LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY
ENG BC 3193y sec. 2
FALL 2005
COURSE REQUIREMENTS

This course is a seminar, and your participation is essential. You are expected to attend class regularly, and to participate in class discussion. To facilitate that discussion, you are expected to have completed all reading by the date for which it is assigned. Please do the reading in the order listed on the syllabus. Note also that some of the assignments are long and/or challenging, and plan ahead.

In order to enhance our discussion, and to facilitate interactions between our weekly meetings, I’ve set up a web discussion for this course. You can reach it by logging into http://courseworks.columbia.edu and clicking on this course.  You are required to post one message to the bulletin board under the category "Meet the class" by September 12. You should also check the discussion group periodically to see what your classmates have been writing.

In addition, you are required to complete the following written assignments:

1) Five papers, three to five pages in length. I will distribute more detailed guidelines for these papers during the semester. Note that these papers are often due on days that we don’t meet as a class.

2) Weekly response papers, one to two pages each. Response papers are due by 9 am each day we meet. They should discuss your response to a particular aspect of the assigned critical or theoretical material. You may choose to do a close reading of a particular passage, to explore a particular theme or issue raised by the reading assignment, or to connect the critical material to the assigned literary texts. While each paper need not be a fully-developed essay with a fully explicated thesis, it should be an essay rather than a stream-of-consciousness document. Its prose should be paragraphed, polished, and free of errors. Moreover, each essay should reveal that you've put some serious thought into the assigned reading.

Response papers should be composed on a word processor, and then posted to the course bulletin board. In addition, you should keep a copy on disk and print out a copy for your portfolio. Each week, you are responsible for posting a response paper to the bulletin board, and reading your classmates’ response papers. In addition, you must post a response to a classmate’s paper each week. (You should print out a copy of each response you post and place it in your portfolio as well.) We will often use your response papers and your responses to each other to open our discussion.

All essays must be typed, double-spaced, on white paper in standard fonts. Please don't use very small or very large fonts to squeeze or stretch out your essay. The page guidelines apply to standard 12-point fonts. Papers should follow the new MLA guidelines for essays; see the English department guide to the preparation of papers, A Writer's Reference, The Borzoi Handbook or The MLA Handbook for details. You are responsible for keeping a copy of each paper that you submit.

Critical Writing marks your formal entry into the English major and into the scholarly community of the Barnard English department. This community, like Barnard College as a whole, values intellectual integrity very highly. Plagiarism (using the words or ideas of others without appropriate attribution)  is a serious violation, and I report all cases of plagiarism to the Dean of Studies without exception. If you are at all confused about appropriate acknowledgement of sources, please see me for clarification.

I will calculate your grade on the following basis: