ENGL 2100 G — Lit & Humanities — Syllabus

Everything you need to know for this class is in this syllabus. You might find this syllabus intimidating because of its length, but I made it a one-stop-shop for you in this course. Along with the usual material about course policies and procedures, academic integrity, and accessibility accommodations, it also contains the course schedule, explanations for all your assignments, the prompts for the papers you'll be writing, and the rubrics we'll be using.

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COURSE INFORMATION

ENGL 2100 G — Literature and Humanities: Graphic Novels
CRN: 83017
TR 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
Arts Building 2071

Course Description

From the University Catalog: Examination of literature as an expression of the humanities through study of several complete works from at least two historical periods, two genres, and two cultures/countries. Includes an essay or projects involving documentation.

Course Dates

• August 14: Classes Begin. Attendance Verification must be completed on the first class meeting day
• August 15: Our first class meeting
• August 14-17: Drop/Add period. Ends at 11:59 P.M. on August 17
• September 4: Labor Day Holiday; no classes
• October 10: Last day to withdraw without academic penalty
• November 20-25: Thanksgiving Holidays for students
• December 4: Last Day of Classes
• December 5-11: Final Exams (University schedule not yet set)

Learning Outcomes / Career Readiness Competencies

Learning Outcomes are the knowledge or skills you should gain (and be able to demonstrate) by the end of a particular course.

Career Readiness Competencies are core competencies developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). They address eight areas where employers agree that your abilities and skills signify your readiness to begin and/or extend your career. Below are the skills you'll have the opportunity to practice in this course.

General Education Area C Learning Outcomes:

Upon successfully completing this course, you should be able to:

• Analyze works of literature in their historical and cultural contexts, critically examining the values they express.
• Demonstrate familiarity with literary language, periods, and genres.

Career Readiness Competencies contained within this course:

Self-Development Display curiosity; seek out opportunities to learn. Assume duties or positions that will help one progress professionally. Seek and embrace development opportunities. Voluntarily participate in further education, training, or other events to support one’s career.	Communication Understand the importance of and demonstrate verbal, written, and non-verbal/body language, abilities. Employ active listening, persuasion, and influencing skills. Communicate in a clear and organized manner so that others can effectively understand. Frame communication with respect to diversity of learning styles, varied individual communication abilities, and cultural differences.
Critical Thinking Make decisions and solve problems using sound, inclusive reasoning and judgment. Gather and analyze information from a diverse set of sources and individuals to fully understand a problem. Proactively anticipate needs and prioritize action steps. Accurately summarize and interpret data with an awareness of personal biases that may impact outcomes. Effectively communicate actions and rationale, recognizing the diverse perspectives and lived experiences of stakeholders.	Equity and Inclusion Solicit and use feedback from multiple cultural perspectives to make inclusive and equity-minded decisions. Seek global cross-cultural interactions and experiences that enhance one’s understanding of people from different demographic groups and that leads to personal growth. Keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking.
Leadership Seek out and leverage diverse resources and feedback from others to inform direction. Use innovative thinking to go beyond traditional methods. Plan, initiate, manage, complete, and evaluate projects.	Professionalism Act equitably with integrity and accountability to self, others, and the organization. Be present and prepared. Demonstrate dependability (e.g., report consistently for work or meetings). Prioritize and complete tasks to accomplish organizational goals. Consistently meet or exceed goals and expectations. Have an attention to detail, resulting in few if any errors in their work. Show a high level of dedication toward doing a good job
Teamwork Listen carefully to others, taking time to understand and ask appropriate questions without interrupting. Effectively manage conflict, interact with and respect diverse personalities, and meet ambiguity with resilience. Be accountable for individual and team responsibilities and deliverables. Employ personal strengths, knowledge, and talents to complement those of others. Exercise the ability to compromise and be agile.	Technology Navigate change and be open to learning new technologies. Use technology to improve efficiency and productivity of their work. Identify appropriate technology for completing specific tasks. Manage technology to integrate information to support relevant, effective, and timely decision-making. Quickly adapt to new or unfamiliar technologies. Manipulate information, construct ideas, and use technology to achieve strategic goals.

These career readiness skills will serve you well no matter what your next steps after graduation might be. Find out more about them on this page of the NACE site.

