Course Info & Policies

Required Materials

It is very important that we all read and work from the same editions of the below novels. We will often read passages together in class, and it is *essential* to the culture of our class that we all reference the same editions with the same paginations. I therefore ask that you please purchase the PRINT editions of the below novels. Digital editions, including those made available via CAMP, should be used as a temporary stop gap or as a last resort only.

If you can afford the below books, please purchase them in hard copy form. I have also placed the correct print editions of each of these novels on reserve at the library. You may also check them out using Borrow Direct. Finally, I also have limited numbers of each text available to lend to students who cannot afford to purchase them. Please talk to me if you encounter difficulties with or have questions about purchasing or otherwise accessing these texts in print; I will help you find a solution.

Please bring the assigned reading with you every day to class.

Course Requirements

Attendance and Active Participation (10%)

You are expected to come to class having completed the reading and assignments listed for each day and prepared to discuss it. Your successful participation in class depends on your preparation. Be sure to complete the reading and other assignments for each class session. More than 3 unexcused absences will affect your entire course grade. More than 3 late arrivals will count as an absence.

There are many ways to participate in this class, including:

  1. Raising ideas from our assigned materials for class discussion, including directing our attention to specific moments you found evocative, inspiring, unexpected, or otherwise salient;
  2. Asking questions about materials or ideas or passages you found puzzling or difficult (I cannot overstate how valuable good questions are to a thriving class, and how desperately I wish more students were courageous in asking them);
  3. Bringing pertinent materials discovered outside of class to our attention during discussion;
  4. Assisting classmates in group activities or other in-class work;
  5. Expressing appreciation for something a classmate has said in class in specific terms and describing how it has deepened, extended, changed, or otherwise affected your thinking;
  6. Visiting office hours to extend course conversations around subjects or questions you find particularly interesting and/or to ask for additional feedback on your writing.

Close Reading Essays (2 essays, 15% each)

3-4 page essay analyzing one of the course novels or poems. Prompts will be circulated in advance.

Historical Context Essay (20%)

5 page essay placing one of the course novels, essays, or poems in its historical context. Prompts will be circulated in advance.

Final Essay Proposal (5%)

1 page proposal for your final essay.

Final Essay Presentation (10%)

5-10 minute presentation to the class about your final essay topic and argument.

Final Essay (25%)

8-10 page essay developing an original argument on a topic and course text(s) of your choosing, involving historical research and research on the critical and scholarly conversations about your text(s) of choice.

Policies and Information

Language, Power, and Difficulty

This class takes seriously the need to examine rather than censor or look away from the messiness, complexity, and, often, ugliness of history and the present. At the same time, our classroom is a contingent community and I treat it as such: we must be accountable to and respectful of each other as we collectively create a space for discussing difficult, and at times uncomfortable, issues.

In that spirit, I want to make explicit that some of the texts we will study this semester use the n-word and other racial slurs. We will not repeat these words aloud in class. While these words have a complex history of reclamation and resignification, they are not appropriate for casual classroom use.

Furthermore, throughout the semester we will read about historical events that are upsetting, to say the least. Our course texts concern forms of institutionalized oppression, personal and structural violence, and abuses of human rights such as genocide, torture, war, terrorism, and sexual assault. Please approach our readings and class discussions with maturity, thoughtfulness, and care for yourself and for others in the class.

Technological Failures Are Not Emergencies

Technological failures and mishaps – file corruption, computer crashes, wifi connection problems, uploading the wrong file to Canvas – are predictable facts of twenty-first century life. They happen all the time and are thus NOT emergencies. You therefore need to develop strategies that take such failures into account. Start your work early, save it often, and save it to an external hard drive or in the cloud using services like Dropbox and Google drive. Technological failure or mishap – including uploading the wrong file to Canvas – is not an excuse for late or unfinished work.

Please note that I will read and respond to whatever you upload to Canvas for grading. It is your responsibility to turn in the correct version of your assignments.

Course Digital Infrastructure

We will make use of multiple online systems and programs in this course: a course site, a Canvas site, and Zoom.

  • Course site: We will use our course site to manage course information and our schedule. You will find an online version of our course calendar there (including the most up-to-date version of reading assignments and due dates), as well as an online version of our course syllabus. You will also find all course assignment sheets there, as well as links to online materials.

  • Canvas: Most of our course readings will be available via our Canvas site (excluding online-only material). You will also submit your assignments via Canvas, and I will use Canvas’s Gradebook to record your grades. You will also be able to access our individual meeting Zoom link (see below) via Canvas.

