Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

1. Deconstruct and interpret literary works in an effort to express multiple meanings.
2. Use learned oral techniques in order to present ideas and arguments to any given audience.
3. Engage in community discourse with an awareness of marginalized thoughts, voices, and ideas.

• Students will complete three written assignments to demonstrate their understanding of various selections of  literature; these analyses should  demonstrate an understanding of the authors intent, as well as the student's individual interpretations.
• Students will perform four readings within the class.

Themes, Concepts, and Issues:

• Context
• Theme
• Conflict
• Symbolism
• Author's intent
• Situational aspects:
  • narrator, speaker(s), listener(s), action, secondary
      characters, setting (time and space)
• Sensory imagery
  • (visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, and/or gustatory)

Figurative language (metaphor, personification, apostrophe, allusion, verbal irony, hyperbole, simile)

• Sound devices (alliteration, cacophony, euphony, rhyme, meter, onomatopoeia, assonance, consonance)
• Physical delivery (eye contact, facial expressions, posture, gestures
• Vocal delivery (pitch/tone, volume, rate/rhythm, pauses)

Competencies and Skills:

• Ability to identify linguistic devices within literature.
• Ability to identify the intent of the authors of literature.
• Ability to choose performance techniques to illustrate one's  interpretation of the feelings and emotion of literature.

A textbook is required. Suggested texts. Alternative texts need Dept. or SAC chair approval.

Roles in Interpretation, Yordon.  Publisher:  McGraw-Hill

Oral Interpretation, Gura and Lee, Publisher: Allyn & Bacon.