Required Material

You'll need to purchase these required books for this class:

The Handmaid's Tale: The Graphic Novel Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault Knopf Doubleday, 2019 ISBN: 9780385539241	Daytripper Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá Penguin Random House, 2011 ISBN: 9781401229696	Maus 1: A Survivor's Tale — My Father Bleeds History Art Spiegelman Pantheon, 2019 ISBN: 9780394747231	Watchmen Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 2019 edition, DC Comics, 2019 ISBN: 9781779501127

I also strongly recommend that you purchase this book:

Understanding Comics Scott McCloud Harper Publishing, 1994 ISBN: 9780060976255

I'll also be providing some resources for you — most notably The Student’s Comics and Graphic Novels Cheat Sheet — which you'll need for the first couple of weeks of class, and The English Major's MLA 9 Formatting Cheat Sheet, which you'll need in order to complete your papers.

Both of these are available on the course site in Folio.

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Course Structure

General

This course will introduce you to the study of the hybrid genre of graphic novels. So we'll be covering matters like:

• visual literacy;
• visual rhetoric;
• the interplay of text and image;
• discipline- and genre-specific terminology; and
• frames and contexts for understanding images and texts.

Apparatus and Application

The course is organized so that we will spend the first couple of weeks getting our feet under us by familiarizing ourselves with the methodology used to study comics and graphic novels. You're already familiar with most of the methods we use to analyze texts; the process for graphic novels is a bit more complicated. We'll be borrowing ideas, processes, and language from film studies, art history, graphic design, psychology, and media studies to work with this genre. This is the apparatus.

After we have thus girded our loins, we'll address the texts at hand. You'll demonstrate your analytic skill and ability to communicate effectively through two exams and two short papers. This is the application of the apparatus.

Readings

The first two weeks of class will be a quick charge through The Student’s Cheat Sheet for Reading Comics and Graphic Novels. It will give us a framework for understanding the texts that follow. You'll have a chance to become familiar with visual rhetoric and practice the techniques necessary for thinking and writing about graphic novels.

Then we'll address, in order, The Handmaid's Tale, Watchmen, Daytripper, and Maus I. We'll have a week-long interlude in the middle of the semester while we watch the film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Papers

You'll write two short papers for this class. You'll submit your papers via a dropbox in Folio, where they'll go through TurnItIn to check for academic integrity. My comments on those papers will be available to you through Folio.

Exams

You'll have two exams, one halfway through the course and one at the end of the course. These will contain some practical questions (can you use the vocabulary of visual analysis?), some questions about the works we've covered (can you remember what you've read?) and some background questions (can you place a work in its historical and social contexts?).

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COURSE EXPECTATIONS

Learning Commitment

The "Carnegie Unit" is how universities define credit hours and categorize the amount of work students do for each credit hour. Each credit requires fifteen "contact hours" which are essentially the hours you spend in class during the semester. And each contact hour requires two hours of outside work, or time devoted to the class that doesn't happen during the class meetings. This is a three-credit course, with 45 contact hours. Those 45 contact hours necessitate at least 90 hours of out-of-class work on your part. That's at least 135 hours committed for each three-credit class that you take. Over a 15-week semester, that breaks down to nine hours per week that you should spend on this class. I've designed the reading and writing requirements with that level of commitment in mind.

If you're not a self-starter, or you have problems with deadlines, or you just don't think you can commit to this level of work, you should probably look for another section of this class.

Academic Integrity

I expect that you will conduct yourself within the guidelines of the Honor System. All academic work should be completed with the high level of honesty and integrity that this University demands.

I don't know of a person at this institution who tolerates academic dishonesty. Beyond the moral implications, as professors, we find it insulting. All instances of plagiarism will be reported to the Office of Student Conduct. Any instance will result in an F in the course and possible further sanctions. Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own without giving them credit. Someone else is defined as anyone other than you: another student, a friend, a relative, a source on the Internet, articles or books. And work is defined as ideas as well as language. So taking someone else's ideas and putting them in your own words—or using someone else's words to express your ideas—is plagiarism. And, in the case of friends and family, it doesn't matter if they give you permission.

A note about group work: I encourage you to use an app like GroupMe amongst yourselves to discuss the texts we're covering, the assignments, and any other aspect of the class. If for no other reason, you need a space to complain about me, without me listening. This engagement, where you can share and improve each other's work, is, in many ways, the core of our endeavor, as we hone our own ideas about the material we're covering through discussions with others. You should also discuss your writing with your classmates, as hearing a number of ideas will help you create and polish your own. However, this does not mean that you should write your papers as a group. While discussion is obviously a group activity, writing is a solitary one, and should be treated as such. Any attempt to subvert this would be an instance of academic dishonesty.

LET ME JUST INTERRUPT MYSELF HERE TO STRESS A SIGNIFICANT POINT. You may have just passed right by that mention in the previous paragraph where I said that discussing your writing with other people is a good thing. But apart from devoting a sufficient amount of time to your writing and revising, having someone else read your work is the single most effective thing you can do to improve your writing. I'll have more about that later in this syllabus.

The University has an extensive definition of Academic Dishonesty (from the Student Conduct Code). It's what we use when we address matters of academic integrity:

So let's say I think you might have copied and pasted some AI-generated material into your first paper. I am obligated to complete an Incident Report about it, because this isn't just about your integrity, but mine as well. If it's your first report, you'll be able to request a hearing through the Office of Student Conduct. Both you and I will speak at your hearing, and I'll send a copy of this syllabus along with the documents in question to the Hearing Officer. That means that you won't be able to claim that you didn't know that what you were doing was wrong, since I'm telling you it is right here.

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COURSE SCHEDULE

While I have listed sections, chapters, or page numbers below, I think that doling out a text in bite-sized chunks is counterproductive, especially in higher education. If you consider reading such a chore that you need page counts or deadlines to prod you to finish a book, or if you need to ask me how far you should read in a book, you might need to reconsider your readiness to take on work at the post-secondary level.

Reading should be a pleasure; it is most certainly a privilege. With the texts below you should grab the opportunity to read as far as you can as soon as you can.

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INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Pellegrino

I'm Dr. Joe Pellegrino, an Associate Professor in the Department of English. I teach lots of different classes. My specialties are Irish literature and postcolonial literature, so I end up doing classes that don't fit into the standard Brit Lit/American Lit model, things like Irish lit, African lit, graphic novels, etc.

I went to school for a long time, and went to lots of different schools: Duquesne University, St. Louis University, Mannes College of Music, The New England Conservatory, and UNC-Chapel Hill, which is where I got my doctorate in English. I've also taught at a lot of schools: Duquesne, UNC, Eastern Kentucky University, University of South Carolina-Upstate, Greenville Tech, Converse College, and here at Georgia Southern. I've had some experience in online education; while at EKU I was the University Director for the (short-lived) Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University, and have taught online classes for over 20 years now.

Professionally, I edit a journal, The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I'm interested in a number of fields, but most of my publications are either on Irish studies, postcolonial lit, or teaching.

I also work on the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, the the oldest and longest-running annual meeting of its kind in the United States. Check out that web site; the design is one of my best.

I have only one item on my bucket list: to see the Northern Lights. One day I'll get there, but in the meantime I check in on the site linked here, from the Churchill Northern Studies Center in Churchill, Manitoba. I've got two daughters who are growing in wisdom, beauty, and grace. I make heirloom furniture (pretty much a middle-aged guy cliché), try to keep up with new technology, wish I could spend more time doing music, and constantly try to keep my head above water.

Contact Information

Office:
Room 3308B, Newton Building
Phone: 912.478.5953
Email: jpellegrino@georgiasouthern.edu

English Department in Statesboro:
Room 1118, Newton Building
622 COBA Drive
Statesboro, GA 30460
912.478.0141

A WORD ABOUT EMAIL

OK, maybe two words : CONTENT and FORM

CONTENT
Please don't hesitate to post to me if you have a question about any of the readings, especially if you're struggling to figure them out. But please think twice about posting questions where the answer is in this syllabus. If you do, I have two options for a reply: I can copy and paste material from the syllabus or schedule just for you, but that's redundant, since you already have access to the material. Or I can reply with something like "check the syllabus" or "check the schedule," which you should already know to do. Since neither of those are satisfactory, if you ask a question that is already answered in the syllabus or in the schedule, I won't be replying at all.

FORM
See that image there on the right? It's not just some funny advice about how to write an email to one of your instructors or teaching assistants; it's a set of guidelines that we expect you to follow. When you write anything, you change the form to suit the content. So you don't write an email to a professor like you're writing a DM to your friend. Look at the graphic, then follow the rules on it.

And as with the questions that have already been answered in this syllabus, I could embarrass you by reminding you of those rules when you don't follow them, or I could just not respond to you until you actually get it right. And just in case you can't parse what those rules are, I'll put them into a list:

• My name is not "Hey," "Yo," "'Sup," or "Dude" — use a proper greeting.
• Don't use acronyms or texting shorthand — write in full sentences. Use a grammar checker.
• Spell-check it before you send it. When you have tools available to you and you don't use them, you're not only demonstrating that you don't know how to communicate at anything beyond a middle-school level, you're also demonstrating your inability to use simple tools in order to make yourself look better.
• Check the syllabus before you make yourself look foolish (see the previous point).
• Sign your name.

So let me sum this all up:
if you don't hear back from me after you sent me an email, it's either because you can't write an email correctly for the audience you're trying to address, or you're asking a question that I've already answered in this document.

Ms. Graham

I'm Hannah Graham. I graduated from Georgia Southern in the spring of 2023 with a Bachelor's degree in English, and I'm in my first semester of graduate school. My interests in academia have been mainly focused on how and why authors and other creators "make it new" in terms of recreating and reimagining older concepts and archetypes in order to reshape audience perceptions. I'm especially interested in feminist theory and how the subversion of established archetypes makes room for new roles and representations of women in literature.

When I'm not buried beneath several drafts of papers that I'm supposed to be writing, you can find me reading books and/or comics that hurt my feelings (the Red Rising Saga and the Green Bone Saga to name a few), scribbling poetry on McDonald's napkins, and buying coffee-related paraphernalia that I can't afford.

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CLASS POLICIES

Attendance

The University Undergraduate Catalog states unequivocally: “Students are expected to attend all classes.” Attendance in this class is not optional. Attending class means that you are present and attentive for the whole class period and that you are prepared for the day’s lesson. Unless you are missing class for a University-sanctioned reason, missing class, regardless of the excuse, will be counted as an absence.

But life gets complicated. So you'll have a free pass to miss almost 15% of our classes, regardless of the reason. You can miss because it's a nice day and you don't want to be inside, or your friend is coming in from out of town, or you were just up too late last night. The reason doesn't matter. Now, let me be clear, I certainly don't encourage you to miss any classes that you're physically well enough to attend. But I'll give you two weeks of absences (that's four classes) before your absences begin to negatively affect your grade for the class. If you are absent more than four times, regardless of the excuse, your final grade will be lowered by one point for every subsequent absence.

If you have to miss more than your allotted absences, there is obviously something going on in your life that does not allow you to pursue this degree wholeheartedly, so you should consider withdrawing from the course, if not the University. Keep this in mind when using your absences—that’s ALL you will be allowed. You do not want me in the position of deciding whose excuse is valid and whose isn’t, so I don’t need any documentation for your absences. If you’re within the limit it is not necessary, and after the limit it will not matter.

By now you recognize that arriving on time for class is, at its core, a sign of respect for your classmates and your professor. Tardiness, therefore, is a statement saying that your time is more important than anyone else’s. I will strike a blow for the group by counting every instance of tardiness as 1/3 of an absence. So, if you’re doing the math, you can be tardy several times without any consequences, save the collective disdain for your actions. And yes, your tardiness works in conjunction with your absences, so a combination of the two will push you toward the negative consequences outlined above.

At the beginning of each class I'll have a series of sign-in sheets at the front of the auditorium, laid out in alpha order. When you come to class, sign in on the appropriate sheet before you go to your seat.

Writing Proficiency

If you need additional work on the surface features of your writing, I'll let you know. Basically, if I can't understand what you're trying to say in your first paper, then you'll have to work at writing more clearly. I'll ask you to schedule sessions at the Writing Center in order to be more successful on your next paper.

The reason professors make students write papers is not because we love to mark them up, or because we somehow enjoy this. I'm willing to bet that every professor you ask would say that marking and grading papers is the worst part of their job. I know it is for me. The only thing that makes it bearable is hoping that I'll be able to engage with your ideas, or see the texts we're covering through your eyes. But if I have to stop after every sentence to figure out what you're trying to say, I'm most certainly not thinking about your ideas.

So do yourself a favor: give yourself enough time to do a good job on these papers. Remember that writing clearly takes far more time than you think it does, because you have to consider your argument from a reader's perspective, not your perspective.

I realize that the grand academic dance of submitting your work, having it evaluated, then responding to that evaluation (either through improving your work in your next paper, or by coming to see me in my office) is essentially a negotiation between us. You want to demonstrate your abilities with X amount of work, an amount that you think deserves a certain grade. You submit your work without knowing how others will see it, and only become aware of their perceptions when your work is returned to you with my comments. But this puts you at a disadvantage, because, as in any negotition, the party that makes the first move does so blindly, and so gives up any hope of advantage.

So in the spirit of openness, let me make the first move, and try to level the playing field by giving you a few tips:

• This is academic writing, where clarity and concision are essential. If your work isn't clear, if every sentence doesn't hang together, you're losing the negotiation. What you have written may make sense to you, but it needs to make sense to your readers as well.

• At the post-secondary level, your writing isn't evaluated in terms of the amount of work you put into it. Just like any other skill, the amount of effort necessary to master academic writing varies from person to person. I am sure that it would take me far more effort than most of you to get back to playing football. But even if I did ten times the work you did, when we both showed up on the field we'd be evaluated on our skills, not on the time it took us to gain them.
• If you pay attention to what the prompt is asking you to write about, and keep that in mind as you think about your paper, you're making a good start.
• If you look at the rubric, especially the distinctions between the levels of performance in content and form, you should get a good idea of how successful your paper will be.
• If you're wondering if your "X amount of work" is enough, it isn't.
• And one last personal comment:
  Before we had things like TurnItIn and other automatic checkers on academic integrity, I was the guy other faculty members went to to track down cases of suspected plagiarism. When Google was just getting off the ground, I was a beta tester for them (one of 25 in the country). I've also been teaching English for over 40 years now. So if you're thinking that you've changed enough of that material that you've copied and pasted to make it look like your own work, think again. If writing and evaluating papers is a negotiation, then presenting someone else's work as your own is a gamble, and you're betting your academic career that you can get away with it. I've just told you what I bring to the table, so if you really think you can get away with it, my only advice is to do it as early as possible, so you can spare yourself the work for the rest of semester, because you'll already be gone from this class.

Timeliness

All electronically-submitted assignments will be placed in the appropriate dropbox section or discussion forum of the Learning Management System (Folio).

I DO NOT ACCEPT LATE ASSIGNMENTS. NO EXCEPTIONS, NO EXCUSES. A late assignment is any work that is not turned in during the class period in which it is due. This means that you must anticipate any problems that will occur. In other words, a computer / printer / drive / car / arm being broken at the last minute is not an excuse. To avoid last-minute catastrophes (which always occur), DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO DO YOUR WORK.

ADA-Related Accommodations

In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I will honor requests for reasonable accommodations made by individuals with disabilities or demonstrating appropriate need for learning environment adjustments. If you wish to avail yourself of any accommodations, you must disclose your disability to the Student Accessibility Resource Center (SARC) before I can implement any academic accommodations. That office will furnish you with a list of accommodations and a cover letter that you'll give to me. It's informally known as "a green sheet." Without that green sheet from the SARC, I can't offer you any accommodations.

For additional information, please call the SARC office at (912) 478-1566 on the Statesboro campus, or at (912) 344-2572 on the Armstrong and Liberty campuses.

Contingencies

If for any reason we might have a break in the continuity of instruction, I've got a couple of plans in place:

• If the institution shuts down:
  We will move completely to Zoom sessions for our classes, and exams will be administered through Folio. Exams will be available in Folio for the entire day on which they're scheduled. You can take the exam at any time during that 24-hour period. Once you open the exam, you'll have the usual amount of time to complete it (75 minutes for Exam 1, 120 minutes for Exam 2). All other course activities will continue as planned. Class discussions may be a bit more forced, but we'll muddle through.
• If you are under quarantine:
  I can't grant you any exemption to the attendance policy unless I receive a report from the GS CARES Team about your status. You can't just email me to say that you think you might have a virus and are self-isolating in order to minimize the chance of infecting others. That means that if you think you might have been exposed, or if you have tested positive, you must complete a COVID-19 Health Reporting Form, which can be found in the COVID-19 Information & Resources section of your MyGeorgiaSouthern page.
  
  If you do have a CARES report and must self-isolate, it'll be like this class did not exist for you during your period of isolation. So those absences will not count against your total absences for the class (see the Attendance policy above), and you will neither gain nor lose points for the class discussions you missed. If a paper is due during your quarantine, you'll have an extension until you return to class. If you miss either exam, we'll work that out on a case-by-case basis.

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WRITING PROMPTS

Page Analysis Project

For this project, you'll select a single page from one of the graphic novels we have read for the course, and illustrate how that page develops or contributes to a central theme — or the relationship between themes — of that work. The thesis of your paper should be specific about the theme(s) you see at work on the page. Then the body of your paper should illuminate how the page develops the theme(s), and how the page connects to the work as a whole.

This first paper will address a page from either The Handmaid's Tale or Watchmen.

Each paper should be somewhere between 500 and 750 words, not counting your Works Cited page. You should format these in accordance with the MLA 9 guidelines. If you want a shortcut for MLA 9 formatting, there's The English Major's MLA 9 Cheat Sheet available to you in Folio.

Your choice of a page to write on is crucial. Choose a page that offers plenty of material for you to interpret. Consider how the page contributes to the theme or themes you see at work locally on the page, and globally in the work as a whole. Focus on at least three elements from the section on "The Structural Frame" in The Student’s Comics and Graphic Novels Cheat Sheet:

• Composition
• Framing
  
  ◦ Shot
  ◦ POV
  ◦ Viewing angle
• Salience
• Vectors/Lines
• Foreground/background
• Gaze
• Body language
• Color and lighting
• Contrast
• Symbolism/icons

Your conclusion should address the overall design of the page: how does the artist use the above elements to advance the themes of the story?

You should incorporate the work of other scholars into these papers. That means, usually, material that has been peer-reviewed. You may consult online summaries or analyses from sites like Shmoop, SparkNotes, or Wikipedia, and you should most definitely work with The Student’s Comics and Graphic Novels Cheat Sheet, but they will not count as scholarly sources for the purposes of this project. I'm not going to mandate a crazy number of sources for you; I would think at least two might suffice, but hearing from more voices is always a good thing. Check the journals in Resources for the Study of Comics and Graphc Novels (linked here and in Folio) for a good place to start your research.

SOME WARNINGS:
I'm serious about the formatting for this paper. If your formatting is incorrect when you submit your first version, I'll return it to you and tell you to get it right and then resubmit the paper. If you can't get it right the second time, you'll lose 10 points on your score for the paper. Miss it the third time and lose another 10 points. Saying, "But I copied what I found online" is one of the feeblest excuses you can offer, especially since you have the guidelines to get it right the first time available to you in Folio.

As for the use of secondary sources, you'll have to format those properly as well. If you're quoting a source for more than four lines, you have to ask yourself why you're including so much. But if you decide that you absolutely need to quote your source for such an extensive passage, you format that quotation differently than you do a shorter quotation. You'll have to cite the work you're using properly in your text, and then include it properly as an item on your Works Cited page.

Most importantly, when in doubt, check The English Major's MLA 9 Cheat Sheet. Everything you need to know about formatting is in there.

Cultural Values Project

Cultural values are what shape society, and shape and influence the people who live within that society. They are abstract concepts promoting the idea that certain kinds of behaviors are good, right, ethical, moral, and therefore desirable. They're usually considered as existing on a spectrum, where the ends of that spectrum are two oppositional ways of being in the world. Here are some examples of some common cultural values, expressed as opposing forces:

NOTE: The list above is made up of pairs of opposites. Each pair IS NOT a cultural value. Rather, what a culture values falls somewhere along the line connecting those opposites. So, for instance, a culture could value gender equality, but if it did so, it would not also enforce rigid gender roles. Or a group of people could value rationality when they make their life decisions, but they would not at the same time privilege making life decisions based on your emotions.

In this essay, you will offer an analysis of the cultural values presented in any of the works we've covered up to this point. So you can write on The Handmaid's Tale, Watchmen, Daytripper, or Maus 1. However, I'm not looking for a discussion of a character's personal values; that's a completely different subject. Rather, you should address the overarching values that the text is putting forth, and perhaps demonstrate how the author is either reflecting the values of the times, or pushing against those values.

I'd like you to take advantage of the AI tools available to you. So the first part of this writing assignment will be your submission of the highlighted section below to the chatbot or AI text generator of your choice. The bot will generate a response that is mostly unique and mostly accurate. In short, it will give you a solid foundation for your work.

If you don't know the first thing about AI-aided writing, or want to try a new Large Language Model, check out the Writing Section of AIToolMall. They've got 110 writing bots listed there. Not all of them will be fit for our purposes, but about 40 will work and are either free to use or have a free trial period you can take advantage of.