  • Zoom: I will hold office hours in person, but for meetings outside of office hours, I can meet with you either in person or on Zoom. If we meet on Zoom, we will utilize a standing Zoom link for our meeting. You can find this link via our Canvas site. To meet with me on Zoom:

    1. From our Canvas site, click on “Zoom” in the left menu.
    2. This will take you to a page where you will see our standing class Zoom link (which is titled “ENGL 3630 COMBINED-XLIST U.S. Literature and the End of the American Century (2024SP)”). Click “Join” to join the meeting.
    3. These meetings will not be recorded. I have enabled a waiting room for these meetings, which you will enter first when signing on. I will then let you into the Zoom room. If I do not let you in right away, this means I am meeting with another student.

Email

You should check your Cornell email account regularly; I will send course information and announcements through email. I endeavor to respond to all emails that you send me within 24-48 hours during the working week and within 2-3 days over the weekend or breaks, but please do not send me urgent emails regarding your assignments in the day or hours before they are due and expect a reply.

I am happy to answer simple questions about the course via email, but I will recommend that you talk to me in office hours or in a meeting about more involved questions and conversations about course material, assignments, and policies. In fact, the best thing to do in almost any situation that affects your class work is simply to talk to me about it. I am also happy to read and discuss advance drafts of your assignments with you in a one-on-one meeting, but I will not read and comment on drafts of assignments via email before they are due.

Attendance

Attendance is required. More than three absences will affect your grade, and more than three late arrivals to class will count as an absence. Save your absences for when you need them. If at any point in the semester you are ill for an extended period of time, or if you need to quarantine or isolate, please contact Student Disability Services, who can provide an accommodation letter and let your instructors know.

Late Work

Unexcused delays in completing assignments will result in a penalty of 1 grade level per day (i.e., an A becomes an A-, an A- becomes a B+, etc.). It is your responsibility to keep up with assignments and to submit them properly and on time. Please communicate with me in advance if you will need more time to complete an assignment.

On a personal level, like everyone else, I dislike being lied to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for a little more time to complete an assignment. You do not need to concoct elaborate stories if requesting an extension on an assignment, or even offer any explanation for this request at all. You can just ask for more time, and we will work it out.

Revisions

You may revise any course assignment, except for the final essay presentation or final essay itself, and re-submit it to me for re-grading. Re-grading means that I will read, comment on, and grade your essay again as if from scratch, without taking your previous grade into account. Revisions of assignments are due two weeks after you receive feedback and your grade from me on that assignment. I strongly recommend you come to office hours or make an appointment to talk with me about the feedback I gave you on any assignment you plan to revise.

Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools

All students are expected to adhere to the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Please see the Code of Academic Integrity at https://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/dean/academic-integrity/code-of-academic-integrity/. The Code states, “A Cornell student’s submission of work for academic credit indicates that the work is the student’s own. All outside assistance should be acknowledged, and the student’s academic position truthfully reported at all times.” Plagiarism will result in a 0 on the assignment and is also possible grounds for failure of the course or expulsion from the university.

Representing text generated by AI writing tools – such as chatGPT, AI tools embedded into Google docs, or other programs – as your own writing is a violation of this policy. If you use AI writing tools to assist you in the writing process, you must explicitly label all artificially generated text that appears in your paper, just as you would label any text written by someone other than you. This means that all text generated by AI must appear in quotation marks, and you must cite it just as you would cite any other source.

If you use AI writing tools to help you write your paper, or to help you brainstorm or generate ideas for your assignments, or to help you revise your own writing, you must acknowledge this explicitly in a statement at the end of your paper. Here are some examples of what this statement might look like: “I incorporated sentences written by chatGPT into the following paragraphs of my essay…”, or “I used chatGPT to brainstorm ideas for this paper…(then go into more detail about what ideas it helped you brainstorm),” or “I used chatGPT to correct my grammar and punctuation in paragraphs 2, 3, and 5 of this paper,” or “I used chatGPT to format my Works Cited page,” etc. Please be specific in this statement about which tool(s) and model(s) you used (i.e., the specific version of chatGPT, AI tools integrated into Google docs or another kind of software, etc.). Finally, include 2-3 sentences concretely describing what you see as the benefits of this tool for your writing process. If you did not use AI writing tools to help you write your paper at any stage, you should append the following statement to the end of your paper: “I did not use AI writing tools to assist with any part of my writing process.”

That being said, I don’t recommend you use AI writing tools to help you write your papers for this course. The goal of writing is to communicate your thinking about the course material; it’s not simply to write a paper for the sake of writing a paper. I am interested in what YOU have to say – not in what chatGPT or other large language models can generate about a given topic. Your ideas, analyses, and interpretations are much more interesting than anything a language model can produce, and your grade will depend much more on the quality of your analysis and the complexity and clarity of your ideas than it will on the “polish” of your writing.

Accommodations and Accessibility

It is important to me that you can access this course and its materials and complete its assignments. If you anticipate or experience barriers to actively participating in or completing your work in this class, please let me know so that we can discuss options. Some resources that might be useful include: