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H 203 4443 Ideas and Human Experience I MW 11:15 12:30 HHC 108 Reading Jessica Abel, La Perdida. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End. Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project. Edward Jones, The Known World. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love. Maile Meloy, Liars and Saints. Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women. In this course, well read 21st-century American novels, which, for the most part, have been written by authors who made their name in the 21st-century. The course has no thesis to propound, and the novels we read vary in style, content, and concerns, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, and regional and, on one occasion, national background. Krausss novel is a fictional memoir about two generations of Jewish-American writers and it sometimes echoes the concerns of Foers novel, which is narrated by a boy whose father died in the World Trade Center. Hemons novel tells the intertwined stories of a 21st-century immigrant to Chicago and an early 20th-century Jewish immigrant mistaken for an anarchist, and as a result killed by the Chief of the Chicago police. Hemon is an American citizen who was not born in the US and he is one of many writers of that type currently at work in America. While Hemon raises questions about what it means to be an American author, Diazs novel of immigrant life focuses on an overweight Dominican-American comic book fan and the alternately comic and tragic events of his days in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. Abels graphic novel, La Perdida, is a companion piece of sorts to the Diaz novel and it traces a trip to Mexico gone wrong for Carla, a half-Anglo, half-Mexican woman dissatisfied with her life in urban America. The inclusion of Abels graphic novel points to that forms rise to prominence during the last decade, a prominence which may also explain the important role images play in the work of Foer and Hemon. Jones who, like Diaz, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, tells a tale of slavery that focuses, in part, on African-American owners of slaves. Ferris offers a look at work from the perspective of the Bartleby like collective We in the novels title, while Meloy tells a tale of family life and strife that follows four generations of a family from the second World War to the present. Walberts A Short History of Women is also a family novel of sorts, but its a family novel that focuses on the history of the women in one particular family from the 1890s, through the period of early twentieth-century suffrage reform, and into the twenty-first century. Range of method and concerns is the key, then, and its that range well explore in this class. Schedule 8/30 9/1 9/6 9/8 9/13 Introduction. Jones, The Known World. 1-103. Jones, The Known World. 105-177. Jones, The Known World. 179-274. Jones, The Known World. 275-388. Gareth Evans HHC 216H Office Hours: MW 9:30 10:45 garevans@indiana.edu

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9/15 9/20 9/22 9/27 9/29 10/4 10/6 10/11 10/13 10/18 10/20 10/25 10/27 11/1 11/3 11/8 11/10 11/15 11/17 11/ 22 11/29 12/1 12/6 12/8 Meloy, Liars and Saints. 3-107. Meloy, Liars and Saints. 108-205 Meloy, Liars and Saints, 206-260; Walbert, A Short History of Women. Walbert, A Short History of Women. Walbert, A Short History of Women. Class meets at Wells Library. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Essay 1 due. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Library Exercise Due. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Krauss, The History of Love. Krauss, The History of Love. Krauss, The History of Love. Hemon, The Lazarus Project. Hemon, The Lazarus Project. Hemon, The Lazarus Project. Ferris, Then We Came to the End. Ferris, Then We Came to the End. Essay 2 due. Ferris, Then We Came to the End. Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. THANKSGIVING Abel, La Perdida. 3-136. Abel, La Perdida. 137-256. TBA. Evaluations Final Essay due.

Note: The schedule and syllabus are subject to change. Three 6-8 page essays. 80% of final grade. Attendance and participation in discussion and in-class activities. 10% of the final grade. A graded exercise designed to display your ability to find and use information in IUCAT, and a number of online databases. 10% of the final grade.

Writing Requirements and Grades Your essays may include use of and reference to secondary, critical sources. A hard copy of each of the essays must be submitted to me on paper. Note: Essays that do not meet the page requirement will be return unread and given an F. Be warned that changing font size, line spacing, and the size of margins are not only doomed to failure, but will insure you get an F for the essay. You will not be allowed to rewrite an essay that does not meet the page requirement for the assignment. A graded exercise designed to display your ability to find and use information in IUCAT, WorldCat, Online Full-Text Journals, and the online Modern Language Association International Bibliography. 10% of the final grade. 10% of your grade will depend on class participation. Students who rarely or never participate in class discussion receive a C for class participation. A C for class participation typically means a student who averages B on his or her essays gets a B- for

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the class. An A for class participation and on the library exercise typically means a student who averages B on his or her essays gets a B+ for the class. On every day you dont have an essay due, bring to class a typewritten response to one of the reading questions posted at Oncourse. Class discussion on those days will sometimes be driven by the questions you ask. Ill collect your discussion questions at the end of each session and redistribute them within a week of their submission. The questions you write and ask count towards class participation. Your final grade for the class will drop by 1/3 of a grade every time you dont bring a response to class with you. You must fulfill all of the writing requirements to receive a passing grade in the class. Essay w/ lowest grade Essay w/ 2nd lowest grade Essay w/ highest grade Library research exercise Class Participation 20% 25% 35% 10% 10%

All essays must be exercises in literary criticism and analysis. Essays will be graded on form as well as content. I place a great deal of emphasis on writing skills and only those students with exceptional writing skills can expect to receive an A in this class. For a sense of how I grade essays, see my Grading Policy and Essay Writing Guidelines below.