PART A - THE AI BASE:

Copy and paste the following into the AI text generator of your choice. You'll need to fill in the brackets with the title and author of the text you're working on. I've tested this with about a dozen bots, and it produces good results on them.

Once the AI has cranked out a response that you like, copy and paste both the question you asked it and its response into a document with the proper formatting. This will make up the first half of your final paper.

PART B - THE HUMAN TOUCH:

For the second half of this assignment, you'll further expand on what the AI has written. What it should have returned to you was something close to a five-paragraph theme on three different values seen in your chosen text. The first thing you have to do, then, is demonstrate just where you see those values presented in the work. Consider them in the order that they are presented by the AI generator, then find and explain at least one example from the text of each value that the AI generated. Your explanation should include your thoughts on why you think each panel, page, or piece of text is a good example of the cultural value you're addressing.

For your conclusion, you'll have to answer an overarching question: WHY are these things or ideas valued in the text? That is, what do you know about the time period and culture in which the author is writing that connects with these three values? Is there something that the author(s) are responding to, or pointing out, or reacting against, in their culture? Or are their concerns more global, and they're writing about something common to all humans? Your thoughts here will be the real value that you add to the assignment.

The material that you'll be producing has two parts. In the first part, you're just doing the legwork for the AI, and showing that yes, those values that it noted are actually expressed in this text. And you're not just pointing out those examples, you're arguing for your choices as good examples. The second part addresses a more complicated question, where you look at the work in its historical, cultural, or social contexts and consider all the values you're addressing in the light of those contexts.

In order to successfully complete this writing assignment, you can't just repeat what the AI text generator has said already. Your focus needs to be, first, on finding and explaining at least one example of each AI-recognized value in the text. So you're essentially proving that the AI was correct in choosing the values it did. And one of the worst ways to prove anything, to anyone, is to argue that something is correct because it says it's correct. That's a circular argument. It's like saying “The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.” Unfortunately, that's an actual quotation from a former political leader.¹ So if you just spit back what the AI wrote, that's exactly what you're doing.

After that, a successful paper will look at all three values the AI noted and consider them in a larger, real-world context. While we can never really know what an author's intent is in producing their work, we can consider what the author has produced in the light of those contexts mentioned above. For this, you'll need to consider not just the values that the AI gave you, but also the plot, characterization, drawing style, and thematic concerns of the book, all within those contexts. Are certain characters or actions "rewarded" by the author? Are others condemned? Why? Is the author pointing out the failings of their contemporary culture? Does it address something broader than just a single cultural or historical moment? Is this work a warning? Is the author holding up their culture as an example of how things should be? Questions like these are what you should be thinking about in this final section of your paper.

There are some helpful materials I can point you to for this assignment. I've got an entire mini-site on Post-WWII US Culture, which is laid out by decades. I also have material on The Holocaust, Postmodernism, as well as background material on all the authors we've covered: Atwood, Moore, Moon and Ba, and Spiegelman.

You should be able to complete the second half of the assignment in a multi-paragraph essay of between 500 and 600 words.

What you'll be submitting to the Cultural Values Paper Assignment in Folio is one document with two halves. First, there will be your prompt for the AI, and its response, formatted like your first paper (look at The English Major's MLA 9 Formatting Cheat Sheet again, so you can get it right). Then, beginning on a new page, you'll have your "Human Touch" section. And if you use any external sources in your paper, that section will be followed by a Works Cited page — again, properly formatted.

Your TurnItIn Score

After you submit your paper and TurnItIn has completed its analysis, you are able to see your TurnItIn Originality Score. In general, lower numbers are better here, unless you're quoting a lot of material from the text. Your score will also have a color attached to it. If the color you see is anything other than green, check your paper again to see that you have cited all your sources correctly. If you have, then you're good. If you haven't, then you can revise your paper and resubmit it. I will evaluate only the most recent version of your paper in the dropbox, but you can submit as many versions of it as you feel necessary.

Exams

We'll have two multiple-choice exams, one halfway through the course and one at the end of the course. These will be 33 questions each, with roughly 1/3 of the questions in these three areas: visual literacy, historical and cultural contexts for a text, and thematic concerns within a text.

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GRADING

My Process

When I mark your papers, here's my process: I read your papers at least three times. The first time, I just go through them looking for your argument and if you addressed the prompt in your essay. In my next reading, I apply the following Minimum Standards Rubric, which comes from the Technical College system in South Carolina. This rubric is applied to papers from students at two-year schools, and it defines the minimum acceptable standards there. Once I've applied the Minimum Standards Rubric, I then read through your paper again, asking the questions here and evaluating it with the Essay Rubric below. This reading is where I mark your paper.

