ENG 201-1109
BMCC Spring 2017
Instructor: Chris O. Cook

Class Schedule

Have the texts read for class on the date indicated.  Please bring hard copies with you to class (it is not acceptable to have them on your phone; you need paper copies on which you can mark, underline, etc.).  For your convenience, I have all the stories and poems stored as Word documents and have uploaded those docs myself, so they will pop up as Word documents when you click their links.  Depending on what kind of computer you have, you may have to look out for a little download symbol/box and then click "open" on it.

It might be a good idea to print out stories/poems several at a time, a few classes in advance, to avoid the chance of being unprepared.


Although all of the stories and poems in the first two Units are online, for the last Unit, on Shakespeare's Hamlet, you will need to buy a copy of Hamlet.  Any edition is fine
(because it is a play, it is not necessary for the page numbers of everyone's copy to line up, since we can just refer to Act/Scene/Line numbers, rather than page numbers), as long as it is Shakespeare's actual text and NOT one of those editions where they "translate" it (i.e., dumb it down) from Shakespeare's original poetry into boring everyday contemporary English ("translate" is not even the right word, because Shakespeare wrote in Modern English; it is the same language we speak today, just very imaginatively arranged).  We will be reading the entire play aloud in class, so you will need the "real" text.  


Sat 2/4:  Hand out syllabus; pontificate about purpose of literature.

Unit One:  A Bunch of Awesome Short Stories

Sat 2/11:  
--James Joyce, "Araby"
              --D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
         
    --Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"

Sat 2/18:  --Ernest Hemingway, "Indian Camp"
               --Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

               --William Carlos Williams, "The Use of Force"
            
Sat 2/25:  --Gabriel García Márquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
               --Isabel Allende, "Two Words"
           
   --Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Sat 3/4:  --Raymond Carver, "Cathedral"
           
 --James Joyce, "The Dead"  (LONG - give yourself time!)

Unit Two:  A Bunch of Awesome Poems


NOTE:  I strongly advise stapling each individual packet together, and keeping all the packets in the same folder and bringing that folder to every class during the Poetry Unit (i.e., you should have a total of seven different stapled packets).  The poems are harder to put back in the right order if they get out of order than the stories are, and there have been far too many problems in the past with people missing individual poems or having the wrong packet with them on specific days.

Sat 3/11
:  --Renaissance / Metaphysical Poetry  (1600s)
               
--First-Generation Romanticism  (1770s-1812ish)

Sat 3/18:  --Second-Generation Romanticism  (1812ish-1824)

Sat 3/25:  --Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman  (late 1800s)
                 --Modernism  (1914-1940s)

Sat 4/1:  --The Beats and The Confessionals  (1950s-1970s)
                 --Contemporary Poetry

Unit Three:  The Awesomest Thing Ever Written

Sat 4/8:  reading Hamlet aloud in class.

Sat 4/15:  SPRING BREAK -- NO CLASS

Sat 4/22
:  reading Hamlet aloud in class.

Sat 4/29:  reading Hamlet aloud in class.

Sat 5/6:  reading Hamlet aloud in class.

Sat 5/13:  Hamlet movie.

Sat 5/20:  Hamlet movie.


*I know the school calendar says the last day of classes is 5/18, but there's also a rule that I must convene class on the Final Exam day even if we are not having a Final Exam (it's a funding thing).  Because we have a Final Paper instead of a Final Exam, but still have to meet on 5/21, that day is just another class (but the Final Paper won't be due until the end of Finals Week).



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