Grading Policy A: Excellent. The best essays I receive analyze how a text works by paying close attention to such matters as language, structure, repeated themes, variations on themes, unusual moments in the text and so forth. Such essays are outstanding in their treatment of the selected theme. The size and scope of the ideas are impressive. The degree of involvement with the material demonstrates the writer has read the texts very carefully, has thought about the ideas very carefully, and is asking important questions. Outstanding papers deal in specifics and they support their claims by quoting appropriate portions of the works they are analyzing. Outstanding papers demonstrate superior technical expertise in the mechanics of writing as well as stylistic finesse. The language is strong and precise, and each sentence fully justifies itself. Ultimately, it is the level of analysis and the level of detail that separates essays that receive A grades from essays that receive grades in the B range or below. Note: The description above is largely a copy of part of Professor Richard Burkes grading rubric for H 211. B: Good. The essay is clearly written for the most part, but it will have several sentence level errors, and/or some poorly constructed paragraphs, and/or the argument may not always flow as smoothly as it might. OR, the essay does what it does clearly and well, but it doesnt do enough, by which I mean, some parts of the argument arent sufficiently developed, and/or some relevant parts of the argument arent touched on at all. Writers of B range essays also commonly tell readers what they think, but dont show readers why they think what they think by quoting and analyzing the text. Most of the essays that get B range grades are less than seven pages long. C: Satisfactory, average, fulfilling requirements. A whole range of issues, including persistent sentence-level errors, failure to spell-check and proof-read the essay, consistent problems with paragraphing, the absence of a thesis, the lack of a focused argument, and the failure to support claims with textual evidence.

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D: Barely adequate or below average college-level work. Unsatisfactory completion of assignment with technical irregularity, misperceived concepts and/or undisciplined effort. F: Unsatisfactory, inadequate, not college-level work. Failure to complete assignment or completion with little evidence of serious thought, support of reasoning, awareness of course content, and/or writing skill. Essay writing guidelines The following list provides guidelines for the essays you write. Your grade will be determined by how closely your essays follow the guidelines. There is no right or wrong answer to the questions to which you will respond. Your grade will depend on how clearly and convincingly you present and support your overall argument. Excellent essays make a plausible argument, and they support that argument by analyzing, and quoting from, the text they are discussing. Essays should be clearly written at the sentence level; they should be free of errors in syntax, punctuation, and spelling. Essays should include a clearly stated thesis statement in the first paragraph. Think of the thesis statement as a direct response to the question. As you plan the essay, begin by formulating a working thesis. Develop and refine your thesis by gathering evidence that supports your thesis. Look for evidence that complicates and/or contradicts your thesis. Reformulate your thesis so it takes into account the complexities and contradictions you have identified in the text. Build a plausible argument that illuminates and supports your thesis. The thesis you use in the final draft should be complex and qualified. Your task is to use evidence that persuades the reader to agree with your thesis. The most convincing essays win the agreement of a reader not only by using evidence to display the validity of their argument, but also by anticipating and countering other potential readings of the text or texts being examined. The first paragraph should also specify the background of the essay as well as the main themes used to organize the discussion of the essay. Begin every paragraph in the body of the essay with a topic sentence that specifies its main analytical point and states how it contributes to your overall argument. Sentences within individual paragraphs should all be related to the same topic. The first sentence of each paragraph in the body of the essay should also be a transition sentence that, through contrast or comparison, makes each point in your argument appear to be part of a logical sequence. Effective transition sentences add greatly to the coherence and logic of the argument made in an essay. Each paragraph should include quotations from the primary text you are discussing, detailed analysis, and concrete examples that support the main point of the paragraph. End each paragraph with a concluding sentence that explains how the evidence of that paragraph contributes to the paragraphs main analytical point and the overall argument of your essay. The conclusion should rehearse the argument you made in the body of the essay. All of your quotations, facts, and examples should be cited according to MLA style. For more on MLA style see the MLA section below. Use the active voice and avoid the passive voice; in other words, write Chopin wrote The Awakening not The Awakening was written by Chopin. Write declarative sentences that say who did what, when, how and why. Use the present tense when you are writing about characters and events in literary texts. Aim for economy of expression. Make every word count.

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Avoid writing in the first person. Academics conventionally write in the third person. Be passionate in your writing, but try to sound objective. Avoid words such as people, individuals, they, or this. Always identify the event, person, people, or social group you are discussing. Always define abstract terms such as realism, naturalism, or individualism. The essays you write will be relatively short. Quote the primary text often, but try to avoid using quotes that are more than three or four lines long.

The Essay Writing Guidelines originally appeared in largely the same form on the web site of Professor Konstantin Dierks at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. <http://php.indiana.edu/~kdierks/A300-2004B-web/A300writingguidelines.html>. Policies Assigned reading must be completed before the class in which it is due to be discussed. Print and read material for the class that is available online or at e-reserve. Always bring the reading to class. I encourage you to participate in class discussion. The more you contribute to class discussion, the more you are likely to learn. Lively class discussion also makes the class more enjoyable for teacher and student alike. Attendance is mandatory. Your grade will be lowered a complete grade if you miss four classes; your grade will be lowered two complete grades if you miss five classes. Students who miss six classes will automatically receive an F in the class. I count all absences, whatever their cause, as absences. Late papers will be penalized one-third of a grade for each day they are late. The grade will be reduced by an extra one-third of a grade for every future day that passes. For example, an essay that would receive a B if it were turned in on time would receive a D if it were turned in a week late. No incompletes. Plagiarism will not be tolerated and will be dealt with according to departmental and university policy. In the worst cases, that will result in a zero (0) for the assignment, an F in the course, a report filed with the Dean, and expulsion from the university. Plagiarism is the reproduction of ideas, words or statements of another person without appropriate acknowledgment. A student must give credit to the originality of others and acknowledge an indebtedness whenever he or she does any of the following: (a) Quotes another persons words, either oral or written; (b) Paraphrases another persons words, either oral or written; (c) uses another persons idea, opinion, or theory; or (d) Borrows facts, statistics, or other illustrative material, unless the information is common knowledge (Student Ethics Handbook). Turn off cell-phones and beepers before entering the classroom. Do not use your laptop during class.