Professor: Sunny Xiang Meeting time: 9-10:15
Email: sunny.xiang@yale.edu Meeting location: HLH17 113
Office: LC 421 Office Hours: Tuesday 1-3 (or by appt.)
English 127: Readings in American Literature (Section 1)
English 127 leads students through a close study of select works within the American literary
tradition. This course offers an introduction to key contexts, stakes, styles, writers, and politics
across a range of historical periods and literary genres but it is not designed to be a survey.
Rather, we will opt for sustained and careful readings of single works. We will take the time to
mull over the dense and the eccentric a process that not only involves completing the course
readings in a timely manner but also requires actively testing out your ideas in class discussion
and exercising your critical acumen in frequent writing assignments. Though we will devote
particularly close attention language, style, and other components in the text, we will also
enrich our engagement of course materials and become more critical, self-aware writers by
making use of archival and secondary sources.
The course will proceed in a seminar style. It includes several sections and is taught by
instructors who have agreed upon a common core of texts.
English 127, Section 1: Course Policies
Essays: English 127 carries a WR designation from Yale College. For this course, you will write
2 short papers (4-5 pages) and a longer, final paper (7-8 pages). All papers will require you to
craft a thesis and to support its claims with evidence and analysis. Your first paper will be an
exercise in close reading a primary text. For your second paper, you will supplement your
reading of a primary text with research in historical archives at Yale and online. Your third and
longest paper will launch your argument about primary text in relation to a secondary critical
source (an essay or book by a critic); this final paper may be a revised and expanded version of
one of the short ones. Essay grades depend on the strength of the papers argument, its selection
and analysis of evidence, and the clarity of its writing. Take due dates seriously. Each day that
your paper is late will result in a 10% grade deduction.
Participation: You are expected to read all assigned texts with care and to attend all class
meetings and scheduled events. You cannot, however, earn full participation credit by merely
being a warm body in class. Active participation requires you to make meaningful contributions
to the conversation, showing respect and sensitivity toward your peers and boldness and
creativity toward the text. Your participation also includes brief presentations and other in-class
exercises. Unexcused absences and late submission of assignments will affect your grade.
Reading Responses: You will write a brief (~150-200 words) response to each weeks reading
and upload it to the ClassesV2 server. Reading responses offer you an informal forum to express
your observations, opinions, and questions about the assigned text. We will discuss how aspects
of your response might be developed into the kind of proposition that we call a thesis or an
argument. Responses, therefore, may serve as the spark or the basis for your critical essays.
Grading : final paper 30%, short papers 30% (2 x 15%), responses 20%, participation 20%
Office Hours: I will hold office hours on Tuesdays 1-3pm in LC 421. If you cannot meet during
my regular office hours, we can schedule an alternative meeting time. I will circulate a sign-up
sheet for required writing conferences.
Email: Please reserve email for issues such as meeting times, absences, and late assignments. I
will not discuss paper questions or other complex problems over email; these inquiries should be
reserved for office hours.
Events outside the classroom: Our program for the semester includes a master class with Teju
Cole, scheduled for Wednesday, Sept 30, at 12pm. Attendance of this event is required. Note
also that two of our class meetings will be held in the Beinecke Rare Book Library.
Technology: Please do not check your email or use the internet during class meetings, and be
sure that your cell phone is silent and invisible. When readings are distributed as PDFs through
ClassesV2, please print them out, mark them up, and bring paper copies to class for discussion.
Yale Colleges Plagiarism Policy
Plagiarism is the use of someone else's work, words, or ideas as if they were your own. Thus
most forms of cheating on examinations are plagiarism; but we usually apply the word to papers
rather than to examinations.
If you use a source for a paper, you must acknowledge it. Initially, many students fear that
acknowledging sources obscures their own original contribution to a paper. But the very idea of
writing in a university is to trace your participation in a conversation of scholars. Showing how
your ideas derive from and comment on the ideas of others is one of the high achievements of
mature academic writing. It would be a mistake to downplay this achievement in an attempt to
suggest greater originality. What we really want to see is an intellectual interdependence between
student writers and their sources.
What counts as a source varies greatly depending on the assignment, but the list certainly
includes readings, lectures, websites, conversations, interviews, and other students' papers. Every
academic discipline has its own conventions for acknowledging sources. Your instructor should
make clear which conventions you must use. But even if you're confused about the specific
punctuation and formatting, you must make clear in your written work where you have borrowed
from otherswhether data, opinions, questions, ideas, or specific language. This obligation
holds whether the sources are published or unpublished.
Submission of an entire paper prepared by someone else is an especially egregious form of
plagiarism, and is grounds for the imposition of a particularly serious penalty, even for expulsion
from the University.
English 127, section 1: Readings and Assignments
Required texts (editions available at the Yale Barnes and Noble)
Teju Cole, Open City
Walt Whitman, The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton Critical)
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown)
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (City Lights)
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Vintage)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Riverhead)
Please be sure that you have the assigned edition of each text. Other readings will be made
available through ClassesV2. Please print them out, mark them up, and bring paper copies to
class for discussion.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments
Week 1
W Sept. 2: Introduction; Excerpts from Whitman, Ginsberg, Obama
F Sept. 4: Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), Song of Myself sections 1-17
Week 2
M Sept. 7: LABOR DAY, NO CLASS
W Sept. 9: Whitman, Song of Myself (finish), Letter to Emerson; Emerson, American
Scholar
Week 3
M Sept. 14: Whitman, Sleepers (p. 84-93), Drum-Taps (p. 237-257), When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloomd (p. 257-266)
W Sept. 16: Thoreau, Ktaadn
Week 4
M Sept. 21: Apess, Eulogy for King Philip; Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens
W Sept. 23: Cole, Open City, through ch. 7, p.94
Week 5
M Sept. 28: Cole, Open City, finish
W Sept. 30: Melville, Moby-Dick, through ch. 20
*Master Class with Teju Cole, 12-1:30, location TBA
Week 6
M Oct. 5: Melville, Moby-Dick, through ch. 36
W Oct. 7: Melville, Moby-Dick, through ch. 59
Week 7
M Oct. 12: Melville, Moby-Dick, through ch. 87
*Class meets in Beinecke Library
W Oct. 14: Melville, Moby-Dick, through ch. 119; Bezanson, Moby-Dick: Work of Art
Week 8
M Oct. 19: Melville, Moby-Dick, finish
* First essay due in class
Oct. 20-26: OCTOBER RECESS
Week 9
W Oct. 28: Dickinson, selections
Week 10
M Nov. 2: Nabokov, Pale Fire: Foreword and Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos; Wimsatt
and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy
W Nov. 4: Nabokov, Pale Fire: Commentary to p. 167
Week 11
M Nov. 9: Nabokov, Pale Fire, finish
W Nov. 11: Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
* Class meets in Beinecke Library
Week 12
M Nov. 16: Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; Kristeva, Womens Time
W Nov. 18: Warton, Roman Fever, Xingu, Autres Temps; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The
Yellow Wallpaper
* Second essay due in class
Nov. 20-29: NOVEMBER RECESS
Week 13
M Nov. 30: Baldwin, Notes, Everyones Protest Novel; Johnson, The Dilemma of the
Negro Author
W Dec. 2: DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, Of the Training of Black Men, The Sorrow
Songs; Hughes, selections; Baraka, selections
Week 14
Dec. 7: Rankine, Citizen; Morrison, Black Matters
Dec. 9: Le, Love and Honor; Chow, Keeping Them in Their Place
* M Dec 14: Final essay due by noon in the English Department drop-box
