English 3005: Introduction to Literary Study
Professor: Timothy Aubry
Office: VC 7-239
Phone number: 646.312.3980
Email address: timothy.aubry@baruch.cuny.edu
Office Hours: Tues/Wed: 12:30-2:30PM and by appointment
Required Text (Available at the Baruch College Bookstore):
William Shakespeare, Othello
Requirements:
Three major papers and one revision: 60% of final grade
Two Response Papers: 10% of final grade
Oral Presentation: 5% of final grade
Class Participation, including blog entries: 15% of final grade
Final Exam: 10% of final grade
Grading policy:
● Late policy: If you need an extension on a paper, please talk to me before it is
due, and assuming you have a reasonable justification I will be happy to give you extra
time. If you simply hand in your essay late without consulting me, I will deduct half a
grade for each class day that it is late. In other words, an A paper one class day late
becomes an A-, two class days late becomes a B+ etc.
● Attendance is mandatory. Failure to attend regularly and punctually will
have a negative impact on your grade, and missing more than 4 classes
without notifying me ahead of time can be grounds for failure.
Plagiarism policy:
Plagiarism is not permitted at Baruch College. To plagiarize is to steal or pass off the
language or ideas of another writer as your own. Anyone caught plagiarizing will be
given an automatic F for that essay and will be asked to meet with the dean.
You are allowed, of course, to use the language and the ideas of other writers, but you
must acknowledge your sources. When you are repeating another writer’s language
verbatim you must use quotation marks and cite your source with a parenthetical citation
(including the last name of the author and the page number) and an entry in your works
cited list. When you are paraphrasing another writer—putting that writer’s ideas into
your own words—you also must include a parenthetical citation and an entry in your
works cited list.
Schedule
August 28: Introduction (Aristotle, Poetics)
September 2: William Wordsworth, “Preface [To the Lyrical Ballads (1802)], pp. 390-411;
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, pp. 5-13.
September 4: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” William
Wordsworth, “A Nightingale”; “The Dungeon”; “The Mad Mother”; “The Convict”; “Lines
Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
September 9: Viktor Schlovsky, “Art as Technique,” pp. 796-805; Charles Dickens, Great
Expectations, pp. 1-5; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, pp. 3-5; Sylvia Plath, “Ariel.”
Response Paper #1 Due
September 11: Erich Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking,” from Mimesis, pp. 463-488.
September 16: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter Four, pp. 58-78; “Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights,” “George Eliot,”; pp. 219-242.
September 18: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
pp. 217-251.
September 30: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (film)
Major Essay 1 Due
October 2: Percy Lubbock, “The Craft of Fiction,” pp. 59-92; Gustave Flaubert, Madame
Bovary, Part I, Chapter V.
October: 7: Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox,” pp. 3-21; “The Motivation of
Tennyson’s Weeper,” pp. 167-177. “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” pp. 192-214.
October 9: John Donne, “The Blossom”; “The Curse”; “The Flea”; “The Funeral”; “The Good
Morrow”; “The Indifferent”; “Love’s Infiniteness”: “Love’s Alchemy”; “The Primrose”; “The
Prohibition”; “The Relic”; “Self Love”; “The Sun Rising”; “A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning”; “Death be not proud”; “Batter my heart”; “Oh, to vex me.”
October 14: Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” pp. 142-148; The Pleasure of the Text,
excerpt, pp. 404-414.
October 16: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” pp. 84-102; “The Black Cat,” pp. 103-112
“The Pit and the Pendulum,” pp. 132-146; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” pp. 173-178.
Response Paper #2 Due
October 21: W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children”; Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,”
pp. 27-33; Barbara Johnson, “The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac,” pp. 3-12.
October 23: Emily Dickinson, “I never lost as much but twice”; “Success is counted sweetest”;
“‘Faith’ is a fine invention”; “I taste a liquor never brewed”; “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”;
“I like a look of Agony”; “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”; “There’s a certain Slant of light”; “The
Soul Selects her own Society”; A Bird Came down the Walk”; “After a great pain”; “I dreaded
that first Robin, so”; “Much Madness is divinest Sense”; “This is my letter to the World” “This
was a Poet—It is That”; “I died for Beauty—but was scarce”; “I heard a Fly buzz—when I
died”; “The World is not Conclusion”; “I would not paint—a picture”; “It was not Death, for I
stood up”; “The Brain—is wider than the Sky”; “I cannot live with You”; “Pain—has an element
of Blank”; “Because I could not stop for Death”; “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun”; “A
narrow Fellow in the Grass”; “The Bustle in a House”; “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”;
“Apparently with no surprise”; “My life closed twice before its close.”
October 28: Terry Eagleton, “Literature and History,” pp. 1-19; Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of
Fear,” pp. 83-108.
October 30: Wes Craven, Nightmare on Elm Street
November 4: Annette Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of
Literary Texts,” pp. 46-62; Jane Tompkins, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary
History,” pp. 81-104.
November 6: Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Ghost in the Mill,” pp. 95-106; “The Sullivan
Looking-Glass,” pp. 106-118; “Mis’ Elderkin’s Pitcher,” pp. 139-147.
Major Essay 2 Due
November 11: Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” pp. 168-185; Hortense
Spillers, “Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems,” pp. 119-131; “‘An Order of
Constancy’: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine,” pp. 131-152.
November 13: Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” pp. 2457-2470.
November 18: Sharon Marcus, “Dressing Up and Dressing Down: The Feminine Plaything,” pp.
111-166.
November 20: Edward Said, “Empire, Geography, and Culture,” pp. 3-14; “Images of the Past,
Pure and Impure,” pp. 15-19; “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness,” pp. 19-31; “Discrepant
Experiences,” pp. 31-43.
November 25: Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” pp. 21-47.
December 2: Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” pp. 47-65
December 4: William Shakespeare, Othello, Acts I-II
Major Essay 3 Due
December 9: William Shakespeare, Othello, Acts III-IV
December 11: William Shakespeare, Othello, Act V