Minimum Standards Rubric

Essay Rubric

Questions I ask while grading

For each sentence in your paper, I ask the following questions:

1. What are you saying? At a basic level, I’m trying to decode the meaning of each sentence. If I cannot understand what you’re trying to say, everything that follows is problematic. If your sentence is confused, convoluted, or contradictory, you make it difficult, or even impossible, for me to answer this basic question.
2. Is what you’re saying accurate? Does this sentence demonstrate that you understand the text or the critic you’re addressing? For instance, if you’re summarizing someone else’s argument, I need to assess if you’re being true to the original author's intent. In your response, I’m assessing your evidence and examples.
3. Is what you’re saying well-expressed grammatically and mechanically? This assumes that your grammar and mechanics aren’t so bad that I’ve been stymied back up at Question #1.
4. Does the writing have appropriate flow, in that each idea links up with the one previously and the one to follow in a way that meets audience needs, attitudes, and knowledge?

If I can answer all four of these questions positively for every sentence, you’re doing well. But when the answer is no, complications ensue. If I can’t understand what you’re saying, I have no way to engage with your ideas, and so I have additional questions.:

• Do you not understand the original text you’re addressing?
• Do you understand the original text, but your writing leaves a gap between that understanding and what is written on the page?

Marks on your papers

When I return your papers to you, they'll have marks on them, but almost no comments. Only in very rare cases, where errors aren’t immediately obvious, will I write a short comment. For the most part, your errors or issues are underlined and marked with a letter representing one of four categories:

MARK	EXPLANATION
A = ARGUMENT	These are errors or issues with the points you’re trying to make. They could be inconsistencies, the use of quotations that don’t do what you need them to do, fundamental contradictions in your macro structure, or a number of other things concerning how you’re moving your argument forward.
C = CLARITY	Usually sentence-level matters where you either need to be more clear and specific, explain yourself better, or resolve a contradiction.
F = FORMAT	You should use MLA 9 formatting for your paper. You'll follow it to set up how your paper looks on the page (your header, your margins, your page numbering) and how you handle things like titles of works, using quotations in your text, and creating a Works Cited page. You have The English Major’s MLA 9 Formatting Cheat Sheet available to you in Folio. “I used an online citation generator” is one of the most damning criticisms of your own abilities you can offer. If I suggested you weren’t capable of looking up and following a simple set of discipline-specific rules, you would be offended. So why would you admit that about yourself, especially since I'm telling you here that they are all, to varying degrees, inaccurate?
M = MECHANICS	Errors in sentence construction, usage, punctuation, spelling, etc. In general, there’s a reason why English has at least 64 different prepositions: they all mean something different. Oh, and burn your thesauruses. Using an elevated word that you think you might know the meaning of works doubly against you: it could be the wrong word for the situation, and it’s not the clear and concise word, which is what you want. Brackets [. . .] usually indicate errors with sentence construction.

Revising Your Papers (the good news)

Once I've returned your paper to you with my marks on it, you'll have a chance to revise that paper for a higher score. No matter the grade marked on your original submission, you can revise it for an additional 10 points (that's a full letter grade). And yes, you can score above 100 on your revision.

If you'd like to do that, you'll have one week after I return your papers to do the following:

1. In a separate document, write out and explain what the error is for each underlined area of your paper. The A, C, F, or M will be your initial guide to figuring this out, and if you can't get it on your own, bring it to either Ms. Graham or me. We're not going to tell you what every error is, but if you have questions about one or two, let us know.
2. Revise your paper, correcting EVERY error.
3. Submit a) the document you produced explaining the errors, and b) your revised version of your paper, to the same dropbox where you submitted your initial attempt.

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EVALUATION

1. Congratulations on clicking on the link for this footnote. It shows that you are most dogged in your pursuit of the truth, and reflects well on your abilities as a student. So here's the information about that quotation. This statement was made in a press conference held by President Trump on February 16, 2017. And the quotation is accurate. It's not taken from some left-wing MAGA-baiting site, but from the National Archives of the United States. If you want to check, here's the link to the full transcript. If you look through it, you'll see that this line isn't even the most ridiculous thing he said that day: Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference.