University of Houston Downtown 
Dr. Merrilee Cunningham, PhD. 
cunninghamm@uhd.edu. 

Tuesday-Thursday 4:00 - 5:15
Prerequisite: Successful completion of  English 1302
Class Meeting Time and Place:  Tuesday – Thursday  1:00 – 2:15; B310
CRN: 10155
Course Description:  “A study of literature of the world from its beginnings through the 17th. Century.”
713- 221-8107; if no answer, 713-221-8033 for messages
1039S; cunninghamm@uhd.edu

Office Hours: Thursday:  2:00-5:00 pm. And before or after  class;  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 12:30 - 2:30 and just knock on the door.(no appointment necessary); If you cannot find me, go to room 1045-S and they will be able to find me

Home page: http://www.uhd.edu/~cunninghamm/index.htm

1. Develop further critical reading and analytic skills by reading dramatic and non-dramatic poetry from Bronze age Greece to the English Renaissance.
2. Trace the development of important modes such as tragedy, comedy, epic, styles, and innovations.
3. Increase our understanding and familiarity with some of the greatest works ever written.
4. Learn to read and analyze individual literary texts within a cultural, historical, and political context.
5. Improve writing and analytical skills, particularly the skill of writing literary analyses in essay form, using the conventions of the university academic community.
6. Demonstrate how to write cogent, extended library interpretations incorporating critical sources
   Acquired through library research and documented correctly and adequately using the MLA style of documentation.

Reasonable Accommodation:  UH-Downtown adheres to all applicable federal, state and local laws, regulations and guidelines with respect to providing reasonable accommodations for student with disabilities.  Students with disabilities should register with Disabled Student Services and contact their instructor in a timely manner to arrange for appropriate accommodation. Disabled Student Services is in –S409; Duraese Hall is the co-coordinator and her office extension is 713-221-8430 as well as 713-226-5227.
                              
Acceptance of Late Work:  All assignments in this class must be submitted on time, even if you are absent.  Late assignments are taken at the discretion of the instructor and carry a minimum penalty of 10% of the grade to be deducted for each and every late assignment. The instructor considers the student who turns in late work to be extremely fortunate that, even with this penalty, that work is accepted. 

Individual needs: I will make every effort to maximize my accessibility to you relating to assignments.  I will be available before and after class and during office hours, which will be posted on my office door.  If you have problems understanding the assignments please seek to talk to me about those assignments.  Talk to me often. Get involved in the course and the course material.

University Policies and Procedures:  All students are subject of university-wide policies set forth in the catalog and the student handbook, including academic honesty, Policy 03.A.19.

Tardiness and Attendance:  Attendance is necessary to successfully complete this course. If you do not attend regularly, you will fail.   However, there may be mitigating circumstances surrounding tardiness. Please come and tell me, after class, why you were tardy.

Philosophy of the Course: In this class we will approach world literature with several questions in mind.
What is the relationship of classical epic and drama to the cultural and economic environments in which they were produced? What is the work as an aesthetic artifact?  What is the relationship of the work to the writer and his or her life?  How do these great pieces of literature become acknowledged as great?

Attendance and Participation:   Both epic and drama are social, collaborative efforts.  The study of this genre requires the same of the student.  Your absence and tardiness will adversely affect the people with whom you are working (and your own grade). Group activity will be a regular part of your class work.  I take a very dim view of student who do not participate to their best ability in this class and absent or silent people are not fully participating.  If you must choose between being late and not coming at all, of course, come to my class late and I will attempt to prevent your being embarrassed.  I will assume that you have had to fight monsters and dragons to get to my class, because I know that you have had to do that.

1. Appropriateness of response to the topic. (If the essay does not address the topic, the grade is 0).
   
   
2. Appropriateness and strength of proofs.
   
   
3. Originality of essay.
   
   
4. Grammatical Correctness
   
   
5. Clarity and rhetorical level of writing style
   
   
6. Detailed textual evidence used in essay.
   
   
7. Conception sophistication of essay.
   
   
8. Adherence to the conventions of academic writing, including thesis, organization, proofs, structure.
   
   
9. Use of correct documentation for secondary sources.

Grades:

900 - 100 - A = Excellent college-level work
800 - 899 - B = Good college-level work
700 - 799 - C = Adequate college-level work
650 - 699 - D = Poor college-level work
0 - 649 - F = Failing college-level work
No work submitted - 0 = F

Participation, including any quizzes - 200 points
During several classes, I will give a quiz over the day's reading assignment. To be eligible to take a quiz, you must be in class at the time of the quiz, which is usually, but not always, the beginning of class. Students who arrive after or leave before I administer a quiz will not be allowed to take the quiz. There will be no opportunities to make up missed quizzes. Quizzes are the instructor's deliberate attempt to reward those who read the assignment before class and then attend the entire class listening to the pearls of wisdom that the instructor and one's colleagues have to offer. Quizzes are a wonderful way for a struggling student of ancient literature to level the playing field a little, to help his or her cause, and to use determination and perseverance in the pursuit of academic victories.

