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CCOG for ENG 104 Spring 2024

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Course Number:
ENG 104
Course Title:
Introduction to Literature (Fiction)
Credit Hours:
4
Lecture Hours:
40
Lecture/Lab Hours:
0
Lab Hours:
0

Course Description

Examines significant works of fiction, short stories and novels, from diverse cultures and periods in history. Explores fiction as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms. Considers fiction as an expression of human experience. Prerequisites: (RD 115 and WR 115) or IRW 115 or equivalent placement. Audit available.

Intended Outcomes for the course

Upon completion of the course students should able to:

  1. Explain the variety of stylistic choices that authors of fiction make within given forms and how form influences meaning.
  2. Articulate ways in which the text contributes to self-understanding.
  3. Analyze a text to identify diverse cultures, experiences and points of view, recognizing the text as a product of a particular culture and historical moment.
  4. Explain the text within the context of a literary tradition or convention.
  5. Evaluate various interpretations of a text and their validity through reading, writing, and discussion, and through individual and group responses, and analyze the support/evidence for a particular interpretation.
  6. Conduct research to find materials appropriate to use for literary analysis, using MLA conventions to document primary and secondary sources in written responses to a literary text.

Integrative Learning

Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.

General education philosophy statement

English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding each other and navigating our differences. In literature classes, students explore significant texts from diverse cultures and periods in history. Students look closely at texts from a range of genres, articulating the way elements of writing, content, form, and style are interrelated, and considering how values and interpretations have changed over time and through different theoretical lenses. Students engage texts through critical analysis and creative response, learning to use evidence to support their interpretations and to navigate critical conversations. Students explore literature both as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms, and as an expression of human experience. Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.

Outcome Assessment Strategies


Assessment tools may include informal responses to study questions; evaluation of small- and full-group discussion; in-class and out-of-class writing; formal essays, as well as informal responses to study questions and other types of informal writing; presentations by individuals and groups; short and long essay exams; close reading exercises using support/ evidence; writing exercises which include evaluation of various interpretations of a text and their relative validity. Both instructor and peer evaluation may be incorporated in the assessment process.

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

Themes, Concepts, and Issues:

  • setting
  • plot
  • point of view
  • tone/voice
  • narration: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, omniscient, etc.       
  • unreliable narrator gender
  • narrative styles
  • rhetorical strategies      
  • diction
  • character
  • climax 
  • denouement
  • symbol                         
  • imagery                                               
  • intertextuality 
  • flashback
  • ambiguity
  • irony
  • allusion
  • form/structure
  • dialogue                       
  • theme
  • structuralist theory                       
  • feminist theory
  • psychoanalytic theory
  • Marxist theory
  • postmodern theory
  • reader response theory
  • new historicism
  • biographical criticism
  • race
  • evidence
  • documentation
  • thesis
  • regional or national literatures
  • censorship
  • stereotyping
  • class
  • contextualizing
  • sources/influence
  • explication of the text
  • genres of fiction
     

Competencies and Skills

  • analysis
  • synthesis
  • understanding prose fiction through contexts such as society, politics, 
  • artistic conventions, multiple interpretations of an author, etc.
  • writing about fiction
  • close readings
  • critical reading employing reviews and critical essays
  • speaking and listening reflectively
  • small-group collaboration