Welcome to ENGL 1B -- Dr. Hanson -- mhanson@bcconline.com -- Barstow Community College

ENGL 1B– Introduction to Literature
Lesson 1

Assignments from Lesson 1 are due by midnight of the date listed on the home page of the course.

Introductory Instructions

There will be 9 lessons total; they will be available to access through the Barstow College online course system.  Most students will access one lesson at a time, finish it, and email the assignments for the professor grade to Dr. Hanson.  Then the student will progress on to Lesson 2 and so forth.  Dr. Hanson will email you each week, letting you know that the assignments were received, and what grade you received on that week’s assignments. If you have problems doing your assignments for Lesson 1 or any lesson, just email me for help or clarification: mhanson@barstow.edu. or hanson335@msn.com or mhanson@bcconline.info.

First Email Assignment

***The first thing you are to do is to email the instructor, Dr. Hanson, and let me know that you are in my ENGL 1B Introduction to Literature online course.   This way I will have a working email address for you and can contact you whenever I need to.

***  As part of this email, you will also write a brief biography/personal profile about yourself of about 5 to 10 sentences (5 sentences minimum), so that the instructor can get to know you better. Tell me about your past life, family, friends, favorite subjects in college, favorite foods/colors, sports interests, leisure time activities, hobbies, and/or languages you speak.  Information about Dr. Hanson appears on the Barstow College website.  Also in the first email, please re-type the following paragraph, typing your name at the end of the paragraph as a signature:

I will maintain a working email address during the time that I am in Dr. Hanson's ENGL 1B class. I consent to having Dr. Hanson email me whenever she needs to. I understand the course grading policy and all other policies set forth in the course syllabus. I understand what materials I must hand in to pass this course and that I must hand in all assignments by the last day of class by 3pm. I am aware of the BC plagiarism policy.

Email the information above to mhanson@bcconline.com.

Information about Lessons:

You will be given 9 lessons with instructions, lecture, reading, and assignments to complete.  Each lesson will include reading from the textbook, a discussion/commentary, an essay to compose, exercises to complete, and lecture. Each assignment will be graded on quality and quantity; the assignment should be complete, thorough, creative, and should meet the sentence or page-length requirements to receive full credit.  If the assignment is done poorly, I will send you an email asking you to redo the assignment, giving you instructions on how to do this, and then asking you to re-submit the assignment for full credit.  There will be an online midterm and a proctored final essay exam (both of these exams include quote and terminology identification, short and long essay exam); these 2 exams will be graded A through F -- 90% or above correct is an A, 80% to 89% correct is a B, 70% to 79% correct is a C, 60% to 69% correct is a D.

Lecture #1 –

The purpose of this course is to expose students to the literary forms of the novel, short story, poetry, essay, and drama.  In each lesson, information about a particular literary genre will be addressed and model literature from that genre will be interrogated.  The selections of literature studied in this course are intended to illustrate a variety of approaches to literature including cultural, gender, and critical discursive diversity.

The History of the Development of the Novel

The novel is one form of an extended fictional prose narrative. It differs from allegory (which functions to teach some sort of moral lesson) and romance (with its emphasis on spectacular and exciting events designed to entertain) in its emphasis on character development. The novel, however, arises from the desire to depict and interpret human character. The reader of a novel is both entertained and aided in a deeper perception of life's problems.

The earliest novel is considered to be The Tale of Genji (from the early 11th century) by Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese noblewoman.  The Tale of Genji has many elements found in a modern novel: a central character and a very large number of major and minor characters, well-developed characterization of all the major players, a sequence of events happening over a period of time covering the central character's lifetime and beyond. The work does not make use of a plot; instead, much as in real life, events just happen and characters evolve simply by growing older. One remarkable feature of the Genji, and of Murasaki's skill, is its internal consistency, despite a dramatis personae of some four hundred characters. For instance, all characters age in step and all the family and feudal relationships are consistent among all chapters. One complication for readers and translators of the Genji is that almost none of the characters in the original text is given an explicit name. This lack of names stems from Heian-era court manners that would have made it unacceptably familiar and blunt to freely mention a character's name. Modern readers and translators have, to a greater or lesser extent, used various nicknames to keep track of the many characters. The Tale of Genji was written in chapter installments (for the women of the Japanese aristocracy of the Heian dynasty) just as Charles Dickens famous novels were written. The installments were doled out for public consumption with cliff-hangers so the public would want to read the next installment, much in the way old silent moving picture serial reels at the onset of motion pictures such as The Perils of Pauline used installments so the audience would come back to the movie theatre next week to see what happened. This technique is still used today in television show.

