Author in context course
Proposal form
[Sample completed proposal]
Please save
the following proposal form to a disk and fill in your responses. Download and print your responses, and
submit as your proposal. Since the
course must be writing-intensive, please explain in the appropriate spaces
below the kinds of informal and formal writing you will use, the numbers of
pages of formal prose, the kinds of revisions you will require, and your
techniques for providing substantive comments for revision before students
submit the final drafts that you will grade.
See "Guidelines for
Writing-Intensive Course" for specific requirements.
Course:
Engl. 460 (WI):
Author in Context
Author: Toni
Morrison
Instructor: Moira
P. Baker
Required
primary texts will be selected from among the following:
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New
York: Knopf, 1987.
---. The Bluest Eye. New York:
Penguin, 1971.
---. Conversations with Toni
Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 1994.
---.
The Dancing Mind. New
York: Knopf, 1996.
---.
Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992
---. The Nobel Prize Lecture in Literature,
1993. New York: Knopf, 1994.
---. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1997.
---.
Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
---, ed. "Introduction."
Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of
Social Reality. New York: Pantheon,
1992.
---.
"Rootedness: The Ancestor
as Foundation." Black Women
Writers, 1950-1980. Ed. Mari Evans.
New York: Anchor-Doubleday,
1984.
---. "The Site of Memory." Inventing
the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed.
William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton, 1987. 103-124.
---. Song of Solomon. New York:
Penguin, 1977.
---. Sula. New York: Penguin,
1973.
---.
Tar Baby. New York: Signet, 1981.
---. "Unspeakable Things
Unspoken." Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1984): 1-34.
Contextual readings
(and viewings) will be selected from among the following, all of which will be
on reserve for student use:
Abrahams,
Roger. African Folktales. New York:
Pantheon, 1983.
Appiah, Kwame
Anthony. In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture. New York:
Oxford UP, 1992.
Bascom,
William. African Dilemma Tales. The Hague:
Mouton, 1975.
Bennett,
Lerone. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. New York:
Penguin, 1984.
Branch, Tyler. Parting the Waters: A History of the Civil Rights Movement.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York:
NAL-Penguin, 1969.
Eyes on the
Prize: Awakenings
(1954-1956). Vol. 1. PBS Home Video, 1987.
Eyes on the
Prize: Ain't Scared of Your Jails
(1960-1961). Vol. 2. PBS Home
Video, 1987.
Eyes on the
Prize: No Easy Walk
(1961-1963). Vol. 2. PBS Home
Video, 1987.
Eyes on the
Prize: The Time Has Come (1964-1966).
Vol. 4. PBS Home
Video, 1987.
White, Deborah
Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York:
Norton, 1985.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Ed. Jean Yellin.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
McLaurin, Melton
A. Celia: A Slave. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.
Morrison, Toni, ed. The Black Book. Comp.
Middleton Harris, et al. New
York: Random, 1974.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flashes of the Spirit: African and
Afro-American Art and Philosophy.
New York: Vintage, 1983.
Critical and
theoretical readings will include selected chapters from the following, which
will be on reserve for student use:
The Aesthetics of
Toni Morrison's Art of something like that!!
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Bloom, Harold,
ed. Toni Morrison. New York:
Chelsea, 1990.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin/White Masks. New York:
Grove, 1967.
---. The Wretched of the Earth.
Gates, Henry Louis,
Jr. and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni
Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past
and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Harris,
Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville:
U of Tennessee P, 1991.
Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. New York:
Manchester UP, 1998.
McKay, Nellie Y.
and Kathryn Earle. Approaches to
Teaching the Novels of Toni
Morrison. New York:
MLA, 1997.
Peterson, Nancy
J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Willis, Susan. Specifying:
a) analytic/interpretive
essay focusing on one crucial scene in the Morrison novel the student will
study all semester (5 page)
b) written
report on the history of U. S., with special attention to Black Americans and
race issues, during the years which constitute the setting for the same novel
(5 pages)
c) annotated
bibliography of secondary criticism on the same novel (5 pages)
d) final
essay using historical and critical contexts to analyze and interpret the same
novel (8-10 pages)
a) analytic/interpretive
essay
b) final
essay
For both the
analytic essay and final essay, I will read students' drafts and offer written
comments for revision before students submit the final graded version.
On class days when
I explain the formal written assignments, I will ask students to freewrite to
begin choosing or narrowing their topics and to formulate any questions they
have about the assignment itself. When
we read assigned contextual materials, I will have students write in class
about the implications of such material to the reading of the Morrison text we
will also be studying at the same time.
When we read critical texts, I will have students write in class about
whether or not they might be able to use a similar approach with the novel they
have chosen to study all semester. As
students begin drafting the final essay, I will have one workshop day during
which we will look at examples of student work that use historical and cultural
contexts as well as criticism in order to interpret a literary text. We will consider strategies for integrating
diverse material into a coherent "reading" of a novel that emphasizes
the student's own ideas and voice. On
this day, students will do an extended guided freewrite to clarify their own
ideas about the novel, pinpoint their audience and purpose, and consider which
contextual and critical works they might include in the essay.
a) focus
questions. Each day students will
design and bring to class one question on the assigned readings
b) guided
freewriting in preparation for the analytic/interpretive and final essays
c) invention
and pre-writing for the first drafts of these two essays
author in context course guidelines
author in context course procedure for approval