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Professor Clare Colquitt
Fall 2014: Engl 494 Modern Fiction of the United States (#21202)
Class time and location: TTh 3:30-4:45 in EBA 412
Office location, AL 415, and hours: T 5:00-6:00 p.m. and W 5:30-6:30 p.m. and at
other times by appointment. If you are unable to meet me during my office hours, I
will, given adequate notice, be happy to schedule an appointment with you in my office
at another time that fits both your schedule and mine.
Office phone and email: (619) 594-6219; colquitt@mail.sdsu.edu
I check my email and voice mail regularly during the work week and do my best to
respond to messages promptly. Please leave messages that are clear, brief, and courteous.
Should you be unable to reach me through my campus email address or office phone, you
may leave a message for me via the main department office (AL 226) during work hours,
M-F 8-4:30: (619) 594-5307. (This last number is the same number to use when you wish
to schedule an appointment with Professor Serrato, the department’s undergraduate
advisor.)
Course description from the 2014-2015 General Catalog: “Prerequisite: Completion
of the General Education requirement in Foundations of Learning II.C., Humanities.
Representative works by twentieth-century American authors such as Cather,
Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Ellison, Welty, Bellow, Vonnegut, Heller,
Walker, others. Primarily for the general student not specializing in English or
comparative literature. May count toward the English major only as an elective” (233).
My own course description: Crucial Moments in Modern American Fiction
A reading-intensive survey designed to acquaint you with some of the “crucial moments”
in the history of modern American fiction, with emphasis on the short story cycle. As the
catalogue copy specifies, our readings will span the twentieth century and will, at the end
of the course, cross into our own time. The course will allow you to encounter examples
of major literary genres: including the novel (Cather, Gibbons, and Vonnegut), the short
story cycle (Anderson, Gaines, Hemingway, and Lee), and the short story (Lahiri and
Packer).
The term “crucial moments” is taken from The Writing of Fiction (1925), by Edith
Wharton:
Drama, situation, is made out of the conflicts thus produced between social order
and individual appetites, and the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the
last analysis, be anything, or need to be anything, but the disengaging of crucial
moments from the welter of existence. These moments need not involve action in
the sense of external events; they seldom have, since the scene of conflict was
shifted from incident to character. But there must be something that makes them
crucial, some recognizable relation to a familiar social or moral standard, some
explicit awareness of the eternal struggle between man’s contending impulses, if
the tales embodying them are to fix the attention and hold the memory. (13-14)
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Required texts (editions ordered for Aztec Shops):
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919: Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White,
eds., Norton 1996)
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918: Joseph Urgo, ed., Broadview 2003)
Ernest Gaines, Bloodline (Vintage/Random, 1968)
Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster (Vintage, 1987)
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (Scribner’s, 1925)
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner, 1991)
James Ward Lee, A Texas Jubilee: Stories from the Lone Star State (Texas Christian UP,
2013)
ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead, 2003)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughter-House Five; or The Children’s Crusade. A Duty-Dance
with Death (Dell, 1969)
Any supplementary reading materials will be brief and will be distributed in class or
posted on Blackboard.
Also recommended: The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers (2009) is an excellent resource for English majors and minors. Non-majors will
also benefit by a number of chapters from this reference book that cover such subjects as
the mechanics of writing and citing sources, primary and secondary, in your papers.
Another excellent reference book is William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature
(Longman, 2012), now in its 12th edition. Recommended in the most recent edition of the
MLAH are a number of dictionaries, including “Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary of the English Language and, especially for the history of a word’s meanings
and usages, The Oxford English Dictionary” (13). As students enrolled at SDSU, you are
fortunate that the library subscribes to a user-friendly online version of the OED,
accessible through the library’s home page. Looking a word up in the OED can open up
possibilities of meaning in a work of literature, and I encourage you to make use of this
incomparable resource and of other fine dictionaries throughout the semester.
Course requirements
In-class work (midterm, final exam, and class participation) = 50% of your grade
20% = Midterm (short answer and/or essay), Thurs., Oct. 9
20% = Final examination: Thurs., Dec. 11, 1-3 p.m.
