LITERATURE OF AMERICAN SLAVERY AND ITS LEGACY
|
HSS
403,
Fall
2013 |
Professor Burt Kimmelman |
Website: http://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma
PLEASE NOTE:
IF YOU
ARE NOT ADEPT AT READING IN ENGLISH, THEN YOU SHOULD NOT SIGN UP FOR
THIS COURSE (INSTEAD, YOU SHOULD ENROLL IN A SENIOR SEMINAR
COURSE THAT IS
NOT CONCERNED WITH LITERATURE). THE COURSE WILL REQUIRE ANALYZING
LITERATURE IN
ENGLISH, AND IT ALSO WILL REQUIRE BEING ABLE TO WRITE CLEARLY ABOUT IT.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will examine literary and some supportive historical works written before, during and after the American Civil War, having mostly to do with slavery in America. In particular, the course will consider how writers have dealt with this keystone experience in American history and culture stylistically and ethically. The course will also reflect upon how these works have helped to shape the American ethos and identity, and how slavery in America has, as a legacy, helped to create the larger sense of American literature as a body of work unique to the United States.
Literary works will be compared with each other and will
be read within the framework primarily of their respective times.
CLICK ON THE "COURSE
PROCEDURES" LINK IMMEDIATELY BELOW TO FIND OUT HOW THIS COURSE
OPERATES AND WHAT WILL BE EXPECTED OF YOU IN IT
(YOU SHOULD THEN RETURN TO THIS PAGE AND READ WHAT ELSE YOU FIND
HERE).
Course Procedures, an Introduction
COURSE TEXTS
(you should read the editions of the works below as specified, not other versions)
Du Bois, W. E. B. The
Souls of Black Folk.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995. ISBN: 067932764. (Optional)
Gates, Henry Louis. Ed. and Intr.
The Classic Slave Narratives.
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka),
Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays.
Kearns Goodwin, Doris. "The Sewards' Trip South, 1835." (See in Moodle.)
Morrison, Toni.
Beloved.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry
Finn.
Wheatley, Phillis. Selected poems to be found at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/phillis-wheatley#about)
Glossary of Terms and
Definitions
Other Online Literary
Resources
Humanities Resources Links: http://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma/humanities.htm.
Writing Guides Links:
http://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma/writing.html.
Documentation Guides Links: http://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma/documentation.html.
Abbreviations for
Marking Papers
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
* Final examination, comprehensive, essay in format, open-book; the exam question(s) will be distributed to you at least a week ahead of time. The exam essay(s) must be uploaded as a Word file in the proper place in the Assignments section of our course in Moodle.
* An end-of-term research paper (the Term Paper), to be 1500 to 3000 words (excluding bibliography) in length; this essay must be a researched, fully-documented, original and critical, discursive, polemical and otherwise argumentative essay that must include at least some detailed literary analysis (see below^^), along with a bibliography of all primary and secondary sources† (again, the bibliography is not to be considered part of your word count)—the essay must not be a mere report, and should be one that is appropriate to a course in literature (as opposed to, for example, a course in history, although historical matters may be included in the essay for this course). The term paper topic is open (yet the topic must have something to do with the literature of American slavery and/or American slavery's legacy) but must be approved ahead of time by the instructor.
* A Term Paper Announcement (see full description below^) consisting of a Working Title and Subtitle, a one-sentence Thesis Statement indicating what of a truly polemical nature is to be proven in your essay, a Description of your future paper’s writing strategy (one paragraph can be enough here, but more than one is acceptable—this is not to be a summary of what you think your paper will turn out to be, but rather a narrative describing how you will prove your thesis), and a Bibliography of at least three secondary sources,† one of which must be a hard-copy source (see full description of bibliography requirements below^).
N.B.: Research Term Paper assignments should be submitted in order, and the TPA should be preceded by your submission of a proposed topic for the paper. Your topic must meet be approved by the instructor. There are Discussion areas where you are expected to post ideas for your paper, and once your idea has been approved where your TPA should also be posted (the TPA can be simple and short but must contain all the elements mentioned above, and this too must be approved). Please don't upload attachments to the discussion forums.
* A group project to be submitted in Power Point at the end of the course. This group-composed document would contain both visual imagery and text, and possibly music, and would delve into a chosen issue or facet of literature involving American slavery and/or its legacy.
* A portofolio of your 8 best posts in the course (your selection). How to create this portfolio: select by copying and pasting the 8 posts you think best demonstrate your performance in this course in the weekly exchanges of commentary, including the time stamp of each post. Paste the posts in chronological order in a Word file and upload it, at the end of the term, in the appropriate place in the Assignment section of our course in Moodle.
N.B.: All papers must be word processed, double-spaced with
one
inch margins, spell-checked, and to the best of one's ability
grammar-checked.
If on occasion use is made of the ideas or words of someone else in
one's
writing—not only in formally submitted papers but all work you submit in this
course, including the weekly posts—then the source(s) of those ideas and/or words must be cited;
that is, when appropriate, your writing must be fully documented in MLA
format (you must cite sources—using footnotes, endnotes, or
parenthetical
documentation, which include specific page numbers keyed to particular
passages in your text, and complete bibliographical information).
PAPERS NOT MEETING ALL OF THESE REQUIREMENTS WILL NOT BE READ AND WILL
NOT RECEIVE CREDIT. Papers must be submitted to the instructor via
Moodle only,
as attachments, using a proper indentifying subject line.
* Posted commentary of various kinds.
