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Regular version of the site
Bachelor 2020/2021

English literature

Category 'Best Course for Broadening Horizons and Diversity of Knowledge and Skills'
Category 'Best Course for New Knowledge and Skills'
Type: Elective course (Philology)
Area of studies: Philology
When: 3 year, 1, 2 module
Mode of studies: offline
Open to: students of one campus
Instructors: Ivan Delazari
Language: English
ECTS credits: 4
Contact hours: 42

Course Syllabus

Abstract

English Literature: A History of Stories consolidates the students’ awareness of concepts and trends in Western literary history and supplements their notional bank of literary genres through the close reading of, reflecting upon, and discussing Anglophone short stories from the last two centuries. Course activities comprise lectures and group tutorials, as well as homework preparation and online contribution. At lectures, students learn about critical, cultural, and historical trends around a particular short story in English. At seminars, they take it in turns to present several other texts from the same era, selecting one from the course short story bank. Reading and discussing all stories presented by their classmates and the lecturer, students accumulate a well-grounded understanding of the dynamic changes in narrative themes and devices from late romanticism to late postmodernism.
Learning Objectives

Learning Objectives

  • The course is aimed at equipping students with a professional grasp of rhetorical and narratological parameters of the short story genre.
  • Students observe the changing trends in subject matter selection by English and North-American prose writers from the 19th to the 21st century.
Expected Learning Outcomes

Expected Learning Outcomes

  • Understands and analyzes short-prose fictional narratives in English.
  • Searches for, finds, selects, and processes primary and secondary texts from various sources for classroom use and research
  • Conducts efficient and ethically acceptable communication of research procedures and results to academic audiences.
  • Engages in fluent written and oral professional interaction in English.
  • Applies the accumulated knowledge of the English short story in individual research and college classroom contexts.
  • Participates in guided discussions of fiction, criticism, and theory relevantly and valuably.
  • Organizes and coordinates classwork activities around a responsibly selected text of the student’s own choice.
  • Learns to present, explain and popularize literary works and relevant interpretations thereof to contemporary audiences.
Course Contents

Course Contents

  • 19th-Century Stories
    The Short Story on the Timeline: Literariness in the 19th Century. What Is So Romantic about Romantic Stories? Romanticism and Realism: Clash or No Clash? Stories of Victorian Mores. On Decadent Storytelling. Women Writers at the Turn of the Century. Darkness Falls: The Shifting Foci of Narrative. From Victorian to Edwardian Prose.
  • 20th-Century Narratives
    Modern Fiction in Use. A Schooling in Ambiguity. Constructing a World. Writing’s Zero Degrees: Style and Simplicity. Identity Crises. Diversity and Seriousness. Entering the Postmodern: More Traditionalists and Innovators. On Narrative Listening. Late Twentieth-Century Women Writers.
  • 21st-Century Texts
    On Retrospective Metafiction. Postcolonial and Global. Stories of Our Time.
Assessment Elements

Assessment Elements

  • non-blocking In-Class Participation
    Students are expected to attend all lectures and seminars and contribute to discussions. They need to be prepared for class by having read the assigned text(s). They contribute to seminar discussions by answering and asking questions relevant to the corresponding class section.
  • non-blocking Online Contribution
    Students post messages to the topics of the LMS online forum for initiated and/or follow-up discussions, either before or after classes.
  • non-blocking Tests
    In one or several lectures or seminars, students are given a test of 10 questions based on a short story/several short stories analyzed at lectures by the course instructor. The test is conducted at no advance notice. The exact number of tests and the questions they contain are kept secret. There can be no more than 10 tests conducted during the course. The test(s) cannot be retaken; if a student has missed a test, the result is marked 0 (zero). The mark for this course requirement is the mean of the marks for all the tests offered throughout the course duration.
  • non-blocking Presentation: Class Discussion Coordination Session
    At the beginning of the course, students sign up for 10 seminar sessions in the role of Class Discussion Moderators, 1-4 students per class, depending on the available number of time slots in one seminar. They select one short story from the course Short Story Pool that is recommended for discussion in the corresponding week, inform other students and the course instructor of their choice, and prepare to lead a 20-min discussion of the text at the class from the teacher’s perspective, finding and providing classmates with reading texts in advance. They conduct the discussion leaning on and/or presenting extra materials of their choice and finding, aiming at everybody’s understanding of the story and its place in literary history.
  • non-blocking Written Exam
    The exam is a test with 3-10 questions. It lasts for 3 hours, conducted on a proctored electronic platform. Students are allowed to use their lecture notes and primary texts of the short stories. Neither written nor oral communication with classmates or any other persones is allowed: the student who gets caught asking questions and sharing materials is considered as a cheat violating academic integrity, while the exam is graded zero.
Interim Assessment

Interim Assessment

  • Interim assessment (2 module)
    0.25 * In-Class Participation + 0.1 * Online Contribution + 0.25 * Presentation: Class Discussion Coordination Session + 0.1 * Tests + 0.3 * Written Exam
Bibliography

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

  • Goyet, F. (2015). The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925. France, Europe: Open Book Publishers. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.A577FA0B
  • Lee, M. A., Rochette-Crawley, S., Kurtzleben, J., Fallon, E., & Feddersen, R. C. (2013). A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=658441
  • March-Russell, P. (2009). The Short Story : An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=272076

Recommended Additional Bibliography

  • May, C. E. (2002). The Short Story : The Reality of Artifice (Vol. First Routledge pbk. edition). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=651248
  • Nagel, J. (2015). The American Short Story Handbook. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=931010