The English novel (meaning from Great Britain) became prevalent in the 18th century.  The roots of the English novel come from a number of sources including Elizabethan prose fiction; French heroic romance--vast baroque narratives about thinly disguised contemporaries (mid-17th century) who always acted nobly and spoke high-flown sentiment; and Spanish picaresque tales--strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure; Don Quixote is the best known of these tales. 

The word "novel" (which wasn't even used until the end of the 18th century) is an English transliteration of the Italian word "novella"--used to describe a short, compact, broadly realistic tale popular during the medieval period (e.g. The Decameron). The novel deals with a human character in a social situation, man as a social being. The novel places more emphasis on character, especially one well-rounded character, than on plot. Another initial major characteristic of the novel is realism--a full and authentic report of human life. The traditional novel has: a unified and plausible plot structure, sharply individualized and believable characters, and a pervasive illusion of reality.

There was a public demand for the English novel. With the expansion of the middle class by the middle of the 18th century, more people could read and they had money to spend on literature. There was already a high interest in autobiography, biography, journals, diaries, memoirs. Alexander Pope's dictum that "The proper study of mankind is man" led to increased interest in the human character.  The early English novel departs from the allegory and the romance with its vigorous attempt at verisimilitude and it was initially strongly associated with the middle class, their pragmatism, and their morality.  Early forms of the English novel are Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Pamela by Samuel Richardson, and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.  The early novels were epistolary fiction, that is, they were stories told in a series of letters between characters or diary entries.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am starting class and lecture with Fitzgerald’s novel because you will need to start reading the novel right away.  The Midterm essay exam that must be completed Week 5 of this course covers the novel and nothing else from this course.  The final exam is cumulative and covers everything in the course except the novel. 

The Great Gatsby was first published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream.

The novel chronicles societal changes in the US. following the First World War. American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamour of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it, a kind of decadence.

Plot Summary

Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a young bachelor from a patrician Midwestern family, who graduates from Yale in 1915. After fighting the Great War he returns to the Midwest before settling in New York City to "learn the bond business."

Nick explains that in 1922 he rented a bungalow between two mansions in West Egg, a wealthy community on Long Island Sound. Across the bay was East Egg, inhabited by the "old aristocracy," including Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is Nick's second cousin once removed and Nick knew of Tom, a football player at New Haven. Nick describes the Buchanans in a visit to their East Egg mansion: although phenomenally wealthy, Tom's glory days are behind him; he is a dilettante. Daisy, although engaging and attractive, is pampered and superficial with a largely ignored three-year-old daughter. Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a well-known female golfer, shows an interest in Nick and tells him that Tom has a mistress in New York City.

One day Tom and Nick take a train ride together to New York and on the way they stop at a shabby garage owned by George Wilson, where Nick is introduced to the owner's wife, Myrtle (Tom's mistress). Nick accompanies Tom and Myrtle to their Manhattan love-nest, where Myrtle presides over a pretentious party that includes her sister and several others. Nick finds the evening increasingly unbearable but does not leave until Tom breaks Myrtle's nose in a spat.

Nick learns that his next-door neighbor, who throws lavish parties hosting hundreds of people, is the wealthy, mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick receives an invitation one weekend and attends, finding the party wild and fun. However, he also discovers the guests do not know much about Gatsby and that rumors about the man are contradictory. Nick runs into Jordan Baker, who invites him to join her. While looking for Gatsby, they run into a man with large "Owl Eye" glasses admiring Gatsby's collection of books. Later, a man strikes up a conversation with Nick, claiming to recognize him from the US Army's Third Division during the Great War. Nick mentions his difficulty in finding the host, and the man reveals himself to be Gatsby. An odd, yet close, friendship between Nick and Gatsby begins.