N.B.: Initial posts will receive a grade—but this grade is advisory only, meant only to guide you so you can get a clear sense of the expectations you must meet in our course; however, when actually grading a student's posts, at the end of the course, no post will receive a grade lower than the advisory grade, and the ultimate grade for a post could be higher than the advisory grade. (Note also that a grade of "D-" is to be reserved for posted writing that does not conform to the minimum standards as regarding protocols for writing in our course—you are expected, in all posts to the class, to use standard writing protocols and Standard English, to have spell checked your writing before posting it and as best you can to have grammar checked it—so don't write as you normally might write when texting or emailing. A "D-" may also be assigned for posts not meeting the minimum word length—see below.)
Initial weekly posts must be a minimum of 100 words and normally not more than 150 words. Secondary posts—i.e., posts in response to initial posts—should be from 50 to 100 words. Follow-up posts, in the form of questions or comments, or in reply to the instructor's comments or questions or both, can be of any length. One initial post per weekly reading assignment and two secondary posts are required.
N.B.: Failure to participate in class discussions (i.e., the posts as described above) at a minimally acceptable level will result in disqualification of end-of-term assignments such as the term paper and final exam; such disqualification must inevitably spell failure in the course. In order to pass this course a student must be consistently active in daily/weekly class work starting from the beginning of the course term.
Disqualification of prior work can also result from
failure to submit a minimally-acceptable response to the final exam question(s).
^ Term
Paper
Announcement:
Consists of 1) a descriptive paper title and subtitle, 2) a
thesis statement that includes the point of your argument, the breadth of that
argument, and the argument’s significant concepts and details, 3) a description
of the writing or argumentative strategy to be employed in your paper (this is
not to be confused with a summary of your projected essay), 4) an alphabetized
bibliography of at least three secondary sources, to be listed along with any
primary sources to be used,† which you plan to consult as part of your research
project, presented in proper MLA format (see writing and documentation
guidelines above, listed with the course readings), one of which must be a
hard-copy source (for the purposes of this assignment encyclopedias,
dictionaries, and textbooks will not be considered as counting toward the
requisite minimum number of secondary sources, although they can be used in your
term paper project and should be listed in your bibliography—but articles
obtained from a NJIT or Rutgers database should be considered as "hard copy").
^^
Term
Paper:
Consists of: 1) a descriptive paper title and subtitle, 2) a
full-length essay, 3) a bibliography in MLA format and alphabetized. For the
purposes of this assignment, use must be made of at least three secondary
research sources† (one of them hard copy) excluding textbooks, encyclopedias and
dictionaries that may also be used and should be cited if used, presented in proper MLA format (see writing and
documentation
guidelines above, listed with the course readings); encyclopedias,
dictionaries, and textbooks will not be considered as counting toward
the
requisite minimum number of secondary sources, although, again, they can be
used in your
term paper project and should be listed in your bibliography—but articles
obtained from a NJIT or Rutgers database should be considered as "hard
copy"—feel free to check with me about the
suitability of
such an article or for that matter about any of your possible sources).
It is STRONGLY recommended that research begin with the MLA Bibliography (locally to be found at the Rutgers-Newark library research room--ask a librarian there to show you how it works).
†If you don't know the difference between a primary and secondary source then find out right away; I've provided links here and in our Moodle space that will help you with this and all matters regarding researching and writing a polemical research essay.
COURSE GRADE
COURSE SCHEDULE
(see specific due dates in Moodle)
Week 1:
Introducing ourselves and general introduction to the course.
Week 2:
Poems of Phillis Wheatley (see link above in the bibliography); Introduction to
The Classic Slave Narratives, by Henry Louis Gates, xi-xxx.
Week 3:
Selections from The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 1-61, 127-40;
and, selections from The History of Mary
Prince, a West Indian Slave, 227-63.
Week 4:
Selections from Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 299-329, 355-403; and,
selections from Incidents in the life of a
Slave Girl, 405-17, 446-52, 463-68, 486-90, 525-29, 607-14.
Week 5:
Selections from Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Preface and Chapters 1, 3, 7, 9, 12-14, 20.
Week 6
: Selections from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapters 30, 31,
33,
34, 40, and 44, and Concluding Remarks.
Week 7:
Selections from Huckleberry Finn,
"Explanatory" note
and chapters 1-18.
Week 8:
Selections from Huckleberry Finn,
chapters 23, 31-43 ("Chapter the
Last").
Week 9:
Selections from The Souls of
Black Folk, 1-8, 24-42, 104-14, 137-46 ("Forethought," chapters 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, and
"The Afterthought").
Week 10:
Dutchman and
The Slave.
Week 11:
Beloved,
xv-xix, 3-100.
Week 12:
Beloved, 101-196.
Week 13:
Beloved,
199-324.
Week 14:
Work on group project
(see next week).
Week 15:
Group
project:
PowerPoint
presentations that will include both visuals and text, showing the historical
and/or cultural contexts for the work of one of the authors (excluding Gates)
assigned this term, due.
Portfolio of Eight Best Posts due.
Week 16: Researched and Fully Documented Term Paper, and Final Examination due.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR MARKING PAPERS
Key: Abbreviation - Meaning
A - Article
Agr - Agreement
Awk - Awkward
CS - Comma Splice
Dic - Diction
Exp - Explain
FS - Fused Sentences
RO - Run On Sentence
SF - Sentence Fragment
Sp - Spelling
SS - Sentence Structure
Syn - Syntax or Word Order
Tr - Transition
Un - Unclear
Uncl - Unclear
Us - Usage
V - Verb
Va - Vague
VF - Verb Form
VT - Verb Tense
WF - Word Form
WW - Wrong Word