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English 104 serves two main purposes.  First, as a Composition course, it works to increase students' confidence and competence as writers.  Throughout the semester, students will write a number of reader responses and three formal papers.  Each of these assignments presents an opportunity for students to refine their skills in all facets of the writing process—from invention and pre-writing, to drafting, revising, and editing manuscripts for final grading.  Students will also acquire new strategies and techniques for writing persuasively—from the sentence and paragraph level to the broader level of essay form.  Finally, students will have an opportunity to explore creative writing as a means of engaging the world of literary ideas.  By the end of the semester, students will be writing with increased clarity, a greater sense of how to make ideas significant to others, and with a heightened ability to control elements of style in their own writing.

The second main purpose of the course is to serve as an introduction to Literature.  As such, the course will continually pose three major questions—what is Literature?  How do I understand it?  And in what ways can it be significant?  Answers to these questions will continue to evolve throughout the semester; our goal will not be to reach definitive conclusions about these questions.  Rather, we will use the questions as ways of discovering the rich variety of literary experience.  At the end of it all, we will understand that there aren't two or three keys to the understanding of literature.  Rather, the "meaning" of a particular story, poem, play, or essay, depends upon the purposes behind the reader's act of interpretation.  For example, reading Shakespeare for pleasure will produce a different kind of "meaning" than reading Shakespeare in preparation for an exam.  "Meaning" also depends upon the cultural context of the act of interpretation.  Does Hamlet mean the same thing to us as it did to the 17th century audiences who crowded into the Globe Theater to watch the play?  Imagine what Hamlet might mean to us in 250 years, or what it might mean today to an Australian Aborigine. 

Our course text, Joel Wingard's reader Literature: Reading and Responding to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay, will raise all these and many more questions, challenging understand texts in as many ways as we can.  The many individual pieces of literature we read will challenge us to care about meaning—to sympathize with heros, to despise villains, and to tell the difference between the two—to discover, examine, and articulate the significance of powerful words—and to question the meanings that are made routinely, constantly, in the "literature" that surrounds us daily, i.e., the advertisements, traffic signs, laws, birthday cards, and sitcoms that help us understand who we are and how we should behave. 

Literature, in a sense, surrounds us, and for that reason, English 104 provides lessons in critical thinking and textual interpretation that will serve students in other disciplines and in non-academic settings, as well.