ENG 3250—Women and Literature
Three Semester Hours
HH 1/14
Prerequisites
University Requisite: ENG 2010 or 2020 or 250 or 2 courses above ENG 200
One 200-level English course and junior rank or permission. You are expected to have reading and writing skills equivalent to this level.
Course Overview
Surveys poetry, prose, and theoretical texts by women writers.
Methods of Course Instruction
All material for this course is print-based. Instructor and students communicate and exchange materials through postal mail.
E-Print Option
In this course, an option exists to use e-mail to submit your lesson assignments. Your assignment will be returned to you either as an e-mail attachment or as a hard copy sent through the postal mail, depending on the preferences of the instructor and/or program.
Textbooks and Supplies
- Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Volume 2 . 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007. [ISBN: 9780393930146]
- Gardner, Janet E. Reading and Writing about Literature, A Portable Guide . 3rd ed. New York, Bedford, 2013. [ISBN: 9781457606496]
- O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood . New York: FSG Classics, 1990. [ISBN: 9780374505844]
- Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God . New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. [ISBN: 9780061120060]
- Morrison, Toni. Beloved . New York: Vintage, 2004. [ISBN: 9781400033416]
- Walker, Alice. The Color Purple . New York: Harcourt, 2003. [ISBN: 9780156028356]
Finally, you will also need access to a college-level dictionary (preferably paperbound, so you can bring it with you for the examinations).
Number of Lessons
The course has nine lessons, including one midcourse examination and a final examination. The lessons include:
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Women in Literature
• Lesson 2: Early Twentieth-Century Literature
• Lesson 3: Modernist and Later-Twentieth-Century Writers: Extending the Mainstream of English Language Writing
• Lesson 4: Modernist and Contemporary Writers
• Lesson 5: Midcourse Examination Information
• Lesson 6: The Southern Gothic
• Lesson 7: African American Women Novelists
• Lesson 8: The Course Paper
• Lesson 9: Final Examination Information
Types of Writing Assignments
In answering the short-essay questions for each lesson, you will be building the skills needed in the examinations and the course paper. My comments and suggestions will help you to be more successful as you progress through this course. The exams will be similar to the lesson assignments and will require you to recall specific information in a supervised testing situation. When you prepare your lessons and write your paper, you should take full advantage of the text materials. Be careful to use your own words and to give credit to any words belonging to others. At Ohio University, we take plagiarism offenses seriously (for the definition of plagiarism, see Academic Misconduct in the glossary): the minimum punishment is failure of the course.
When I ask questions, I will be looking for you to show me that:
- You understand the original reading,
- You can compare and contrast readings,
- You have thoughts of your own about the readings, and
- You can provide evidence from the text for your views.
There will be questions that ask you to respond to passages from the readings and to tell me their significance to the topic of our study in a short paragraph. Some questions will ask for a longer consideration of one or several readings, for which you will develop a particular topic relevant to that lesson (about four to six paragraphs). There may be a question that asks you to present an opinion about what you’ve read.
Grading Criteria
- Individual Lessons (7 x 50): 350 points
- Midcourse Examination: 100 points
- Course Paper: 100 points
- Final Examination: 100 points
- Total Points Possible for the Course: 650 points