Instructor
Office Hours
Course
Required Texts
Aimee Wilson, aawilson@fsu.edu
MW 2-3 pm or by appt., WMS 330
LIT 2020-07, MW 3:35-4:50, Fall 2010, WMS 121B
Making Literature Matter , 4 th
ed.
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down."
-Woody Allen, Love and Death
COURSE
Love is slippery in Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” In one instance it means the saccharine-sweet, doe-eyed, “No I love YOU more” kind of love and in the next instance it’s a metaphor for sex. This linguistic word play is easy to understand because we all do it all the time, often without realizing it. And yet when “love” comes to mean “abuse” or “rape” or “obsession,” we are forced to question what love is, and to realize that people draw the line at very different places. An examination of love, then, is also an examination of human nature. Concepts such as characterization, setting, symbolism, and so forth will be the platform from which we will explore love in its many incarnations. This course provides an introduction to the basic interpretive skills necessary to conduct literary analysis. We will begin with foundational documents (discussions of close reading practices, argumentation, the writing process, etc.) to give us common points of discussion. As with any good study of literature, we will examine the crossroads of race, class, and gender for their fascinating and sometimes surprising inflections. Although the majority of our time will be spent on close reading, we will spend some time on critical approaches such as reader response, feminist, and postcolonial theories toward the end of the semester.
STUDENT OBJECTIVES
By the end of this course, students should have learned:
•
•
•
•
To read, understand, and interpret short stories and write analytically about them.
To understand literary principles and use basic terms important to literary analysis
To construct essays using textual evidence from both primary and secondary sources.
To extend the skills of expository writing and critical thinking established in first-year composition.
• Finally, I hope students come to a deeper understanding of ideas such as love , desire , truth , and justice – specifically, an understanding that these ideas are inherently complex, subjective, and impossible to fully understand.

MAJOR ASSIGNMENTS
There will be 2 exams consisting of 6 short-answer questions each (open notes). These exams will test your knowledge of the readings and literary terminology. You will be assigned one argumentative, literary analysis of at least 6 typed pages (MLA formatting); details will be given in class. For your daily reading assignments, write and bring to class a typed, 100 word summary of each of the day’s readings to class. Do not worry about grammar and formatting on these assignments. I will be grading on completeness, not formality. During class, I expect you to take note on these summaries. I will collect them at the end of each class and grade them pass/fail. You will be allowed to your summaries and notes during the exams.
Exam 1…………………………………….….....20%
Exam 2……………………………….……..…...20%
Final Essay..…………………………..…………30%
Daily Reading Assignments...….….……………20%
Participation………………….....……...……….10%
COURSE CALENDAR
All readings are from Making Literature Matter (page numbers listed) or Blackboard (Bb). This schedule is subject to change at my discretion, though I will give you at least 24 hours notice.
Monday (Aug 23)
Wednesday (Aug 25)
Readings
None
"How to Read Closely" (16);
“What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love” Raymond
Carver (675)
In-Class Discussion/Activity
Course Introduction; Review the list of
Literary Terminology
Close reading; how to interact with stories
Monday (Aug 30)
Wednesday (Sept 1)
"How to Make Arguments about
Literature" (33); "Orpheus and
Eurydice” Diane Ackerman (613);
“Psyche and Cupid” Carol Gilligan
(617)
Begin discussing literary analysis, especially how it differs from the analysis you might have learned in
ENC 1101 or 1102; look at myths about love and compare them to what we know (or think we know) to practice making arguments
Continue discussion from Monday
Monday (Sept 6)
Wednesday (Sept 8)
Monday (Sept 13)
Wednesday (Sept 15)
How to Write about Stories" (91);
“When I Married I Became an Old
Woman” J. Robert Lennon (10)
NO CLASS – LABOR DAY
“Yellow Woman” Leslie Marmon
Silko (587); “The Gilded Six-Bits”
Zora Neale Hurston (685)
“Adventure” Sherwood Anderson
(606); “Araby” James Joyce (595)
“A & P” John Updike (600)
NO CLASS – LABOR DAY
Characterization and the intersections of race, class, and gender that inevitably influence character
Characterization – close reading for race, class and gender; relationship charts
Discuss the ways point of view affects characterization; changing the

