Course Outline
Comparative Literature

A. Vocabulary

UNITS 1-17: College Vocabulary B

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define a core set of college-level words-241 in number.
· Use a core set of college-level words in context.
· Recognize their meaning in a text of sufficient complexity.
· Understand the etymology of a given word from the morphological analysis of prefixes, suffixes, and roots.
· Recognize and generate the nominal, adjectival, adverbial, and verbal forms of a given root.
· Understand the difference between the connotation and denotation of a word.
· Successfully complete analogy questions, which require comparative and analytical reasoning.

Classroom Activities:

· Weekly readings in vocabulary list etymologies.
· Weekly exercises from the text, which are meant to practice the students in denotation and connotation.
· Weekly tests on approx. 14 words designed to gauge understanding of both connotation and denotation.
· Beginning of the year diagnostic tests, review tests with analogies covering four units at a time, and a final exam.

B. Reading and Writing

UNIT 1: Imaginative Comparison

Authors:

· Mark Twain
· Emily Dickinson
· John Ruskin
· Walt Whitman
· Alexander Petrunkevitch

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Identify the basic types of metaphor including the following: metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, and synecdoche.
· Understand the role of metaphor in writing and speaking.
· Identify poetic elements in prose writing.
· Define and illustrate imagery.
· Define and Illustrate personification.
· Recognize how a poet usages imagery and imaginative comparison to make a seemingly trivial incident memorable.
· Recognize how a dictionary and grammar text can help to understand poetry, but the neither illuminates the full connotative meaning of a word or the collective force of a passage.
· Identify the use of literary puns.
· Recognize the use of poetic diction and style in both prose and poetry.
· Acquire a sense of the structure in both poetry and prose.
· Further recognize and understand the purpose of extended metaphor.
· Remark on the difference between literature of imagination and that of information.

Classroom Activities:

· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Write a short descriptive paper employing figurative language and imagery.

UNIT 2: Sound and Syntax

Authors:

· James Joyce
· John Updike
· Lincoln Colcord
· William Shakespeare
· Walt Whitman
· Norman Duncan

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Recognize the influence of sound and syntax in poetry and prose.
· Identify rhyme and meter in poetry.
· Identify the forms of sound repetition in prose and poetry: alliteration, assonance, consonance, and internal rhyme, and onomatopoeia.
· Recognize how onomatopoeia and other forms of sound repetition can work together to create an atmosphere in a poem.
· Recognize the effective use of metaphoric expressions and sound devices in creating and sustaining tension.
· Understand how sound and syntax can support sense.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss works with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Complete worksheets that help identify the various kinds of sound repetition.
· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Write short poem exemplifying all of the above types of sound repetition and exhibiting studied poetic diction.

UNIT 3: Thought and Theme

Authors:

· Emily Dickinson
· John Greenleaf Whittier
· William Shakespeare
· Paul Engle
· Thomas Hardy
· Kenneth Roberts
· William Cowper

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Identify the arrangement or central organization of a work.
· Recognize the concept or major idea of a work.
· Recognize the effective se of repetition and sensory images in creating mood.
· Recognize the effective use of poetic devices in prose writing.
· Recognize how to discern theme by focusing on literary details in a story.
· Recognize the value of using personal experiences, observations, and emotions to communicate universal concepts.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss works with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Engage in group work to decipher the theme of subtler works.
· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Clearly express the theme of a selected work in a well-developed paragraph.

UNIT 4: Allusion

Authors:

· G. K. Chesterton
· Rudyard Kipling
· Edgar Allan Poe
· Matthew Arnold
· Edmund Waller
· John Updike

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define and generally understand the use of allusion in literature.
· Recognize the types of allusion: Biblical, Historical, Mythological, Classical, etc.
· Recognize the importance of a solid reading in such literature to catch allusions.
· Recognize the effectiveness of viewing a common incident from an uncommon viewpoint.
· Recognize the universality of themes in literature, such as man's search for immortality.
· Understand the use of allusion as it contributes to the overall argument of an essay.
· Understand that some allusions can do more than reinforce a story's theme; they can be an integral part of character development and plot structure.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss works with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Complete worksheets that practice the student in recognizing and explaining allusions and their allusive antecedants.
· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Write a short paragraph that employs allusion creatively and effectively to begin to establish an atmosphere.
· Write a short, five-paragraph poetry explication dealing with theme, prosody, characterization, figurative language, tone, mood, and persona.

