ENG 104Z: Introduction to Fiction

Land Acknowledgment

Oregon State University in Corvallis is located within the traditional homelands of the Marys River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya.

Oregon State is committed — in the spirit of self-reflection, learning, reconciliation and partnership — to ensure that this institution of higher learning will be of enduring benefit, not only to the state of Oregon, but also to the people on whose ancestral lands it is now located.

Read the University’s full land acknowledgment here.

Course Description

“Introduction to Fiction” invites students to enter imaginative narratives and confront the challenges of being human. Provides opportunities for the appreciation of fiction, including deeper awareness of craft and insight into how reading fiction can lead to self-enrichment. Includes reading a variety of types of fiction, from diverse perspectives and eras, and develops skills in discussion, literary analysis, and critical thinking.

Prerequisites or Corequisites

None.

Instructor Communication

Expectations for Time and Participation

This course combines approximately 120 hours of instruction, online activities, and assignments for 4 credits.

This course is asynchronous and somewhat flexible, but not self-paced. Our schedule of Course Content and the due dates that appear in Canvas provide guidelines for how you’ll interact and with what frequency. I recommend that you create your own workload schedule and set reminders for assignment due dates.

Learning Resources

In this class, we will be reading:

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1969.

A digital copy of Slaughterhouse is available from the Library.

You can purchase a physical copy for less than $20. I recommend checking these sites first:

Fair Use

All other readings will be available on Canvas.

The readings available on Canvas include copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I have determined this to be “fair use” of the copyrighted material as referenced and provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use any of this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain express permission from the copyright owner.

https://policy.oregonstate.edu/policy/copyright-fair-use

Technical Assistance

If you experience any errors or problems while in your online course, contact 24/7 Canvas Support through the Help link within Canvas. If you experience computer difficulties, need help downloading a browser or plug-in, or need assistance logging into a course, contact the IS Service Desk for assistance. You can call (541) 737-8787 or visit the Service Desk online.

Ecampus Reach Out for Success

If you encounter difficulties, need assistance or want to connect with someone one-on-one, it’s important to reach out. Your Ecampus student success team is here to support you. As part of your success team, Ecampus student services and success coaches are here to help answer any questions you may have.

Ecampus students are always encouraged to discuss issues that impact your academic success with the Ecampus success team. Email to get help with identifying strategies and resources that can support you in pursuing your educational goals.

For mental health

Ecampus students have a different set of support options for counseling and psychological services than on-campus students do. These services include the free, virtual mental health and physical wellness support resource, Anytime Anywhere. If you are in immediate crisis, please call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or Crisis Text Line by texting 741-741.

For financial hardship

Any student whose academic performance is impacted by financial stress or the inability to afford groceries, housing or other necessities, for any reason, is urged to contact the Office of Student Care (541-737-8748).

Student Resources Guide

To find even more resources, check out the Student Resources Guide for additional support services and guidance.

Measurable Student Learning Outcomes

Course Specific Learning Outcomes for ENG 104Z

  1. Explain how particular elements of fiction, literary devices, genres, and forms deepen our understanding of character or themes.

  2. Describe authorial perspectives, literary movements, and literary forms that have shaped literary fiction.

  3. Discuss literature as both shaping and reflecting the culture and context in which it was created.

  4. Explore how literature helps us understand the human experience by connecting to our lived experiences and modern lives.

  5. Defend literary interpretation with textual evidence and close reading.

Core Education / Bacc Core / WIC

This is a Core Education course that fulfills the requirements for the Arts and Humanities: General category. In addition, this course also fulfills the Baccalaureate Core requirements for the Arts and Humanities category.

  1. Describe genres, forms, perspectives, events, and/or ideas that have shaped and recorded the human experience.

  2. Analyze examples of human expression and/or human perspectives in changing cultural and/or historical contexts.

  3. Employ humanistic, theoretical, and/or philosophical methods to explore the human experience.

Oregon Transfer Compass / Common Course Numbering Outcomes

  1. Articulate how culture and context shape literary texts and how literature contributes to understandings of ourselves and the world.

