E N G L I S H 1 0 4

Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street
Don Delillo: White Noise
Tony Hoagland: What Narcissism Means to Me
Highly recommended: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing or another writing handbook

Purposes of the Course:

The discussion group prompts, quizzes, and larger assignments of this course will be directed toward accomplishing the following goals:

introducing the challenges and pleasures of critical interpretation
illustrating literature’s relationship to culture
building college level reading skills, both in terms of comprehension and critical thinking
enhancing your ability to write thought-provoking, well-supported argumentative essays
encouraging you to use writing as an exploratory, expressive, and artistic outlet

Course Description:

English 104 introduces Viterbo’s second-semester students to the challenges and rewards of literary study, while continuing to enhance the argumentative writing abilities that English 103 helped establish. As a student in this online version of English 104, you will engage the challenges of critical reading on your own, while turning frequently to the Blackboard module’s discussion groups, quizzes, and assignments. These will provide structure—questions to guide your reading, discussion groups for active debate, and assignments to test your comprehension and critical thinking—for your online learning experience. By the end of the course, you should be a more perceptive reader, with a heightened ability to see significant ideas in written texts. You should also feel even more confident as a writer of argumentative essays—the detailed, interpretive readings required in the course should refine your ability to craft carefully worded, persuasively structured papers. Not only is this kind of learning useful—the interpretation of literature is an excellent preparation for other disciplines that require textual interpretation, such as law, psychology, political science, and even business—it may also be pleasurable. Yes, it’s okay to enjoy the course. In fact, I’ve tried to select texts that will help make the course fun.

Course Policies:

Depending on circumstances, late work may be accepted with penalty, or may not be accepted at all.
Viterbo University policy applying to nondiscrimination on the basis of disability: “it is the policy of Viterbo University to comply with the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act and regulations issued thereunder to the extent applicable to Viterbo University.”

Plagiarism Policy: Viterbo University and its English Department have very strict policies regarding plagiarism. It is important that you understand them clearly.

You commit plagiarism when you use another person's words or ideas without acknowledgment, either intentionally or unintentionally.
You commit plagiarism when you incorporate into your own writing words or ideas from a print source, an electronic source, or directly from another person without citing that source.
If you summarize or paraphrase a source without citing it, this is plagiarism. If you use exact words from a source without using quotation marks and properly citing them, this is plagiarism.
Plagiarism is a serious offense within an academic community. At Viterbo University, the sanctions for plagiarism range from failure for the assignment to expulsion from the University.

Assignments and Grading:

This course is based on a 750 point scale, in which

682-750 = A

660-681 = AB

607-659 = B

585-606 = BC

525-584 = C

450-524 = D

below 524 = F

The 750 points break down like this:

Participation in Discussion Forums:                        100 points


3 Response Essays:                                               150 points (50 points each)


Creative Piece:                                                      50 points 


Formal Essay:                                                       250 points 


Quizzes:                                                                200 points

Participation in Discussion Forums (100 points)

Discussion Forums will appear in the Blackboard module for this course, under the “Group Pages” button (click "Group Pages," then "Group Pages," then click your group, click "Group Discussion Board," then click the forum to which you wish to post). Each of you will be assigned to a small group, and will post your thoughts on each discussion forum. To post, click the forum to which you are posting. Then use the “Add New Thread” button and a text box will appear for you to type your post. Once your post is finished, click submit, and the other members of your discussion group will receive your post. When you write for discussion forums, you should write in a semi-formal fashion. You don’t need to edit extremely well, or to use very formal structures of writing. You should, however, think clearly about the substance of what you’re saying. You should try to contribute a substantial idea to the forum--perhaps a significant question and your thoughts on possible answers to it. Even if you’re uncertain about your reading, you can contribute to the forum by expressing that uncertainty as clearly as you can.

In addition to posting your own thoughts, you’ll need to respond to what your group-mates are saying. You should try to use your group to help you clearly comprehend the readings, and to think about the significance of the readings (see "Course Texts and Active Reading,"). As a group, you can answer each others' detail-oriented questions about the reading and also gain different perspectives from each other. I won’t participate in your group discussions. I will only monitor them in order to award points. Here’s what I’ll be looking for:

Each group member should contribute at least two postings, each of at least 100 words, to each of the discussion forums that appear during the semester. These posting should appear within three days of the forum’s appearance on the Blackboard account.
At least one of those postings should respond to the ideas of at least two of your discussion partners.
Postings should be thoughtful, and thought-provoking.
Postings should never be attacking or inappropriate. “Flaming,” or “screaming” in the discussion forums may constitute cause for expulsion from the course. Any verbal harassment or violence in the discussion forums may constitute cause for expulsion from the course.

It’s very important that each discussion forum be active and thought-provoking, because the discussion forums serve as the basis for the three response essays. In order to do well on those assignments, you’ll need to have strong, thoughtful response forums from which to draw. Each individual, then, needs to take responsibility for contributing good ideas to the discussion forums.