Monday (Sept 20)
Wednesday (Sept 22)
Monday (Sept 27)
Wednesday (Sept 29)
Monday (Oct 4)
Wednesday (Oct 6)
Monday (Oct 11)
Wednesday (Oct 13)
Monday (Oct 18)
Wednesday (Oct 20)
Monday (Oct 25)
Wednesday (Oct 27)
Monday (Nov 1)
Wednesday (Nov 3)
Monday (Nov 8)
Wednesday (Nov 10)
Monday (Nov 15)
“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” Z.Z.
Packer (Bb) point of view of “A & P”
Characterization – Hollywood style
“The Things They Carried” Tim
O’Brien (798): “The Room” William
Dialogue; Exam review
Trevor (694)
Prepare for Exam 1
“Where Are You Going…” Joyce
EXAM 1
Begin discussing the importance of
Carol Oates (1367); “Desiree’s Baby” setting
Kate Chopin (661)
“Little Red Riding Hood” Charles
Perrault (1573); “Little Red Cap”
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1576);
“The Company of Wolves” Angela
Carter (1580)
“The Life to Come” E.M. Forster
(Bb); “Happy Blue Crabs” José Raúl
Bernardo (247)
Culture as a part of setting, especially cultural rules, norms, and lessons
Continue discussion from Monday
“Physical Culture” (Bb); From
Gender Trouble (Bb)
Where cultural rules come from: using secondary sources in literary analysis
“Battle Royal” Ralph Ellison (1470); Continue discussion from Monday;
“Social Equality” Gunnar Myrdal
(1489) discuss symbolism
“Human Evolution” Octavia Butler
(1494); “The Ones Who Walk
Away from Omelas” Ursula K. Le
Guin (1507)
Breaking the rules: how does fantasy affect our interpretation?
Comparing fantasy to realism
“Marriage is a Private Affair,”
Chinua Achebe (Bb)
Symbolism and Setting
“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” Karen Russell (1073)
Comedy and allegory
“The Love of My Life” T.
Coraghessan Boyle (528); “Hills Like A discussion of summary vs. analysis
White Elephants” Ernest Hemingway
(523)
Theme: Answering the big “So What?”;
Prepare for Exam 2
“Girl” Jamaica Kincaid (39); read and bring to class “What Makes a
Good Literature Paper” (Bb)
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (924); “Why I
Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
(938); From “The Ladies’ Guide in
Health and Disease” (944)
EXAM 2
Return to point of view and setting;
Discussion on genre; instructions for final essays
Continue discussion from Wednesday; diagnosing illness from textual clues
“A Painful Case” James Joyce (Bb); Style and literary movements; a brief
“A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner overview of Modernism
(667); Intro. to Modernism (Bb)
“Berenice” Edgar Allan Poe (Bb);
“Morella” Edgar Allan Poe (Bb);
“Gothic versus Romantic” (Bb)
Continue discussion from Monday; a brief overview of Gothic fiction; discussion of unreliable narrators

Wednesday (Nov 17)
Monday (Nov 22)
Wednesday (Nov 24)
Monday (Nov 29)
Wednesday (Dec 1)
“Counterparts” James Joyce
(1604-1611); Critical Approaches to
Literature (1599-1604)
Critical Approaches (1612-1616);
Sample Student Essay (1617-1619)
“The Storm” Kate Chopin (653);
“The Story of an Hour” Kate
Chopin (659)
Discussion of critical approaches
Practice with critical approaches;
Research and scholarly sources
What makes something scandalous?
Discussion of reader response theory
“Like a Winding Sheet” Ann Petry
(1619); “Strategies for Writing a
Comparative Paper” (82)
Writing comparative analyses
Essay Proposal (2-3 pages) Proposal due; workshop and Q&A
***Final Essays due December 8 by Noon***