  2. Identify how literary devices and various formal elements contribute meaning to a text.

  3. Build interpretations based on relevant evidence.

How these outcomes are fulfilled

This course fulfills requirements for the Arts and Humanities: General category does this in the following ways:

How learning outcomes are addressed and assessed
Outcomes How this outcome will be addressed How this outcome will be assessed
Describe genres, forms, perspectives, events, and/or ideas that have shaped and recorded the human experience. Identify literary devices, stylistic choices, genres, and forms in stories and a novel, and consider how these elements shape the story and reflect the context in which it was written. Examples include stream-of-consciousness, irony, minimalism, American Gothic, postmodernism, and more. Discuss how authorial perspectives (including cultural and gender identities) and historical events (such as the Woman Question, WWI, Vietnam, and more) shape and are reflected in stories and a novel. Defining and identifying literary elements will be covered in weekly quizzes and discussion boards. The Anthology Project asks you to place stories in literary context and make a case for their value in a lit class by examining their use of literary devices and their historical importance.
Analyze examples of human expression and/or human perspectives in changing cultural and/or historical contexts. Analyze the meaning and impact of short stories and a novel from the last 200 years and multiple cultural contexts. Dissect texts as a sentence level through close reading. Discuss literature as both shaping and reflecting the culture and context in which it was created. Explore how literature helps us understand ourselves and our world by connecting to our lived experiences and modern lives. The Analysis Essay prompts you to analyze themes or literary devices in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and compare those elements with a story of your choice from another historical context. You will prepare for this essay with formative assignments, including Perusall annotation, a topic proposal, and a rough draft.
Employ humanistic, theoretical, and/or philosophical methods to explore the human experience. Examine stories through a humanistic lens by discussing characters’ motivations, relationships, and emotions in order to better understand the human condition. Apply theoretical lenses such as Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and eco-criticism in our discussion of stories to better scrutinize the human experience. The Character Project asks you to use humanistic, creative methods to explore a character of your choice. In this assignment, you will create and analyze a new way for us to see the character, through a text chain, illustration, podcast, or something else. This assignment asks you to explore characters as flawed, rounded, and relatable representations of the human experience.

Evaluation of Student Performance

Points

Students can earn up to 1000 points in this course.

Assignments and point values
Assignment Points Description
Quizzes 200 Multiple choice quizzes on assigned stories, key terms, author biographies, and historical context. All quizzes are open book/open note, and they do not have a time limit.
Discussion Boards and Learning Activities 200 We will have a robust conversation or activity connected with each of the stories this term to promote active reading and thinking about the texts. May include audio/video or creative options.
Perusall Annotations 100 Four collaborative annotations of selected texts.
Character Project 100 Examine a character of your choice in a creative project and analysis. Creative project could be a text chain, playlist, painting, or something else.
Anthology Project 200 In small groups, design a unit of an anthology and make an argument for which stories you will include. Present your ideas in a slide deck and recorded presentation. Includes preparation steps to choose a theme and outline your work.
Analysis Essay 200 Write a 3-4 page essay analyzing character and theme in literature by comparing and contrasting those elements in two texts: Slaughterhouse-Five and a short story of your choice. Includes a topic proposal, rough draft and peer review, final draft, and a reflection.

Scale

Grading scale
Grade Percentage
A 93.5%
A- 90.0%
B+ 86.5%
B 83.5%
B- 80.0%
C+ 76.5%
C 73.5%
C- 70.0%
D+ 66.5%
D 63.5%
D- 60.0%
F 0.0%

Course Policies

Discussion Participation

Students are expected to participate in all graded discussions. While there is great flexibility in online courses, this is not a self-paced course. You will need to participate in discussions on at least two different days most weeks, with your first post due no later than Wednesday evening.

