First Seminar
Reading Bleak House

REQUIRED TEXTBOOK:

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Penguin, 2003), ISBN 9780141439723

COURSE DESCRIPTION.  In this seminar, we focus on the act of reading.  What happens when we read?  How do we make sense of what we read?  Is reading a literary text different from reading other things?  Why do we sometimes misunderstand what we read?  What do we need to know in order to understand what we read?  In exploring these questions, we read recent theories about reading and comprehension from the disciplines of literary studies, education, psychology, and linguistics.  As a test case, we read Bleak House, a novel by Charles Dickens.  I, the professor, read the novel for the very first time with you – so that I do not have the advantage that professors usually have over their students of having already read the entire literary work assigned in class before the semester starts.  Instead, we all explore reading Bleak House together from start to finish, all the while monitoring and analyzing our preconceptions, responses, questions, misunderstanding, and interpretations of the book.

GOALS.  By the end of the course, I want you

1. to be more aware of and curious about deceptively simple but, in truth, complex phenomena such as reading,
2. to approach the world, information, and knowledge ever more critically, questioning surface appearances, received opinion, and authoritative answers,
3. to be able to find scholarly sources on a given topic and evaluate those sources accurately and critically, as well as to collect, analyze, and interpret information and to communicate it to others in a reliable way,
4. to use writing, research, and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating,
5. to be able to write essays that are clear, effective, correct (according to the norms of standard American English), and appropriate to an academic setting,
6. to understand better how the literary, visual, and performing arts reflect and inspire the richness of human expression, and how language and other forms of expression convey meaning and story,
7. to be able to analyze how forms of expression are used to reflect, exalt, or challenge the values of a culture,
8. to be able to explain the many purposes for which art is created and the multiple contexts in which it acquires meaning and value,
9. to have developed perceptual habits and conceptual lenses conducive to the appreciation of specific media, genres, and styles,
10. to have pursued a sustained investigation of the idea of literature itself by examining what literature is and how it is culturally, politically, philosophically and/or sociologically defined and influenced, and
11. to demonstrate sensitivity to the concrete historicity and cultural specificity of texts and to the development of literary traditions, cultural values, modes of thought, and uses of language over time and across national boundaries.

REQUIREMENTS.  For this course, you must complete the following graded assignments:

1. PAPER 1 (15% of your final grade),
2. Research Report (15%),
3. CEL ASSIGNMENT (15%),
4. PAPER 2 (20%),
5. PAPER 3 (30%), and
6. 10 response papers (2% each, 20% all together).

Your final grade will be based on the following scale:  A = 93%-100%, A- = 90%-92%, B+ = 87%-89%, B = 83%-86%, B- = 80%-82%, C+ = 77%-79%, C = 73%-76%, C- = 70%-72%, D+ = 67%-69%, D = 60%-66%, and F = below 60%.  This scale is absolute.  Because the response papers are in a sense a form of extra credit built into this course from the start, I do not give extra credit at the end of the semester to help students raise their grade even a whisker.  So, even if, at the end of the semester, you are just .0001 points away from an A-, your final grade will be a B+.

RESPONSE PAPERS.  In the course of the term, you are required to write 10 short, informal papers (about 2 pages each) on the readings for class from Dickens.  You may choose for which days you want to write a response paper, as long as you have completed 10 response papers by the end of the term.  For each response paper, choose one of the following topics and analyze the reading assignment from Dickens for the day with respect to the topic you’ve chosen:

1. Phenomenology.  Try to follow your own act of recreation in reading the assignment.  What expectations do you bring to the reading assignment?  How are those expectations modified as you read?  What interruptions to the flow of your interpretation occur?  What gaps have to be filled?  How do you fill them?  What illusions do you form in order to impose consistency on the text?  What “alien associations” cannot be made consistent with those illusions?  Do you indentify with any of the characters?  Does the text make you think the thoughts of another?
2. Schemata.  What happens if you assign yourself different perspectives while reading (like the homebuyers and burglars in Richard Anderson’s article)?  Does taking on a different perspective affect what you notice, understand, and retain from your reading?  Were you ever confused, bored, or uncertain during your reading?  Identify idea units in the confusing passage that seemed important to you.  Where do you seem to lack the proper schemata to comprehend Dickens’s  text?  Where do you seem to have the proper schemata?
3. Descriptive Systems.  Identify a descriptive system in the reading assignment for the day.  What are the specific words that form the descriptive system?  What seems to be the nuclear word in the system?  What satellite words and clichés seem to be associated with that nuclear word?  What realities are excluded from the system?  What are the associations and symbolism of the descriptive system?  Is the system still familiar to us?  Do we still respond to it with the same expectations and reactions as Dickens’s audience might have?
4. Rules of Reading.  What are Dickens’s rules of reading?  Focus on one or, at most, two of the following areas:
   1. What are Dickens’s rules of notice?  What details in the text seem to be privileged?  What details don’t seem to be as important?  Is there a pattern to which details matter and which don’t?  What is that pattern?  When do Dickens’s rules of notice seem to differ markedly from our own?  When do they seem very similar to ours?
   2. What are Dickens’s rules of signification?  What meanings does Dickens seem to want us to draw from the details that he privileges?  How do you know?  What external symbolic systems (myths, icons, or stereotypes outside the text) does Dickens seem to use to convey quick, shorthand meaning?  How do you know when these symbolic systems are relevant?  When do Dickens’s rules of signification seem to differ markedly from our own?  When do they seem very similar to ours?
   3. What are Dickens’s rules of configuration?  What larger patterns does Dickens seem to expect us to recognize and privilege?  Can you predict what is going to happen next or how an episode is going to end?  What was your starting point before you began reading?  Did you reach any interpretive dead ends or run into any interpretive surprises as a result of your starting point?  What do you think the “proper” starting point was?  When do Dickens’s rules of configuration seem to differ markedly from our own?  When do they seem very similar to ours?
   4. What are Dickens’s rules of coherence?  What textual disjunctures seem acceptable to Dickens?  How is his audience supposed to interpret such disjunctures (as metaphor, subtlety, irony, something else)?  Were there times when a textual disjuncture disturbed your reading?  What did you do to resolve it?  When do Dickens’s rules of coherence seem to differ markedly from our own?  When do they seem very similar to ours?
5. Resisting Readers.  Become a resisting reader of Dickens.  Question his values and assumptions.  Notice what’s missing from his text.  What does Dickens try to keep hidden or unacknowledged?  Who profits from having the world portrayed the way Dickens portrays it?  Who loses?  Like Judith Fetterley, you may focus on issues of gender, but you may focus on other issues instead or in addition (race, class, politics, country, religion).
6. Freud’s Masterplot.  How does the reading assignment for the day constitute repetition, particularly the kind of repetition that binds textual moments together and allows us to master them?  What is the “primal scene” to which the repetition ultimately returns and which it compulsively seeks to master?  In what ways does the reading assignment threaten to short-circuit the end?  In what ways does it tempt the characters (or the reader) to desire something (someone) too perfect, something (someone) dangerous and cruel, or something (someone) just wrong?  How is the short-circuit prevented or avoided?  Do sub-plots help to ward it off?

You should have written at least once on each of the six topics in bold above over the course of your 10 response papers for the term.  No response papers may be submitted before we begin reading Dickens (i.e., before September 17) or on a day after that for which there is no reading assignment from Dickens (see the course schedule below).

Response papers will be graded Pass/Fail.  Think about one of the topics  above; then, write a response.  Don’t worry about answering every question I ask under the particular topic.  In fact, focus on the one question that seems most interesting to you, and be as specific as you can, getting down as much as you can, as quickly as you can.  I don’t want a five-paragraph theme; I want a free-wheeling exploration – as detailed and specific as possible – of the reading assignment for the day.  Be sure to address one of the topics assigned above, however; I should never finish reading a response paper and be left wondering which topic you were supposed to be addressing.

Normally, as long as you submit a response paper of suitable length, detail, topic, and thoughtfulness (and as long as you submit it in hard copy in class on the day that the reading from Dickens is assigned), you will receive all the points that the response paper is worth.  The purpose of the response papers is

1. to help you in your preparation for class discussion,
2. to help me see where you’re struggling with the readings for class,
3. to help you develop your intellectual independence and your confidence as a reader of Dickens, and
4. to practice the kind of analysis that you will do for PAPER 1, PAPER 2, and PAPER 3).

You may submit more than 10 response papers in the course of the semester (to make up for any response papers that do not receive a grade of “Pass”), but no matter how many extra response papers you submit, you will not receive credit for more than 10 total.  You may NOT submit more than one response paper on a single day, NOR may you submit a response paper for a day that you are absent from class.

PAPER 1.  Choose an episode or scene from Bleak House that we have not discussed in class but that seems very important to you in terms of developing a theme, character, or idea in the novel.  Compose a paper of 4-5 pages in which you argue a clear and specific thesis about the scene and its significance.  As you think about what to write, I strongly recommend that you use your response papers as a starting place.  Once you’ve chosen a focus for your paper, look very carefully at your scene.  Look for details that reveal or illustrate the significance of the scene in terms of your chosen focus.  Use those details as evidence and illustration in your paper.  You need not use outside sources for this paper (other than Dickens); in fact, I would encourage you not to use outside sources (because I'd rather hear what you think than what some published scholar thinks).

