English R1B

Other Readings and Media

"Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend (Oxford UP 1998)

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text (Oxford 1998)

Hacker, Diane. A Writer's Reference 5th Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's)

as well as a Big, Thick, and Thrilling Course Reader (TBA) "

Description

"In this class, we will examine a wide variety of texts leading up to the 'Darwinian Revolution,' and will read from several of his core texts, as well as letters and entries from his travel logs and autobiography. We will then move from Darwin's core materials to an examination of the wider cultural response, focusing in particular on the ways in which novelists and poets reacted to theories of evolution and natural selection. In addition, we will take a look at some more contemporary reactions to Darwin, from excerpts of the Scopes 'Monkey' Trial transcripts to the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, from 'Marxist Darwins' to the recent and rather bizarre incarnation that is Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest. Near the end of the semester, we will be reading an extraordinarily long novel by (you guessed it) Charles Dickens which will inform our reading of Darwin and will help direct your final research projects.



English R1B requires approximately 8000 words of writing, the reading of 5 complete works (two of them book length), with at least two works written originally in English. There is a stipulation that readings include essays produced by the students themselves. In English 1B, readings are chosen to facilitate student writing projects and to introduce students to a coherent area of intellectual inquiry. Like R1A, the R1B course stresses the recursive nature of writing and reading and offers students frequent practice in a variety of forms of discourse leading toward exposition and argumentation in common standard English. R1B aims at incorporating research results into argumentation. A short essay is assigned at the beginning of the semester to assess the students' writing skills. Students will then be assigned at least two progressively longer essays (totaling at least 16 typewritten pages), with at least an equal number of pages of preliminary drafting and revising. The final paper will be a research paper on a directed topic of your own design. "