UNIT 5: Symbol

Authors:

· Langston Hughes
· Aesop
· John Keats
· William Cowper
· Ralph Waldo Emerson
· E. E. Cummings
· Edgar Allan Poe
· Robert Browning

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define and understand the use of symbol.
· Recognize and discuss the literary context of symbol and the forms of symbolic literature: parable, allegory, and satire.
· Define epigram and fable and understand their didactic usefulness.
· Recognize the impact of style on the theme of a work.
· Identify transcendentalist themes in Emerson's poems.
· Define allegory.
· Recognize how the elements of a story (e.g., conflict, character, plot, symbol, allusion, and irony) can reveal theme.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss works with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Write an explication of the near allegory in Poe's "The Masque of Red Death."

UNIT 6: Irony

Authors:

· James Hall Wheelock
· Joyce Cary
· Robert Frost
· Max Eastman
· Rudyard Kipling
· Mackinlay Kantor

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define and identify the various categories and forms of irony: paradox, situational irony, juxtaposition, dramatic irony, verbal irony, pun, satire, sarcasm, hyperbole, and understatement.
· Recognize the structural and persuasive use of irony.
· Recognize the use of irony to develop the overarching tone in a work.
· Recognize the value of ironic reversal to make a poignant statement.
· Recognize the humorous use of irony.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss the work with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Query directly as many students as possible on the types and use of irony.
· Unit test.

Projects and Writing Activities:

· Write a short ironical personal essay.

UNIT 7: Biography

Authors:

· James Thurber
· E. B. White
· Lincoln Steffens
· Eudora Welty
· John Greanleaf Whittier
· Rudyard Kipling
· Plutarch
· Robert Hayman

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define, recognize, and exhibit mastery of the following terms: flashback, plot, conflict, external conflict, internal conflict, protagonist, antagonist, setting, atmosphere, and tone.
· Identify the major literary genres.
· Define and recognize the distinct forms of biography and autobiography (e.g., memoirs, diary, journal, anecdote, personal anecdote)
· Understand the structure, tone, and art of biography.
· Recognize how the author of an autobiography can interpret the events of his own life for didactic purposes.
· Understand how situational and dramatic irony can be used in biography.
· Recognize the similarities between narrative poem and story.
· Show mastery in recognition and use of sensory images that create a specific mood.
· Understand how contemporary context influences historical biography.
· Identify how a biography written by a contemporary can provide information not only on historical figures but also on the era in which they lived.
· Recognize that a biography, though sympathetic to its subject, need not exclude all reference to its subject's flaws.

Classroom Activities:

· Write a short parody of Plutarch's "Life of Caesar" in the same style, but with an entirely different tone. Several students should present an excerpt at the end of class.

UNIT 8: Short Fiction

Authors:

· Robert Louis Stevenson
· Alfred, Lord Tennyson
· Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
· Ray Bradbury
· Stephen Crane
· John Greenleaf Whittier
· Thomas Hardy
· Walter de la Mare
· Edwin A. Hoey

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Understand the structure of a given work of fiction.
· Understand how to interpret and evaluate fiction.
· Identify the characteristics of Romantic fiction.
· Recognize the relative appeal of a symbolic or even stereotyped character.
· Understand the significance of point of view in detective fiction.
· Recognize the value of progressively illuminating details in developing characters and building suspense.
· Show mastery of imaginative comparison, sound and syntax, and symbol.
· Recognize the effect the historical context of a work has on its meaning and interpretation.
· Recognize the relative importance of understanding the details of an authors personal life in interpreting a story.
· Recognize how setting can be used to reinforce characterization.
· Show mastery of imagery.
· Explain how suspense is created and maintained in a short work of fiction.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss the work with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Chart the structure of selected works of short fiction.
· Unit test.

UNIT 9: Lyric Poetry
Authors:

· Fray Angelico Chavez
· David Wagoner
· Christian Rossetti
· George Herbert
· Robert Hillyer
· William Stafford
· Robert Frost

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Identify the characteristics of lyric poetry.
· Explain the value of word play and double meaning in a poem.
· Explain how an extended metaphor is developed.
· Explain how the cadence of a poem can reinforce its content.
Classroom Activities:

· Discuss the work with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Write a lyric poem on an appropriate subject.

UNIT 10: Drama

Authors:

· William Shakespeare

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Identify the characteristics, modes, structures, and devices of drama, which is saying quite a bit.
· Understand the strengths and weaknesses of both stage and film productions of the Romeo and Juliet.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss the work with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Write a combination of a film and drama critic, comparing a stage production of Romeo and Juliet with that of a modern film version.