The General Catalog stipulates, “No final examination shall be given to individual
students before the regular time. If you find it impossible to take a final examination on
the date scheduled you must make arrangements with the instructor to have an
incomplete grade reported and must take the deferred final examination within the time
allowed for making up incomplete grades” (470).
10% = Class participation
This portion of your grade will be based on the following: the quality and consistency of
your participation in both class discussion and in any in-class group work, and on your
performance on unannounced quizzes and reading responses. Note: Quizzes and
responses may take place at any point during class: beginning, middle, or end. Arriving
on time only to take a quiz or complete a response is unacceptable and will result in a
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grade of zero for that day. Crucial to your participation grade--and to your success in
this course--is regular attendance in class (See attendance policy below). In a very real
way, you cannot participate if you are not in class. For those of you who are
uncomfortable speaking out in class, your participation grade will depend entirely on the
quality of your group work and of your cumulative quiz/reading response grade.
Please record the dates of our midterm and final exam in your calendar.
Out-of-class work = 50% of your grade
The remainder of your grade will be based on the quality of the literary journal you will
keep throughout the semester, beginning in Week 2. Your journal will be comprised of 12
weekly reading responses to one or more of the works assigned in the course calendar for
any given week. I will collect your entries every other week, beginning in Week 3, on
Thurs., Sept. 11. Your first entry is to be completed next week and is to be 1-2 typed
pages in length, formatted according to MLA style but without a works-cited list attached
unless you consult and then cite other sources beyond the primary source which is your
focus. At the top of each entry, type your name, the course number, the date, and the
entry number of each response. Each entry should be a minimum of 300 words long.
Regarding your prose style for your entries, the tone and diction for your literary
journal should strike a balance between high formality and informal text-speak. Your
writing should be lucid, pointed, and grammatical; your responses thoughtful, informed,
and well-supported with an appropriate number of textual citations followed by the
relevant page number(s) from the work that is your focus. If citing an ebook that lacks
pagination, include in parentheses the chapter number or story title so that I may locate
the passage in my own book. As stated above, when citing additional sources beyond our
assigned reading, include relevant bibliographical information immediately after your
final paragraph. (No separate works-cited page is required.)
For the first entry in your journal, I am assigning you a specific topic pertaining to
Willa Cather’s My Antonia. (For a description of that assignment, see Cather handout.)
From the second entry to the final entry you will write, you will have more freedom in
choosing how to respond. In thinking about your weekly entry, select a topic, possibly
pertaining to a specific passage or scene or chapter, that you judge to be important and
that in some manner intrigues or impresses, or, conversely, stumps or disturbs you. In
some entries you may reach specific conclusions about the reading; at other times, you
may raise more questions than you can answer.
As the above suggests, the majority of your journal entries will be exploratory and
interpretative in nature. However, I also encourage you to display on occasion your own
literary abilities, for instance, by choosing to rewrite the ending of a story or a particular
scene or conversation in one of the works of fiction we are reading. Here is one approach
you might take if writing a creative response: you might reimagine and retell a portion of
a story or a chapter from a novel from the point of view of some other character than the
narrator or character of consciousness chosen by the author. Please note that as many as
five of your twelve entries may be creative in nature.
Note: no entries will be required in Week 1, the week of our midterm (Week 7), in
Thanksgiving week (Week 14), or in Week 16.
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For students with disabilities: For those of you who need accommodations to
successfully complete my class, please read carefully the following statement which,
beginning this semester, SDSU faculty are to include in all syllabi. If this statement
applies to you, let me know early in the semester, preferably in the first week of class,
how I am to accommodate your needs:
If you are a student with a disability and believe you will need accommodations for this
class, it is your responsibility to contact Student Disability Services at (619) 594-6473.
To avoid any delay in the receipt of your accommodations, you should contact Student
Disability Services as soon as possible. Please note that accommodations are not
retroactive, and that accommodations based upon disability cannot be provided until you
have presented your instructor with an accommodation letter from Student Disability
Services. Your cooperation is appreciated.
Attendance: I expect you to be present, on time, and prepared for each class meeting. If
circumstances require you to miss a class, remember that you are still responsible for
material covered and for any study questions announced or distributed in class. Contact
me, a classmate, or consult emails sent to our class via Blackboard to find out what you
have missed.