Three Response Essays (50 points each, 150 points total):

For each of three main texts in this class, there will be multiple discussion forums, covering multiple aspects of the text. Each of you will be required to take one of those forums for each text, and synthesize your group's thoughts with your own reading, in order to create a coherent exploration of that discussion forum’s subject, or main question. In other words, once, for each book, you’ll use a discussion forum as a launching pad into a more full, thorough, thinking-through of an issue related to your readings. Here are the specifications for the response essays:

Three to five pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt., 1" margins, MLA style.
At the top of the first page, put your name, the assignment, and the discussion forum you're responding to.
Use MLA style to cite all of your references to the text—to do this, you’ll primarily use parenthetical page number citations.
Refer to at least one idea that arose in your discussion forums. It can be your own idea. Make sure that you give credit to your discussion group partners, if you use their ideas in your response essay. You don’t need to cite these formally, but make sure you use clear signal phrases so that I understand when you’re summarizing or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas. Not to do so is plagiarism.
Your response essay should try to answer a question about one of our main texts—probably a question that’s posed by a discussion forum, but perhaps a question that’s raised within a discussion forum. In trying to answer a question, the essay should exhibit a detailed, specific knowledge of the text. You should refer to the appropriate passages of the text that help you answer the question, and you should show that you’ve read those passages clearly and critically. The main question about the text should provide the focus for each response essay, and the essay should work clearly within that focus.
Your response essay does not need to be definitive. You may write about a question that can’t be answered in one, single way. A good response essay can show a few different perspectives on the question, and should support all of them with specific references to the main text and/or to the discussion forum. Writing a definitive response when certainty isn’t justified can be a serious mistake in writing a response essay. If you’re too confident about your way of seeing a book, you may be missing other possibilities. Your response essays should exhibit that they’re open to multiple readings.
You should consider your response essays formal, academic writing. You should do your best to show that you’ve thought seriously about the question at hand, that you’ve closely examined the ideas of your discussion group members, and that you’ve closely read the text. Also, you should show that you’ve respected the formal nature of the assignment by formatting the essay exactly according to requirements, and by proofreading your work carefully. By making sure that you hand in your highest quality writing, here, we can determine what elements of writing you still need to work on.

Creative Piece (50 points):

Once, during the semester, you’ll have the opportunity to show what you’re learning about literature by writing literature. For this assignment, you’ll be asked to write either a vignette that exhibits some of the same qualities as Sandra Cisneros’s vignettes in The House on Mango Street or a poem that exhibits some of the same qualities as Tony Hoagland’s poems in What Narcissism Means to Me. This assignment, primarily, is an opportunity for you to have some fun, but it will be graded, albeit more leniently than your essays.

The piece should be no more than three pages in length, and should show the following:

A sense of fine-tuned focus: both the poem and the vignette are forms that look closely at a specific situation. Your poem or vignette will need to be closely tuned to a well-defined setting.
A sense of conflict: in each vignette or poem, there’s an overt or subtle conflict that motivates the piece’s action. Often this conflict is resolved by the end of the piece. At the very least, it’s developed.
Well-chosen details to render a captivating, descriptive scene.
Well-chosen words that give the poem or vignette a sense of artistry.
A confident, controlled voice. You should write your poem or vignette in first person, though the piece doesn’t have to be autobiographical. In order to make your piece feel alive, you’ll need to write in a way that shows the personality of your first person narrator.

Formal Essay (250 pionts):

The formal essay is the major writing assignment of the course. In it, you’ll be asked to discuss the relationship between literature as an art form and the culture that it represents. How does literature deliver messages to its readers about their culture? What, based on your reading, is the relationship of literature to culture? What are these texts telling us about our American identities? You may be able to base your formal essay on some of the writing you did in the response essays or in discussion forums. However, the paper will need to deal with at least two of our three main texts, so none of your earlier work will apply exactly to this assignment.

Here are the requirements for the paper:

Five to six pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point, one inch margins.
At the top of the first page, put your name, the assignment, and the title of your paper (you should give your essay an original title).
Use MLA style to cite all of your references to the texts, and to any secondary texts you might use. Add a “Works Cited” page to the end of your essay.
Your essay should use interpretation of at least two of our three main texts to support a thesis statement about the relationship of literature to culture. You might use Tony Hoagland and Don DeLillo to support a thesis about how Americans’ neuroses are revealed in What Narcissism Means to Me and White Noise. Or you might use Don DeLillo and Sandra Cisneros to make a claim about how disparities of socio-economic class are revealed in White Noise and The House on Mango Street. Having an original idea upon which to focus your essay is probably the most important element of succeeding in this assignment. As the semester goes on, keep your eyes open for ideas that might apply to this assignment.
Good essays will have highly original thesis statements that are clearly articulated, analyzed from multiple perspectives, and supported by discerning analysis of the course texts.
You may use secondary sources, but you must cite them. You should only use secondary sources to provide support for or other perspectives on your own original thesis.
Your paper’s organization should effectively work to support the paper’s main argument.
The paper should be written to the highest standards of formal college writing. You should do show that you’ve thought seriously about your chosen topic and that you’ve closely read the texts. Also, you should show that you’ve respected the formal nature of the assignment by formatting the essay exactly according to requirements, and by proofreading your work carefully. As the final piece of formal writing in the course, the essay will show the level of your abilities as you exit the class. It’s quality is of highest importance to your semester’s grade.

Quizzes (200 points):

Reading quizzes are an important part of the course. They test your reading comprehension and your ability think critically about the course texts. Quizzes will be periodically announced on Blackboard, and can be completed in the Blackboard module. You can always use your course texts in taking the quizzes, i.e., they are “open book” quizzes. A couple of things to remember, though: the quizzes are time sensitive—they will only be posted for a three-day period. If you haven’t taken the quiz by the end of that “window,” you will have missed those points. Also, once you begin taking a quiz, you will not be able to stop the quiz and start again. Also, in some cases (perhaps many cases), you will not be able to go back and change an answer you’ve already submitted.