UNIT 11: Personal Essay

Authors:

· David Dubber
· Helen Keller
· Robert Benchley
· O. B. Hardison, Jr.
· G. K. Chesterton

Essential Concepts and Objectives:

· Define and recognize personal essay.
· Recognize the common characteristics of a personal essay.
· Define parody.
· Recognize how persuasive writing might be used in a personal essay.
· Note the use of philosophical argumentation in personal essay.

Classroom Activities:

· Discuss the work with instructor led questions on the above concepts.
· Write a reflective personal essay with a subtly didactic aim.

C. Grammar and Writing (This section should be seen in light of previous experience in grammar from ENG09)

GrammarText

Classroom Activities:

· Weekly exercises in the improvement of writing style.
· Optional daily exercises from the text, which are designed to practice the students in the appropriate rule by both correcting and writing novel sentences that require understanding of the rule.
· Quarterly tests on grammatical rules and their application in sentences.
· Lecture on research process and writing particulars.

Major Assignments:

· Write a seven- (7) page collection of essay answers to a set of literary questions on the subject of Virgil's Aeneid. (See "UNIT 9" below.)
· Write one four- (4) to five- (5) page poetry explication. (See The Elements of Writing about Literature and Film: Part One , Chapter 3 below).
· Write one four- (4) to five- (5) page annotated analysis on the subject of Greek drama and Sophocles' Oedipis Rex. (See also "UNIT 10" above, during which a preliminary effort is made to develop the tools for such an analysis.)
· Write an annotated research paper of five- (5) to eight- (8) pages with a title page and works cited page. The form of all elements the research paper will be based on rules and examples for Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations, sixth edition.

Essential Concepts Listed by Unit:

UNIT 1: Sentence Basics

· Master the use and punctuation of the types of sentences: interrogative, declarative, imperative, and exclamatory.
· Master the concept of subject and predicate.
· Master the recognition and proper use of parts of speech.
· Recognize and use phrases correctly.
· Recognize and use clauses correctly.
· Recognize and correctly form compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences.
· Identify the basic English sentence patterns.
· Make sentences complete.
· Avoid run-on sentences

UNIT 2: Nouns and Articles

· Recognize the types of nouns.
· Understand noun phrases and their proper use in sentences.
· Understand noun clauses and their proper use.
· Use nouns correctly as objects of propositions, complements and appositives.
· Correctly form noun plurals.
· Correctly form the possessive forms of nouns.
· Make correct decisions about the use of articles, indefinite and definite.

UNIT 3: Pronouns

· Recognize and correctly use the various types of pronouns: personal, reflexive, relative, interrogative, demonstrative, and indefinite.
· Understand and correctly use pronoun case, number, and gender.
· Understand the concept of an antecedent and correct the confused or improper connection between antecedent and pronoun.
· Avoid illogical pronoun shifts.

UNIT 4: Verbs

· Understand the formation and proper use of all verb tenses.
· Understand verb agreement, how to form the principle parts of verbs, and the morphology of irregular verbs.
· Recognize various types and subtypes of verbs: action, linking, being, auxiliary, transitive, intransitive, etc.
· Avoid problems with commonly confused verbs.
· Understand the sequence of tenses.
· Understand and use voice correctly.
· Avoid the overuse of the passive voice.
· Understand and use mood correctly.

UNIT 5: Verbals

· Identify and use correctly the various forms of infinitives.
· Recognize the grammatical function of an infinitive in the context of a sentence.
· Avoid split infinitives.
· Identify and use correctly participles and participial phrases.
· Avoid misplaced participial phrases.
· Avoid dangling participial phrases.
· Avoid sentence fragments containing verbals but not complete verbs.
· Identify and use correctly gerunds and gerund phrases.
· Distinguish gerunds from participles.
· Maintain parallel structures with verbals.

UNIT 6: Adjectives and Adverbs

· Identify and correctly use adverbs and adjectives.
· Understand normal adjective groupings and patterns.
· Understand the adjectival use of participles, nouns, phrases, and clauses.
· Correctly position adjectives in a sentence.
· Avoid double negatives.
· Correctly form and use the comparative and superlative of a given adjective or adverb.
· Recognize and use correctly conjunctive adverbs in a sentence.
· Avoid run-on sentences with conjunctive adverbs.