One day, Gatsby drives Nick to New York City. Gatsby presents a clichéd description of his life as a wealthy dilettante and war hero to an incredulous Nick, but the latter is convinced when Gatsby displays a war medal and photograph. In New York, Gatsby introduces a bemused Nick to underworld figure Meyer Wolfsheim (based on Arnold Rothstein). Nick then sees Tom and tries to introduce Gatsby, but finds that Gatsby has disappeared.

Jordan Baker later reveals to Nick that Gatsby had fallen in love with Daisy in 1917 while an Army Lieutenant stationed near Daisy's hometown, Louisville. After the war, Gatsby came east and bought his mansion near Daisy and Tom, where he hosts parties hoping she will visit. Jordan says Gatsby would like Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy. Nick agrees, and invites Daisy and Gatsby to his house. The reunion is initially awkward, but Gatsby and Daisy begin a love affair. An affair also begins for Nick and Jordan, but Nick predicts their relationship will be superficial.

Daisy invites Gatsby and Nick to her mansion, where Tom discovers that Gatsby loves Daisy and, accompanied by Tom and Jordan, they depart for the Plaza Hotelin Manhattan. Tom insists he and Gatsby switch cars; as he stops by Wilson's garage for gas he flaunts Gatsby's roadster. At the hotel Tom confronts Gatsby about their affair. Gatsby urges Daisy to say she never loved Tom; Daisy says that although she did love Tom "once," she loved Gatsby "too." Tom mockingly tells Gatsby nothing can happen between him and Daisy. Gatsby retorts that the reason Daisy married Tom was because he (Gatsby) was too poor to marry Daisy. Tom visibly loses composure and reveals that Gatsby is a bootlegger. Gatsby tries to defend himself to Daisy. However, Tom knows Daisy's superficial nature very well and by taking away Gatsby's air of financial security, Daisy is now beyond his reach. With the situation between Tom and Gatsby tense, Daisy runs out of the hotel, with Gatsby following her, to Gatsby's car, where she insists on driving home as it will calm her nerves. Tom, believing he has bested Gatsby, leaves with Nick and Jordan.

George Wilson, also suspicious that his wife is having an extramarital affair, argues with her. Myrtle runs outside as Gatsby's roadster approaches (believing it to be Tom), only to be struck and killed by the car. Daisy and Gatsby speed away. Later, Tom, Jordan and Nick notice a commotion by Wilson's garage on their way to East Egg, and stop. While George mourns, moaning over his wife's body, a bystander tells of having seen a yellow car strike Myrtle. As George takes in this information, Tom, unfazed by the death of his mistress, tells George the car wasn't his, but George doesn't seem to listen and Tom, Jordan, and Nick leave.

Later that night Nick learns the truth of the accident from Gatsby — Daisy was driving when the car struck Myrtle. The next morning Nick finds Gatsby depressed, unsure whether Daisy still loves him, and awaits a call from her. Seeing himself as Gatsby's closest friend, Nick advises Gatsby to leave for a week. "They're [Daisy, Tom, Jordan] a rotten crowd," Nick says, "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

Having tracked the owner of the roadster, Wilson appears at Gatsby's mansion with a gun. George finds Gatsby floating in his pool and kills him before committing suicide.

Despite Nick's efforts, few people attend Gatsby's funeral. In the end, only Nick, Gatsby's father, and the "owl-eyed" man who admired the books in Gatsby's library show up at his funeral.

Nick severs connections with Jordan (who claims to be engaged to another man). Also, Nick has a run in with Tom, who admits that he revealed that Gatsby was the owner of the roadster to George Wilson, leading the deranged man to find and kill Gatsby.

Nick returns permanently to the Midwest, reflecting on Gatsby's dreams and the sad and cyclical nature of the past.

Themes

Decay/Decadence, The Corruption of the American Dream, The Hollowness of the Upper Class, The Futility of life

Motifs

Notice how the weather changes in certain scenes to match mood, Notice the various geographical locations and how they relate to characters and mood, Notice color usage, Notice imagery and other forms of figurative language that are used in the novel.

Symbolism

The Green Light – envy, greed, the lost American dream, the unattainable

Daisy – innocent/white petals on the outside with gold/money/worth on the inside

The Valley of Ashes (chapter 2) – moral and social decay of the wealthy

The Eyes of Doctor T. J Eckleburg on the billboard along the road to NYC:

Seeing, knowing, the eyes of God, judgment, fate, ennui, meaningless world (how do the glasses on the Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg change the meaning of the symbol?  Glasses make you see better, more clearly, or do they??)