About a week before the paper is due, you will submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) via email, and I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis before you submit your paper.

Your paper will be graded based on these criteria.

PAPER 2.  Choose an episode or scene from the readings from Bleak House since PAPER 1 that we have not discussed in class but that seems very important to you in terms of developing a theme, character, or idea in the novel.  Compose a paper of 4-5 pages in which you argue a clear and specific thesis about the scene and its significance.  As you think about what to write, I strongly recommend that you use your response papers as a starting place.  Once you’ve chosen a focus for your paper, look very carefully at your scene.  Look for details that reveal or illustrate the significance of the scene in terms of your chosen focus.  Use those details as evidence and illustration in your paper.  You need not use outside sources for this paper (other than Dickens); in fact, I would encourage you not to use outside sources (because I'd rather hear what you think than what some published scholar thinks).

About a week before the paper is due, you will submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) via email, and I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis before you submit your paper.

Your paper will be graded based on these criteria.

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED LEARNING (CEL) ASSIGNMENT.  In fulfillment of your first-year CEL requirement, we’re going to participate in a book club with Trenton Central High School students. We'll visit Trenton Central High School three times. The first time, we’ll participate in a discussion with the students about a short poem, and we’ll invite the students to tell us about what they like to read. Then you all (broken up into four groups of four) will do some research and reading to choose a book or two to recommend to the Trenton High students (based on what they said they like to read and on the reading theory that we’ve been doing in class). The second time we go to the high school, we’ll participate in a discussion of a book chosen by the Trenton High librarian, and your groups will “pitch” the books you’ve researched to recommend to the Trenton High students, who’ll vote on what they’d like to read next. The third time we go to Trenton High, your groups will “pitch” the books you’ve researched to recommend to the Trenton High students will lead the discussions of the books that the Trenton High students chose (from the ones you recommended).

After the experience of participating in the book club, you’ll individually write a brief paper (of 2-3 pages) that

1. describes the research your group did on potential books to recommend to the Trenton High students (including how many books your group considered and why you decided on the one or ones that you “pitched” to the students),

2. outlines your group’s plan for leading the discussion on the third visit to Trenton High suggests general discussion questions for the TCHS book club to use in its future book discussions (based on the reading theory that we’ve done in class), and

3. summarizes what you as an individual contributed to the group.

Your grade for the assignment will be based on this paper and on your performance at TCHS, participating in and leading  discussions over the three visits.  Keep in mind that the more thoughtful your decisions about books to recommend and about how to lead the book club discussions discussion questions to propose (in terms of how many book choices you consider, as well as what theories about reading you use to choose books and to guide the discussion at Trenton High inform your proposed discussion questions), the better your grade will be.  I recommend that, for your discussion questions, you think in terms of the response paper topics.  How might those topics be adapted effectively for use by a high school book club (with younger students who have joined the book club primarily for entertainment and who have not read the theory itself)?

RESEARCH REPORT.  I doubt that any of us knows very much about Bleak House, and we all should learn more.  So, each of you is required to find one scholarly source about Bleak House.  Your source must be recent (published since 1980, preferably since 2000) and must be an article in a refereed literary journal or a chapter in a book from an academic press.  No source that you find may be duplicated by any other student.  In other words, each of you must find a completely different source from everyone else.  When you find your source, you should post the name of its author, its title, and its basic bibliographic information on the class wiki in SOCS (making sure to include your name as well).  Once you have posted a source on the wiki, it is yours; no one else may choose or claim that source.  If you find a source and don’t post it on the wiki, you could lose it to someone else who posts it first.  You may post your source at any point in the semester (including right now).

After claiming a source on the wiki, you are responsible for carefully reading (and re-reading) the source and then writing

• a one- or two-sentence description of the source,
• a one-paragraph summary of its main points, and
• a one- or two-sentence evaluation of its importance as a source.