A caution: Repeatedly coming late to class or frequent absences will not only lower your
participation grade but damage your standing in the course. If early in the semester you
find that you are unable to meet the requirements of this class, the most basic of which is
to attend, you should drop. This semester’s add/drop (schedule adjustment) deadline
is Sep. 8. As the General Catalog notes, this is also the last day you can “change
[your] grading basis” (3).
Classroom guidelines:
1) Arrive on time and sign roll.
2) Come prepared with book (or Nook or Kindle), paper, and pen, and questions about
our reading. If you use a laptop or tablet for taking notes, I ask that you sit at or near the
front of the classroom. No surfing or work done for other courses during our class
allowed.
3) Turn off and put away unnecessary electronic devices, especially smart phones. Above
all, no texting during class!
4) Be alert and engaged from the first minute of the class to the last.
5) Last but not least, have fun!
All of the guidelines above may be summarized as follows: treat your peers and me with
respect. If you are unaware of the consequences of what the General Catalog terms
“inappropriate conduct by students,” consult the section titled “Student Conduct” in the
current catalog (477-78). First on the list of “grounds upon which student discipline can
be based” is “cheating, plagiarism, or other forms of academic dishonesty that are
intended to gain unfair academic advantage” (477).
Scholastic honesty: Your work should be your own. The General Catalog includes a
detailed section titled “Cheating and Plagiarism” (479) you are responsible for reading.
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There the university defines cheating “as the act of obtaining or attempting to obtain
credit for academic work by the use of dishonest, deceptive, or fraudulent means.”
Among the examples of cheating cited in this catalog section are the following: “using
notes, cheat sheets, or other devices considered inappropriate under the prescribed testing
condition.”
A major form of cheating is plagiarism, defined “as the act of incorporating ideas,
words, or specific substances of another, whether purchased, borrowed, or otherwise
obtained, and submitting same to the university as one’s own work to fulfill academic
requirements without giving credit to the appropriate source.”
The university takes acts of plagiarism seriously, as do I. Whenever you are in
doubt regarding how to cite a source, consult me and also the MLA Handbook for Writers
of Research Papers (especially chapter 2 on “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity”). That
reference source sets forth the best practices of literary scholarship.
Also, please understand that SDSU faculty are required to report students who
cheat or commit plagiarism to the Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities for
appropriate disciplinary action. Acts of cheating or plagiarism will have severe
consequences in my class—from failure on an individual assignment to an “F” in the
course. Students who commit plagiarism or cheat in multiple courses endanger their
standing in this university. Again, refer to the section on “Cheating and Plagiarism” from
the General Catalog, which stipulates that students found guilty of academic dishonesty
may be expelled, suspended, or placed on academic probation (479).
Grading: In evaluating the quality of your exams, in-class quizzes and reading
responses, and your literary journal, I follow the “Definition of Grades for Undergraduate
Students” detailed in the General Catalog: “Grade of A (outstanding achievement;
available only for the highest accomplishment), 4 points; B (praiseworthy performance;
definitely above average), 3 points; C (average: awarded for satisfactory performance;
the most common undergraduate grade) 2 points; D (minimally passing; less than the
typical undergraduate achievement), 1 point; F (failing), 0 points.” Other grades such as
Cr (credit) and NC (no credit) are defined in this same section, as are the decimal values
for plus and minus grades. This section further explains, “Faculty members use all grades
from A through F to distinguish among levels of academic accomplishment. The grade
for average undergraduate achievement is C” (468 emphasis mine). Make certain that
you understand what it means to receive a “WU” for an unauthorized withdrawal, a grade
that is “equivalent to an ‘F’” (469).
Late papers: unacceptable.
Conferences: Feel free to see me whenever you have a question about an assignment or
wish to discuss our reading. Time permitting, I am also always willing to hold
appointments to discuss your progress in your literary journal and your performance on
your quizzes and exams. Note: Questions regarding your standing in my course are best
addressed earlier rather than later in the semester.
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Course Calendar
The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. The novelist
must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it. . . . (836)
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one
might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the
overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional
aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the
drama, as well as to poetry itself. (837)
Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922)*
*Citations to this essay or other works by Cather are, unless otherwise indicates, taken from the 1992 Library of America collection of
Cather’s work compiled by Sharon O’Brien: Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings.