Personally, I relate Michel Foucault’s (20th French theorist) theories on image to this symbol.  Foucault’s first book The Order of Things discusses in Chapter 1 the painting Las Meninas that has different levels of looking.  Foucault’s theory is that everything is image. Foucault coined the terms "the gazer," those with power over others/who control others, and "the object of the gaze," those who are watched and controlled by "the gazer."  The patriarchy is often the gazer and those who are othered are the objects of the gaze, like minorities such as women, people of cultural diversity that are not part of the mainstream, mentally or physically challenged groups of people, children, slaves, prisoners – like the prisoners in Foucault’s ideal prison the Panopticon, a prison in which the cells are on the outside of a circular building and the guards are in the center of the circle so that the prisoners are constantly being watched.  God is the gazer and his flock are the object of the gaze. Foucault’s theory is that the object of the gaze changes its behavior because those who are the object of the gaze know they are constantly being watched so they internalize the gazer’s eye and start watching themselves and how they act and react.

It is interesting to apply Foucault’s theories to The Great Gatsby.  Who is/are the gazer in this novel? (Tom, Nick, Dr. Eckleburg, Gatsby).  Who is/are the object of gaze? (Daisy, Myrtle, Gatsby).  Does this relationship between the characters shift so that the gazers become the object of the gaze and vice versa as the novel progresses? Do those who are the object of the gaze in the novel change their behavior to suit the gazer’s perception of them? (i.e. Daisy and Tom).  

Historical Background

The Jazz Age describes the period after the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with the onset of the Great Depression. Traditional values of the previous period declined while the American stock market soared.

The age takes its name from popular music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments typically seen as progress — cars, air travel and the telephone - as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. The phrase was coined by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who greatly criticized this new era of "relaxation" in novels such as The Great Gatsby.

Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Professor Henry Van Dyck of Princeton University in the 1920s wrote "…it is not music at all. It’s merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion."

Even the media began to degrade jazz. The New York Times took stories and altered headlines to pick at Jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was Jazz that scared the bears away. Another story claims that Jazz caused the death of a celebrated conductor. The actual cause of death was a fatal heart attack (natural cause). From 1919 Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans played in San Francisco and Los Angeles where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. However, the main centre developing the new "Hot Jazz" was Chicago, where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers.

Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924. Also in 1924 Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as featured soloist for a year, then formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, also popularizing scat singing. Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers. There was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras, such as Jean Goldkette's orchestra and \fs22ulPaul Whiteman's orchestra. In 1924 Whiteman commissioned Gershwin'sRhapsody in Blue, which was premi red by Whiteman's Orchestra. Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson's band, Duke Ellington's band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Clubin 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines's Band in Chicago (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe there in 1928). All significantly influenced the development of big band-style swing jazz

Art Deco

Art Deco was an opulent style, and its lavishness is attributed to reaction to the forced austerity imposed by World War I. Its rich, festive character fitted it for modern contexts, including the Golden Gate Bridge, interiors of cinema theaters (a prime example being the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California) and ocean liners such as the Île de France, Queen Mary, and Normandie. Art Deco was employed extensively throughout the United States' train stations in the 1930s, designed to reflect the modernity and efficiency of the train. Art Deco made use of many distinctive styles, but one of the most significant of its features was its dependence upon a range of ornaments and motifs. The style is said to have reflected the tensions in the cultural politics of its day, with eclecticism having been one of its defining features. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the distinctive style of Art Deco was shaped by "all the nervous energy stored up and expended in the War."

Reading #1 –   F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby + supplementary readings

You can get a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel at Borders or Barnes and Nobles or online at Amazon.com OR you can read the entire novel online at:  http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/

You also need to read for this week’s lesson the sections in your textbook on literary criticism/schools of thought, specifically:

Deconstruction, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism or Cultural Materialism, Post-Colonialism, New Historicism

In scholarly circles, these are called discursive traditions.  Scholars apply discursive traditions to works of literature when writing essays of literary criticism.  This is what you will be asked to do on your midterm exam.  You will write 2 essays using at least 2 different discursive traditions, applying these schools of criticism to themes associated with the novel.