You will submit this written information in the “dropbox” of SOCS between Thanksgiving and the last day of class.  Your submissions will be graded, at the latest, during the Reading Days of Finals Period based on the following criteria:

1. How accurate is your summary of the source?  Does your summary give an accurate picture of what the main points of the source are?  Does your summary convey those main points without injecting your own bias or focusing on your own interests?  (You will be required to give me a copy of your source if it is not available in full text through the TCNJ library databases.)
2. How helpful is your evaluation of the importance of the source?  Did you look critically at the source?  Did you evaluate it using valid criteria from an academic researcher’s perspective?  Did you give the source credit for what it offers?
3. Is the source you found appropriate?  Do you accurately describe the source, including information about what the source is, who its author is, and where it is published (i.e., what kind of journal or book)?
4. Is your writing clear, effective, interesting, correct (according to the norms of standard American English), and appropriate to an academic setting?  How readable is your summary on its own?  Does the summary stand alone and make sense to someone who has not seen or read the source?

PAPER 3.  Revise either PAPER 1 or PAPER 2 in light of what you have learned after finishing Bleak House.  Compose a paper of 5-7 pages in which you argue a clear and specific thesis about the scene from Bleak House that you discussed in an earlier paper and its relationship to the end (and/or other later portions) of the novel.  As you think about what to write, consider how the novel’s latter portions change or reinforce how you perceived the novel earlier in your reading of it.  How does what happens subsequently in the novel affect your interpretation of the scene that you discussed in your earlier paper?  You need not use outside sources for this paper (other than Dickens); in fact, I would encourage you not to use outside sources (because I'd rather hear what you think than what some published scholar thinks).

About a week before the paper is due, you will submit a thesis paragraph (a draft first paragraph of your paper or just a paragraph that describes what you plan to write about) via email, and I will give you feedback on your proposed thesis before you submit your paper.

Your paper will be graded based on these criteria.

ATTENDANCE.  Regular attendance is a virtual necessity for successful completion of this class.  Class discussion constitutes important, useful preparation for your graded work.  If you miss a class, you will essentially lose out on that day’s contribution to your preparation, since it is never really possible to reproduce or recapture the dynamics and flow of information for a missed class meeting (even if you get notes from someone).  If, however, you positively must miss a class, I expect you to find out what you missed and to come fully prepared – without excuses – to the next class meeting.  For more information on the College’s attendance policy, please go to http://policies.tcnj.edu/policies/viewPolicy.php?docId=8162.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY.  Academic dishonesty is any attempt by a student to gain academic advantage through dishonest means, to submit, as his or her own, work which has not been done by him/her or to give improper aid to another student in the completion of an assignment. Such dishonesty would include, but is not limited to: submitting as his/her own a project, paper, report, test, or speech copied from, partially copied, or paraphrased from the work of another (whether the source is printed, under copyright, or in manuscript form). Credit must be given for words quoted or paraphrased. The rules apply to any academic dishonesty, whether the work is graded or ungraded, group or individual, written or oral.  TCNJ’s academic integrity policy is available on the web at http://policies.tcnj.edu/policies/viewPolicy.php?docId=7642.

OFFICE HOURS and EMAIL.  My office is Bliss Hall 216, and my office hours this term are 12:30-4:00 p.m. on Tuesdays.  If you cannot see me during these office hours, feel free as needed to call my office (771-2106) or to talk to me before or after class to arrange an appointment at another time.  You may also contact me by email (through SOCS), or you may leave a message for me in my box at the English department offices in Bliss 124.  Email is generally the fastest way to contact me in an emergency.

I may, on occasion, want to e-mail everyone in class.  I generally only have access to your TCNJ e-mail addresses, however.  As a result, if you regularly use an e-mail address other than your TCNJ address, I recommend that you have mail from your TCNJ address forwarded to the address you use more regularly.  That way, if I e-mail your TCNJ address, my message will be forwarded to your other address automatically.

If you would like to send an e-mail message to one or more of your classmates, you can do so through SOCS.  To access SOCS, go to http://socs.tcnj.edu and, after you have logged in with your TCNJ e-mail username and password, choose this class from the list of your courses this semester.  Then, when our course page comes up, click the “Email” button.  From there, you can select individual e-mail addresses or the entire class and send a message to the address(es) you’ve selected.

Accommodations.  The College of New Jersey prohibits discrimination against any student on the basis of physical or mental disability or perceived disability.  The College will also provide reasonable and appropriate accommodations to enable students with disabilities to participate in the life of the campus community.  Individuals with disabilities are responsible for reporting and supplying documentation verifying their disability, and requests for accommodations must be initiated through the Office of Differing Abilities Services (Eickhoff Hall 159).  If you require special assistance, I will make every reasonable effort to accommodate your needs and to create an environment where your special abilities will be respected.  For more information, please go to http://policies.tcnj.edu/policies/viewPolicy.php?docId=8082.

COURSE SCHEDULE.  This schedule is subject to revision at the discretion of the professor.  Changes in the schedule after the start of the semester will be shown in red.