Mercy College, LLC Division
Dr. Frances M. Biscoglio
 
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ENGL 200
Poetics: Introduction to Literary Texts

Description:
This course is an intensive formal analysis of poetic texts. It emphasizes the way words, images, metaphors, and symbols create the structures basic to the verbal imagination.

Objectives:

1. To enable students to perform an intensive formal study of a poetic text.
2. To enable students to learn the terminology of formal analysis.
3. To enable students to recognize, understand, and analyze poetic elements such as imagery, figures of speech, metrical and stanzaic patterns, tone, voice, and other features of prosody.
4. To enable students to speak and write well about poetics.

Enabling Activities:
Reading, discussion/analysis, recitation, quizzes, in-class and out-of-class writing.

Competency Goals:

Writing:
To have students learn how to prepare a coherent, organized analysis of a poem that demonstrates command of the conventions of grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and sentence style.

Critical Thinking:
To have students learn how to examine and, using the data of the text as supporting evidence, to weigh the relative merits of alternative interpretations of a poetic text.

Oral Communication:
To have students present ideas and positions persuasively in class discussion of poems.

Quantitative Reasoning:
To have students understand the quantitative principles of metrical scansion and apply them to the analysis of a poem. To have students understand various structural components of a poem, such as stanzas and lines, and their contribution to the overall effect of the poem.

Information Literacy:
To facilitate students' use of technological research skills, as well as to enable them to use correct MLA format for writing projects.

Texts

  1. The Norton Introduction to Poetry. J Paul Hunter. 7th edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1999.
  2. Glossary of Literary Terms. M. H. Abrams. Latest edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
  3. A good compact dictionary.

Assignments:
Written assignments will be due based on topics that will be given in class. There will be a mid-term and a final exam. Class assignments and/or unannounced quizzes may be given at the discretion of the instructor. Individual students will prepare an oral analysis of a selected poem each week.

Attendance and Grading:
Since this is a course that meets once a week, a maximum of two absences is permitted. The mid-term and final will account for 50% of the final grade. Two written papers represent 40%. Quizzes, participation, and attendance will account for the remaining 10%.

NOTE: ASSIGNMENTS ARE EXPECTED ON DATES DUE. LATENESS INCURS LOWERING OF FINAL GRADE.

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