Film Adaptations:

Students find that viewing film adaptations of the novel helps them understand the reading of the novel, especially the plot, character interaction, symbolism, and themes of the novel.  There are a number of film adaptations of The Great Gatsby but these 2 are the most famous and most easy to access:

The Great Gatsby (1974 film) , starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterson, Bruce Dern, and Karen Black with a script by Francis Ford Coppola

The Great Gatsby (2000 film) , a TV film starring Toby Stephens, Paul Rudd, and Mira Sorvino

Try going to your neighborhood video store or grocery store kiosk like Blockbuster.  If they do not have the film adaptation you seek ask if they can order it for you.  Also, you could buy the film adaptation on Amazon.com.  Watching the film version is not required.　

Writing:  For more information on F. Scott Fitzgerald, go to: http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/

This week’s writing exercise is to go to this website, click on anything that interests you, and write a summary of 20 sentences of the contents therein.  To summarize reading, you read the material online and then put the reading material into your own words, shortening the main points of the original text. 

For example, some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories appear if you hit the link button "Writings by Fitzgerald."  You could read one of these stories and shorten up in your own words the main points of the plot of the story.  This reading would be a wise thing to do since you could use this material on your midterm exam.  Of course, you could also look around in the rest of the website and use something else from this website as the topic of the summary exercise for this lesson.

Use synonyms for the words in the online material and flip some of the sentences around (put the back of the sentence you read on the front of your summary sentence and put the front information from the sentence you read on the back of your summary sentence) OR use different sentence patterns other than the ones in the online material to make your summary different from the original text you read.

In addition, it would be a good idea to write notes about the novel, especially applying discursive traditions/literary schools of criticism to the novel to prepare for the Midterm exam essay.

Important Note: When submitting the assignment, place the assignment in your word processor and do your work. Spell check, grammar check and proof-read your assignment, and then send the work as an RTF attachment to mhanson@bcconline.com. Remember, it is your responsibility to save a copy of all of your work.

Discussion – do not forgot to log on to the discussion board each week and post your 10-sentence discussion and your 5-sentence comment on a peer’s posting.

Reading Discussion for Lesson #1 –

You must log on to the Barstow College Discussion area to post your discussion commentary each week. The Discussion area is connected to the webpage where you find the lesson instructions each week.  The discussions/commentaries in each lesson are connected to the textbook reading and exercises.  Your reading responses and discussion comments in this class can be in expository/essay form, but they don’t have to be.  You could write a short story, an obituary, a diary entry, a business letter, or a paragraph (10 sentences minimum).  If you prefer, your reading response could be a poem, a skit, a recipe, a song lyric, a personal anecdote, or a list (10 lines minimum). I encourage students and give higher grades to students who design creative comments and responses to our critical discussion topics posted here. 

Also, you do not have to respond to all the questions listed as part of the discussion/commentary instructions.  These ideas that I have included here are supposed to help you think about the reading in the textbook and the issues attached to the reading. Your response can be about the textbook reading or about any or all of the ideas listed in the prompt above for your discussion/commentary that you will write for that textbook reading for this week.  Don’t forget to comment on your classmates’ postings in the discussion area of BCC online.  You should do this for each lesson discussion.  You get grades for your posting and for your posting comments to other people’s thoughts and ideas.  The discussion area, obviously, is a chatroom or threaded conversation, a place for you to air your views and discuss theories with others about the plays and poems we will read in ENGL 4.

You must log on to the Barstow College Discussion area to post your discussion commentary each week. You must also comment in 5 sentences on at least one posting by a classmate. This comment posting must be at least 5 sentences in length.   You get grades for your posting and for posting comments to other people’s thoughts and ideas. 

Lesson #1 Discussion topic (you may have to post this discussion on week 5 after you have finished reading this novel):  After reading The Great Gatsby, discuss one or two of the following topics:

What is the American Dream? How does Gatsby represent this dream? Does the novel praise or condemn Gatsby's dream? Has the American dream changed since Gatsby's time?

What is Nick Carraway's role in the novel? Consider Nick's father's advice in chapter one: "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Does telling the story from Nick's point of view make it more believable?

Discuss the four main characters. Who, if any, do you find most sympathetic?

Discuss the symbolism in the novel.  Which symbol is most striking to you, speaks to you the most?

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