Week 1
26 Aug: In-class writing: in a couple of paragraphs introduce yourself to me as a student
interested in this course. What is your hometown, your major(s) or minor(s), your
intended graduation date, your post-graduate academic or career plan? Who are some of
your favorite American writers? (These needn’t be writers of fiction.) Your favorite
authors outside the US? What was the last work of literature you read that you especially
enjoyed and would recommend to our class? The last movie or play or museum
exhibition that you would recommend to our class? Regarding your recommended
reading, film, play, exhibition, etc., what were the qualities of that work that especially
appealed to you? At the end of the semester, what do you hope to carry away with you
from this course? Introductory discussion on Willa Cather and on the narrative frame of
My Antonia. Comparative discussion of the original 1918 Introduction and Cather’s 1926
Revised Introduction. First journal subject assigned (See Cather handout).
28 Aug: My Antonia (through Book 1 “The Shimerdas”)
Week 2
1 Sep.: Labor Day
2 Sep: My Antonia: Books 2 and 3. In addition, read Joseph Urgo’s introduction (9-32),
Cather’s first published short story, “Peter” (Appendix D 163-65), and H. L. Mencken’s
review of the novel (Appendix F: 297-98).
4 Sep: My Antonia: Books 4 and 5.
Week 3
9 Sep: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: focus on “The Book of the Grotesque”
and the first three stories in this short story cycle: “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” and “Mother.”
11 Sep: Winesburg (through “Respectability”): focus on “Godliness,” “Nobody Knows,”
and “Respectability.” First two journal entries due.
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Week 4
16 Sep: Winesburg (through ending): focus on “The Strength of God,” “The Teacher,”
“Death,” “Sophistication,” and “Departure.”
18 Sep: Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (through chapter 4 and “The Three-Day Blow”)
Week 5
23 Sep: In Our Time (through chapter 9 and “Mr. and Mrs. Eliott”): focus on “The
Battler” and “Soldier’s Home.”
25 Sep: In Our Time (through ending): focus on “Big Two-Hearted River” (all) and
“L’Envoi.” Third and fourth journal entries due.
Week 6
30 Sep: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five (through chapter 3)
1 Oct: Slaughter-House Five (through chapter 6) Review for midterm examination.
Week 7 Reminder: no journal entry due this week.
7 Oct: Slaughter-House Five (through chapter 10)
9 Oct: Midterm examination
Week 8
14 Oct: Ernest Gaines, Bloodline (“A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray”)
16 Oct: Bloodline (“Three Men”) Fifth and sixth journal entries due.
Week 9
21 Oct: Bloodline (“Bloodline” and “Just Like a Tree”)
23 Oct: Kay Gibbon, Ellen Foster (all)
Week 10
28 Oct: Continue discussion of Gibbon, and from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of
Maladies, read “A Temporary Matter” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”
30 Oct: Interpreter (through “Sexy”): focus on “Sexy” and the title story, “Interpreter of
Maladies.” Seventh and eighth journal entries due.
Week 11
4 Nov: Interpreter: “Mrs. Sen’s” and “This Blessed House”
6 Nov: Interpreter: “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” and “The Third and Final Continent”
Week 12
11 Nov: ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: read “Brownies” and “Every Tongue
Shall Confess.”
13 Nov: Drinking (through “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”): focus on the title story and
“The Ant of the Self.” Ninth and tenth journal entries due.
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Week 13
18 Nov: Drinking (through ending): focus on “Geese” and “Doris Is Coming.”
20 Nov: James Ward Lee, A Texas Jubilee: Stories from the Lone Star State (through “A
Blue and Gray Christmas”)
Week 14 Reminder: no journal entry due this week.
26 Nov: Texas: through “The Pink Petticoat”
27 Nov: Thanksgiving
Week 15
2 Dec: Texas: through “It’s the Law”
4 Dec: Texas: through “Navy Blue and Gold” Review for final exam. Final journal
entries due (eleventh and twelfth). Extra credit journal entry due.
Week 16
9 Dec: Texas: through “Home Front Heroes”
11 Dec: Final examination, 1-3 p.m.
Note: Instructors must turn in their students’ grades by 11 p.m. on December 31.