UNIT 7: Conjunctions

· Correctly identify and use coordinating and correlative conjunctions.
· Understand the use of subordinating conjunctions.
· Correctly write complex sentences with dependant and independent clauses (nominal, adverbial, and adjectival).
· Improve style by using subordinating conjunctions.

UNIT 8: Prepositions

· Correctly identify and use common and compound prepositions.
· Correctly position prepositional phrases in a sentence.

Writing Text

Part One: Analyzing Literature and Film

· Chapter 1, Analyzing Fiction

- Note the structure and subplots.
- Become aware of specialized techniques such as irony, foreshadowing, images, motifs, symbols, and archetypal symbols.
- Consider the categories and subcategories of point of view: omniscient author, limited or Jamesean, unreliable narrator, first person, dramatic or objective, stream of consciousness.
- Observe the setting
- Discover the mood and tone, recognizing irony.
- Think about style.
- Study the characters: motivation, foils, static vs. dynamic, significance of names.
- Question to discover theme.
- Use a list of questions for analyzing fiction.

· Chapter 2, Analyzing Poetry

- Get the literal meaning of a poem by straightening out the syntax, filling out any blanks, writing a prose version, paying attention to punctuation, and using a dictionary.
- Make associations for meaning.
- Study the devices of a poem by identifying the persona, discovering the tone, considering the connotations, and interpreting paradox and oxymoron.
- Interpret figurative language such as metaphor, simile, images, motifs, symbols, synesthesia, personification, and allusion by using appropriate reference works.
- Notice sentimentality.
- Consider the form of the poem: rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, stanza form, rhyme schemes.
- Speculate on the theme.
- Apply a list of questions for analyzing poetry.

· Chapter 3, Analyzing Drama

- Hear the full significance of the lines.
- Visualize the scene.
- Consider the staging of the drama where appropriate: types of stages, production techniques, props.
- Consider the plot structure of Drama.
- Apply an understanding of the development of the dramatic protagonist from the tragic hero to the modern hero.
- Take into consideration recent developments in drama: theatre of the absurd, theatre of cruelty, and immediate theatre.
- Apply a list of questions for analyzing drama.

· Chapter 4, Analyzing film

- Analyze the structure of the film, including camera work, editing, flashbacks, and crosscutting.
- Consider the cinematic imagery, such as the use of motif and symbol and directorial technique.
- Identify the visual point of view.
- Identify the cinematic style that pervades the film.
- Examine characterization, setting, and theme in the film.
- Apply a list of questions for analyzing film.

Part Two: Writing about Literature and Film

· Chapter 5, Finding a topic

- Determine the purpose of the paper.
- Analyze the targeted audience and adjust accordingly.
- Generate ideas by a combination of invention, freewriting, brainstorming, clustering, marking the text, and keeping a journal.

· Chapter 6, Planning the Paper

- Focus in a clear thesis by posing a problem and effectively relating the part to the whole.
- Present a reasoned analysis.
- Choose the proper format of the paper and organize accordingly: comparison and contrast, argument, explication.
- master the form of the film and book review.

· Chapter 7, Developing the Discussion

- Draft an representative title and an effective opening.
- Work on the structure by writing a scratch outline.
- Decide on the most effective order of arguments.
- Maintain a critical focus throughout the paper.
- Develop the arguments with details, including logical argumentation, examples from the text, and authoritative opinions.
- Draft a creative closing with the proper balance between reiteration and commentary.

· Chapter 8, Improving the Presentation

- Re-outline the draft.
- Sharpen the introduction to include sufficient background information and making the reader eager to hear the arguments.
- Employ a list of strategies to strengthen the closing.
- Integrate quotations effectively.
- Document sources meticulously.
- Respect the reader by following the conventions of formal, critical research papers: use proper grammar, use formal language, avoid the second person, use the literary present, punctuate titles correctly, choose precise terminology, and apply that terminology correctly.
- Follow a list of instructions for revising the paper.
- Follow a checklist for proofreading the paper.

D. Presentation

In order to fulfill oral presentation requirements, the instructor regularly engages students in classroom discussion where reasoned extemporaneous responses to literary questions are required as a part of the participation grade. In addition to this, the instructor requires the intermittent presentation of short papers and participation in the organized formal debate of selected topics. In addition, students publish at least one major written assignment in HTML, and groups of students present a Microsoft PowerPoint narrative review of a section of Dante's Inferno. The document includes an introduction to the project, a table of contents, a bibliography, links to relevant resources, and a glossary. The training culminates in the senior year with the presentation and defense major paper before a board of humanities instructors.