Late Work Policy

Extensions

Incompletes

When a requirement of a course has not been completed for reasons acceptable to the instructor and the rest of the academic work is passing, a report of “I” (incomplete) may be made and additional time granted, according to Academic Regulation 17 of OSU Academic Regulations.

If you are having any difficulty that might prevent you completing the coursework, please don’t wait until the end of the term; let me know right away.

Statement Regarding Religious Accommodation

Oregon State University is required to provide reasonable accommodations for employee and student sincerely held religious beliefs. It is incumbent on the student making the request to make the faculty member aware of the request as soon as possible prior to the need for the accommodation. See the Religious Accommodation Process for Students.

Class Participation and Building Community

Active interaction with peers and your instructor is essential to everyone’s success in this online course. I encourage you to please practice the following:

Content Warning

Literature often deals with difficult topics, including (but not limited to) mental illness, violence, racism, sexual assault, war, trauma, and death. We will discuss those topics as they arise in our reading. Please consider whether you are comfortable reading and writing about those topics this term. There won’t be individual content warnings on each story.

As a member of this classroom community, please be thoughtful and respectful about how you write about difficult topics. Remember that a fictional scene for you might be lived experience for someone else, and it can be difficult to know how our words impact others. Please use compassion and common sense when speaking about these issues in discussion boards.

If you find one of our stories this term too difficult to read or discuss, you can contact me for alternative assignments for the quiz and discussion board that week.

Academic Integrity

It is important that you understand what student actions are defined as academic misconduct at Oregon State University. Refer to the OSU Student Code of Conduct and the Office of the Dean of Students for more information. More importantly, if you are unsure if something will violate our academic integrity policy, ask your professors, GTAs, academic advisors, or academic integrity officers.

Academic misconduct, or violations of academic integrity, can fall into seven broad areas, including but not limited to: cheating; plagiarism; falsification; assisting; tampering; multiple submissions of work; and unauthorized recording and use.

Generative Artificial Intelligence

Student use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) does not typically advance the learning goals in this course, which focus on developing the core activities of reading, thinking, and writing.

As a result, the use of any GenAI tools (including but not limited to ChatGPT, Copilot, or Claude) to generate or edit any portion of the substance of your work is not permitted unless explicitly noted in the assignment instructions. While this course recognizes that AI is increasingly embedded in everyday tools like Microsoft Word and Google Search, you are not allowed to use AI for your coursework beyond these limited non-substantive supports.

Acceptable GenAI Use

I allow one general use of GenAI because it advances the learning goals of this course.

Everyone encounters words, sentences, and paragraphs in literary texts that they do not understand. Often, this difficulty is inherent in the text because literature attempts to express subtle or uncommon experiences. In literature classes, we learn how to overcome such difficulties by facing them again and again. Usually, these cases require careful reading and thinking in order to arrive at an interpretation of what a text might mean. This kind of difficulty would not benefit from the use of GenAI because the “answer” that GenAI would provide would almost certainly differ from the interpretation you would arrive at on your own. Everyone needs to practice interpreting texts in order to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.

Other times, students face barriers to comprehension above and beyond what a text’s imagined reader might face. This could the use of vocabulary or phrases that they do not know, or references to unknown people, places, or events. In such cases, students may use GenAI to aid their comprehension. By “comprehension,” I mean that you get to the end of a sentence or paragraph, and think to yourself, “I don’t understand this at all.”

When facing a sentence or paragraph that you struggle to comprehend in this way, I ask you to do these things in this order. You may stop at any point once you have figured it out.

  1. Read it twice.
  2. Look up unfamiliar words or phrases.
  3. Re-read it after looking up words or phrases that you do not know.
  4. If you are still struggling, transcribe the passage, then ask this class’s Custom GPT for help:

Custom GPT

The Custom GPT expects to receive a sentence, paragraph, or passage from a work of fiction, and has been instructed to help you comprehend the passage. I ask that you use this Custom GPT because its behavior should be limited in ways that benefit the learning objectives of this course rather than impeding them.