Midterm 200 points

The midterm examination will consist of short answer and short essay questions. Before the exam I will hand you a review sheet and study questions. Easy responses should be organized clearly with thesis, clear support for the answer in a variety of relevant specific references to the reading, and demonstrations of your skills in critical reading and thinking.

Annotated Bibliography 100 points

The annotated bibliography is due 14 days before the research paper and gives an account of your work on that paper in terms of your sources. I will hand out a template, which will self-correct form according to the MLA style as well as an example of an annotated bibliography.

The Long Paper 200 points

An extended study, due towards the end of the semester, the ticket to entrance into the final examination, but due 10 days before the exam, this is a serious piece of scholarship for the course. You will receive a detailed handout on how to do the paper and some of the sources where you might begin can be found on the website area for the course.

Final Examination 200 points

The final examination will be in the same format as the midterm examination, but will include the material since the midterm in the identification section and refer to all material covered in the essays. A study guide will be provided, but it will not cover the identification section. It is the student's responsibility to develop a plan for the identification section.

Plagiarism:

"Mine honor is my life; both grow in one:
Take honor from me, and my life is done."
King Richard II

You will fail the course if you plagiarize. Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of ideas (whether paraphrased, summarized or quoted) by a writer who seeks to pass off those ideas as his or her original thought. If you fail to document or attribute a source of the idea, even if you restate another writer's
ideas, you have plagiarized. A serious university offense, plagiarism may be punished by failure or expulsion. Students who plagiarize on the research paper will receive an F on the paper.

To avoid plagiarism, you must document your papers using the MLA citation format. We will not cover this format in class, since it was covered in English 1302, but if you do not know how to document your paper, I would be happy to teach you by taking you personally through the system. The library has a handout on MLA citations format and directions on citations are easily found on the web. If you do not know how to use CD-ROM databases in the library or in the computer center I would be happy to help you with those also. I will provide you with a template that you can download that self-corrects your bibliography to MLA Bibliographical style.

You may, if you wish, earn up to 35 points of extra credit during the term.  If done well, the following are worth 10 points each.

The Museum Paper 10 points- I will give you the opportunity of joining your interested colleagues in one or two of two trips.  The first trip will be to the Menil Museums and I will ask that you write a two-page paper on the artifacts that you see there as they are related to the material in the course.  The second trip, equally enjoyable and informative, no doubt, will be to the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston, where we will look at the Greek Roman, and Egyptian collections.  You may do the second trip, but you will only be allowed an extra 5 points.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey or The Name of the Rose:  10 points Copies of both of these movies will be placed on reserve for you so that you might write a two-page analysis of their relationships to Humanism and the Great Age of Exploration. 

We will be touring both the Menil Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. I ask you to write a two-page paper on the tour as it relates to what we have read and the cultures that we have studied.

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls; You may, for the fee of a discounted group ticket, join the Drama Class on their trip to see the 20th. Century play Top Girls, about all the top women in history and what happened in their lives as they tried to live them through hardship, misogenism, and prejudice. Time and place to be announced.

.  1st. Class- Introduction to the course: Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian overview; "Messing with Macadamia";  The Library of King Assurbanipal and  Gilgamesh

2nd. Class- The Odyssey(only from books 1,2,4,5,9,10,11,15,17,21,22)

1st.  Class- Oedipus the King

Thursday, September 11th

2nd. Class- Oedipus the King

Sunday,  September  14th

The Menil Museum trip(see map)  1:00 in the lobby on the round leather couch.

Thursday,  September 18th

6:00 p.m.  The Museum of Fine Arts trip( You actually don’t have to go on Thursdays or free days because by now you have a membership to the MFA, but your baby sister or brother, or, since it is Valentine’s Day, your significant other  might want to come with you, so that is why we are going on Thursday night.) You are not required to go on either of these trips, although you are welcome to both or either.  Dr. Cunningham will be in the basement cafeteria eating a salad if you want to get there early, or you can just meet in the new building in front of the entrance on Main St.

1st. class- Aristophanes' Lysistrata

2nd. class . - Overview of Plato and Aristotle;  Catullus

1st. class  . Virgil's Aeneid ( Only Books 4,6,12) and Ovid's Metamorphosis and Amores (Only Book 1).

2nd. Class . ,  Marcus Aurelius(as seen in The Gladiator - Is this the man you know from class? Short screening of Gladiator)

Friday, October 3rd

3rd. meeting Friday afternoon review session for midterm - at the will of the class

Beowulf

2nd meeting.   Marie de France's Lanval; Introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy - The Inferno.

2nd meeting - Read The Canterbury Tales The Wife of Bath’s Tale  

2nd. Meeting - Petrarch - all

1st. meeting -  Boccaccio's Decameron   Introduction only

2nd. Meeting -  Michel  de Montaigne,  : Museum Paper Due    Shakespeare's Play and Sonnet.

1st. meeting - Erasmus' In Praise of Folly; –  Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book IV

2nd. Meeting – Don Quixote de la Mancha by Cervantes:   Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly

1st. meeting  -  and Balthassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier
Martin Luther, The  Ninety-Five Theses

Thursday, December 4th

December 6th

Last day of class

Reading Days

Final Exams