Autry, Erin Kelly

37 The Depressed Person: Brandon Dudley, Jenna Williams

70 The Devil Is a Busy Man: Jessica Diamond, Matthew Thompson

72 Think: Jessica Diamond, Matthew Thompson

75 Signifying Nothing: Taylor Green, Tabatha Harris

82 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Rachel Freeman, Ashley Howard

125 Datum Centurio: Mac Hulbert

131 Octet: Kristin Karschner, Fred Serpico

Comparison/Contrast Paper

While the close reading paper requires undergraduates to practice attentive analysis of a key passage and the book review calls for graduate students to summarize and evaluate a scholarly book on postmodern literature, the comparison/contrast paper instructs all to analyze how one particular idea, issue, or characteristic functions both the same way and different ways in two works of postmodern American literature. For example, you could compare and contrast either the metafictional strategies of Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" and Coover's "The Babysitter," the unstable realities of Roth's The Ghost Writer and Butler's Kindred, or the narcissistic, unreliable narrators of Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Roth's The Ghost Writer.

 

Undergraduates should write a 5-6 page comparison/contrast paper on in class works only, but not ones written on in the close reading or research papers.

 

Graduates should write a 6-7 page comparison/contrast paper on one in class work and one outside class work (let the professor know the outside work at least two weeks before the due date), but not one studied in the presentation or research paper.

Research Paper

The close reading paper asked undergraduates to closely read a work and comparison/contrast paper challenged undergraduates and graduate students to make connections and distinctions among two works. The research paper will afford you the time and space to perform a sustained and sourced discussion of a significant issue in a postmodernist work. Your thesis-driven paper should employ textual analysis and support its interpretation of the issue with scholarly criticism. Here is how to conduct literary research.

 

Undergraduates: You will write a 8-10 page research paper, incorporating at least 5 scholarly articles, on a work read in class (but not one written on in either the close reading paper or comparison/contrast paper) or a work not studied in class by one of the authors studied in class.

 

Graduates: You will write a 12-15 page research paper that enters, engages, and advances the scholarly discourse of a postmodernist work either discussed in class (but not one studied in either the presentation or comparison/contrast paper) or selected by you and approved by the professor. First, you will compose a 250 word paper proposal following the suggestions by Owl. Your final essay should be worthy of being presented at a conference, integrate at least 6 interpretive sources and apply at least 2 theoretical articles on postmodern literature. You will be given 15 minutes to read your essay in class; then you will participate in a question and answer session about your paper with the class. Note that you will have to amend your paper to fit the time limit.

Final Exam

In the take home final exam, you will write two thesis-driven comparison/contrast essays of your choice from a selection of four to six questions.

 

Not all works are appropriate for all essays. Choose works which afford adequate material to address the question at hand. Do not use a work to answer more than one essay; and do not write on authors written about previously in close reading, comparison/contrast, research, or presentation assignments.

 

Organize essays by argument and analysis. Have a controlling idea, an interpretation, a thesis that bridges the works. Support your points with textual evidence (quotations) when necessary and warranted; avoid plot summary. Make connections and distinctions among the texts; in other words, compare and contrast the works' key themes.

 

The broad topics that you will be tested on, generated from class discussion Monday, November 19, are:

The questions posted here on Monday, November 26, are:

Undergraduate Assignments

Literary Biography

GeorgiaVIEW Post

You will sign up to write a literary biography of an author we're reading in class and post it to GeorgiaVIEW > Discussions > Literary Biographies. Much like a Norton anthology or Contemporary Authors author biography, this paper should

Below is a list of sources that will help you collect the information for your literary bibliography. They are available through the GCSU Library.

Informal Presentation

You will also be asked to introduce the author and work on the first day of class discussion. Your graded paper will be returned to you within a week of your presentation in GeorgiaVIEW > Assignments > Literary Biography.

Due Dates

  1. Your written literary biography will be due in GeorgiaVIEW > Discussions > Literary Biographies three days before we discuss the author in class. If you do not submit your written summary to GeorgiaVIEW before the article is discussed in class, you will fail the assignment.
  2. Your brief, informal presentation will be due on the day we discuss the author in class. This date is approximate for we sometimes fall a day behind.
  3. I will return your graded literary biography to you in GeorgiaVIEW > Assignments > Literary Biography a week after we discuss the article in class.
  4. For example, we are scheduled to discuss Roth on Wednesday, 8-22. Therefore, someone's literary biography will be due in GeorgiaVIEW by Sunday, 8-19. In class on Wednesday, 8-22, that student will informally present her literary biography. I will return the graded literary biography to her the following week in GeorgiaVIEW > Assignments > Literary Biography.

Note: It is extremely important for each person to turn in the literary biographies on time and attend class for the presentation component. Biographies will be penalized one letter grade for each day, not class period, that they are turned in late. Failing to present the article to the class without providing a valid absence excuse will result in a one letter grade penalty.

Close Reading

Sign up in pairs to analyze a key passage in a formal 5-6 page paper and formal 5-7 minute presentation not including reading the passage aloud. Your essay and presentation 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, and 2) arguing 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. 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 diction, idea and theme. Your well-organized presentation should clearly convey your ideas to the class, and each member should speak during the presentation.

Graduate Assignments

Book Review

Review a monograph of postmodern literature (subject to professor approval two weeks before the due date) by appreciating and interrogating its argument, summarizing and evaluating its interpretation. Example reviews of varying lengths are available on Postmodern Culture.

Presentation

For the 30 minute presentation, you will sign up to research and present/teach an scholarly journal article or book chapter that advances class discussion as well as understanding of a literary work. Provide the professor the article at least one week before your presentation and retrieve your graded presentation in GeorgiaVIEW > Assignments > Presentation approximately one week after the presentation.

 

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