Turnitin

Your instructor may ask you to submit one or more of your writings to Turnitin, a plagiarism prevention service. Your assignment content will be checked for potential plagiarism against Internet sources, academic journal articles, and the papers of other OSU students, for common or borrowed content. Turnitin generates a report that highlights any potentially unoriginal text in your paper. The report may be submitted directly to your instructor or your instructor may elect to have you submit initial drafts through Turnitin, and you will receive the report allowing you the opportunity to make adjustments and ensure that all source material has been properly cited. Papers you submit through Turnitin for this or any class will be added to the OSU Turnitin database and may be checked against other OSU paper submissions. You will retain all rights to your written work.

Statement Regarding Students with Disabilities

Oregon State University is committed to making learning experiences accessible to all, which includes consideration of the course design, course learning outcomes, and barriers experienced by the disabled student. Disability Access Services (DAS) staff and students work together to determine reasonable accommodations. Students connected with DAS who have questions about their accommodations should reach out to their DAS Adviser. Students who have not yet completed the process for setting up accommodations, please contact DAS at 541-737-4098, visit the DAS website, or email to explore accommodations for a disability (e.g., mental health diagnoses, chronic health conditions, learning disabilities, physical conditions/injuries, etc.). Students and faculty members are encouraged to collaborate around the implementation of accommodations.

Accessibility of Course Materials

All materials used in this course are accessible. If you require accommodations please contact Disability Access Services (DAS).

Additionally, Canvas, the learning management system through which this course is offered, provides a vendor statement certifying how the platform is accessible to students with disabilities.

Tutoring and Writing Assistance

You can connect live with experienced online tutors by accessing Online Tutoring in the side navigation bar of your Canvas course. You are eligible for up to 5 hours of tutoring each week. To learn more, go to Online Tutoring - Overview.

To get help with any form of writing, you can contact Oregon State Online Writing Support for feedback via email or live Zoom appointment.

Academic Calendar

All students are subject to the registration and refund deadlines as stated in the Academic Calendar: https://registrar.oregonstate.edu/osu-academic-calendar

Student Bill of Rights

OSU has twelve established student rights. They include due process in all university disciplinary processes, an equal opportunity to learn, and grading in accordance with the course syllabus:

https://asosu.oregonstate.edu/advocacy/rights

Expectations for Student Conduct

Student conduct is governed by the university’s policies, as explained in the Student Conduct Code (https://beav.es/codeofconduct). Students are expected to conduct themselves in the course (e.g., on discussion boards, email postings) in compliance with the university’s regulations regarding civility.

Student Learning Experience Survey

During Fall, Winter, and Spring term the online Student Learning Experience surveys open to students the Wednesday of week 9 and close the Sunday before Finals Week. Students will receive notification, instructions, and the link through their ONID email. They may also log into the survey via MyOregonState or directly at https://beav.es/Student-Learning-Survey. Survey results are extremely important and are used to help improve courses and the learning experience of future students. Responses are anonymous (unless a student chooses to “sign” their comments, agreeing to relinquish anonymity of written comments) and are not available to instructors until after grades have been posted. The results of scaled questions and signed comments go to both the instructor and their unit head/supervisor. Anonymous (unsigned) comments go to the instructor only.

Course Content

Week 0: Getting Started

Week 1: What is Literary Fiction?

Week 2: Ironic Twists and Turns; The American Gothic

Week 3: The Southern Gothic & Point of View; Style: Minimalism & Stream of Consciousness

Week 4: Magical Realism

Week 5: Coming of Age

Week 6: Parents & Children

Week 7: Afrofuturism; Genre Bending: Science & Magic & Myth

Week 8: Narrative Structure; Return to Metafiction

Week 9: Postmodern Literature

Week 10: Writing About Literature

Finals Week

Acknowledgments

This course is a modified version of a previous iteration of this course developed by Liz Delf.