"An old woman sits in her shuttered room. She is alone in the whole world. Every other thing is dead. The doorbell rings."
attributed to Thomas Baily Aldrich

This 3-unit course is fully transferrable to both UC and CSU. NOTE: there is a prerequisite for this course. You must either have completed English 101 (or its equivalent) with a grade of "C" or higher, or you must be placed into English 101 as a result of the assessment test. For more information, please contact the counseling staff at LAHC.

Most of you have done book reports and plot summaries; many of you have researched some biographical information on authors. WE WILL NOT be doing that in this class. You are going to be challenged to look more closely at works of fiction to try to find out what ideas various writers/thinkers have to share with us. In literature these ideas are often suggested rather than stated explicitly, so you are going to have to really think about what we read.

English 102 is designed to enable students to read a wide variety of literature with increased understanding, to sharpen critical thinking, and to improve skills in effective writing and research. This is primarily a course in ideas. We will be looking at techniques different writers use to engage, entertain, challenge, even tease us, but mainly we will be looking at what different writers have to say. Perhaps you will see something of yourself. At the very least, ENJOY! Most of our time will be spent discussing works assigned; there will also be writing assignments for each genre.

This is not a class in personal beliefs or opinions or abstractions or vague, general thoughts. It is a course in concrete details, examples, incidents. You are NEVER required to agree or disagree with the ideas the authors express; you ARE required to try to understand what they are saying, and, as in any other class, you will need to back up your analyses with evidence.

theme

Although the word theme has a very specific (different) meaning in literature, I am using the word to mean the special focus or subject of this class. A while back I created a class in the Mystery as Literature. It morphed into a specially-focused Literature & Motion Picture class on Mystery and Detection. Over the years I've noticed that a lot of my students find analyzing complex literary works to be a bit of a mystery, and so I've decided to flip the theme from Mystery as Literature to Literature as Mystery, puzzles that need to be solved. The idea really took hold when I thought about the sorts of activities my daughter does as a chemistry major specializing in Forensic Science. The tools that the detective and the scientist use to help solve mysteries and break cases is really very much like the tools a literary analyst uses to try to make sense of a challenging story of poem.

So that is our theme for the class: Literature as Mystery. Like the great detectives of literature, this processing of clues and critical thinking will be our approach.

Consider the short story by Thomas Baily Aldrich near the top of this page. Yes, that one line is intended to tell a story. But it is so short, really just a fragmentary moment in a larger story. So much is not told that we are really left with a mystery. What happened to every other living thing in the world? How did this one person survive? If every other thing is dead, who is ringing the doorbell?

Several possibilities come to mind:

We don't know. We just ahve little bits of information--clues, It is up to us to try to make sense of them. That is what we will be attempting in this course.

General Nature of the Course

This course functions very much like a correspondence course; the chief difference is the electronic environment and your relatively immediate access to your instructor (me). Also instead of students submitting work on paper, assignments are submitted, commented upon and returned via e-mail; lecture material, course deadlines, assignment information are available via the internet.

Class Schedule: You will need to regularly keep track of assignment (reading and writing) due dates by referring to the Class Schedule. It is up to you to keep up with assignment deadlines. I highly recommend that you bookmark the Schedule page.

Lectures: There are a series of online lectures on topics related to your reading and writing. Be sure to read the lecture material for each week listed because this should help you to understand what some of my expectations and special concerns are about your reading and writing. To get to the different lectures, click on the links to Lecture 1, Lecture 2, etc. on the Class Schedule.

Essays: Much of your grade is based on your written assignments. There are detailed instructions on how to produce and submit essays on the class Writing Assignments page. Read over this material very carefully; there are requirements on length, file format, MLA format, etc. that you need to know. Specific paper topic instructions can be reached through the links on the Class Schedule page or the Writing Assignments page.

Class Discussions: Most of the rest of your grade will be based on class discussions of certain questions relating to the readings. Discussions will be conducted with the entire class on an Canvas message board (more information is available on the Discussions page). Be sure that you read this page thoroughly so that you can earn maximum discussion points. To get to individual discussion questions, click on the links to Discussion 1, Discussion 2, etc. on the Class Schedule.

Miscellaneous: There may be some miscellaneous short activities (such as the class Orienatation Assignment) that will be done in the Assignments/Quizzes section of Canvas. These will be noted on the Class Schedule.

Are you starting to see why I recommend you bookmark the Class Schedule page? It is leads out to all other sections of the class :)

Student Learning Objectives

Student who complete this course successfully should, minimally, be able to

Here is the Webster's definition of plagiarize:

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive senses : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

Realize that if you are caught plagiarizing, you will fail the assignment with no chance to revise it. There are no exceptions. If you are unsure what constitutes plagiarism, contact me.

Student Responsibilities

Your responsibilities for this course are really the same as those of any student taking any course with the following addition: you have to keep reminding yourself what is required (assignment dates, rules, etc.) because you don't have an instructor in the front of a room reminding you every class.

If you do not agree to all of the above requirements, do not take this course.

LAHC Student Resources

For a list of resources available to students at Los Angeles Harbor College, please click this link: LAHC Resources Information.

Textbooks

Required Texts:

Grading

Each assignment will receive a point score; letter grades are based on percentages (90-100% = A; 80-89% = B; etc.); for example, if a discussion is worth 20 points possible, and if you score a 16, then you have scored 80% which equals a B for that assignment.

At the end of the semester, your overall score will be converted into a percentage of the points possible for the entire course to determine your letter grade for the course.

General Information about Essays

For more information about what constitutes an "A" paper (or not), click here. Note: .

More-detailed information on Essays and other Writing Assignments can be found on our Writing Assignments information page.

MLA Essay Format

All essays must be in standard MLA-8 (Modern Language Association) format; this is the format you should have learned in English 101. College and university academic standards require that papers written in the humanities (there is a different format for scientific papers) be submitted in this format.

For complete information on what this format looks like, refer to your Engish 101 writer's handbook (if you have one). I have also included a copy of a sample MLA paper with some instructions that you can look at on our Writing Assignments information page. (I've saved the files in two formats; you should be able to open at least one). There is additional information on Canvas in the Files section.

Please look over the format of your essay before you submit it. You will lose points for incorrectly-formatted papers; in some cases, essays will not be accepted if the format is too far from the MLA-8 standards.

Late Work / Missing Work

Try to get all work in on time. Late essays will always be penalized. A late essay will lose 10% of the total score. NOTE: Any essay that is more than one week late will receive no credit! To avoid a late penalty (or a zero), it's a very good idea to submit work early. Always keep a copy of your work in case it gets lost or misplaced in the e-mail.

Any work that is not an essay (so quizzes, discussions, etc.) will not be accepted late. Again, try to get things in early just in case.

One of your first two shorter (100-point) papers is optional (that is, I will drop the lowest score of those first two shorter papers). Use this option to your advantage: if you have a huge Calc test around the time the second paper is due, you may end up skipping that paper, but remember that you cannot afford to miss any of the others.

And, of course, you are welcome to do both; it cannot hurt your overall grade, but it can help your grade if the second paper ends up being higher than the first.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: the Research Paper and the Final Project are not optonal. You cannot pass the class if you fail to turn these in.

Extra Credit
who doesn't love extra credit?

Every semester I try to find one or two Extra Credit opportunities that make sense within the context of the class; last semester, for example, some of my students attended an online poetry slam/competition (and most actually loved it; well, that's what they told me :).

At the very least, the last discussion of the semester is an optional, extra credit discussion.

I will do my best to remind you of these opportunities during the semester. All are completely optional. Just consider that these points can help you quite a lot if you are on the borderline between two grades or if you missed some assignment :)