English 242
Reading Fiction

Course Introduction

The University of Washington General Catalogue describes English 242 as a course in "Reading Fiction," and then it adds these additional words of explanation: "Critical interpretation and meaning in fiction. Different examples of fiction representing a variety of types from the medieval to modern periods." These additional words confuse me, for it would take at least two separate courses to cover issues of interpretation and meaning in fiction, and maybe five or six more to cover in a summary fashion the history of fiction. Clearly, we cannot do this in English 242, and so my first task in preparing this course guide has been to find a way to narrow and focus the course.

As I have cast about for various ways to organize English 242, I have followed two principles. First of all, I have kept in mind the fact that this is a course which is regarded within the university as part of general education. That is to say, its purpose is to prepare students more for life than for specialization. Hence, I have constructed a course which should help you read fiction for the rest of your life with greater insight and enjoyment. But I am also aware that some people take English 242 in order to help lay the foundation for more advanced literary study. The methods of analysis, interpretation, and understanding which you will cultivate in this course will carry over to other literature courses you might take in the future. In sum, if this course works as I intend it to, it will serve both the general citizen and the soon-to-be English major.

What, then, will English 242 be about? Half the course will be about how to read fiction beyond just noting the sequence of events in it, and the other half will be about the necessity of constructing fictions in order to live, while at the same time becoming aware of how misleading or dangerous those fictions can be. We are all both consumers and producers of fictions in our lives, and English 242 will sharpen our ability to be both.

Required Books

1. Beaty, Jerome, ed. The Norton Introduction to Fiction. New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0-393-96821-9
2. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Vintage, 1991.
3. Murdoch, Iris. The Book and the Brotherhood. New York: Penguin, 1987.

A Note on the Texts

The editions I list above for the first and third books are the only ones which exist, while the one for The Joy Luck Club is, at present, the best one in print. All three books will be available through the University Bookstore, but if you wish to find copies elsewhere or to borrow them from the library, that is fine. Let me also add a few words about The Norton Introduction to Fiction. As you will discover, we will only be reading and using part of it in this course, but it does contain a variety of unassigned fiction which you will find interesting and challenging to explore. It also contains Jerome Beaty's remarks about how to read and understand fiction. Because I offer in this course guide my own version of what Beaty covers in those remarks, I have not asked you to read him. But this is not meant to slight him, and I think reading what he has to say about fiction will supplement nicely my own treatment of the subject. In other words, if you feel the need for help in reading fiction beyond this course guide, Beaty is a good authority to which you might turn.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply to all discussion forum questions on the forum, and to e-mail questions via e-mail.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Course Objectives

Let me begin this discussion of how English 242 is organized by listing for you the aims of the course. By the end of this course, I would like you to have

• acquired a general understanding of how one reads fiction closely, and of how we need to make fictions in order to live our lives.
• developed a specific understanding of how the organization of a plot in fiction structures our experience of reading it and shapes its meaning.
• learned how to analyze the ways in which story tellers reveal themselves (their values, habits, and interests) in the very act of telling their stories.
• refined your habits of literary analysis such that you can explore various elements within a fiction in order to have a more complete understanding of its entirety.
• learned to appreciate some of the reasons why we must have stories in order to live well, and why without stories our world would be immensely impoverished.
• become aware of the dangers inherent in the human necessity to rely on and use stories in order to live well.

Organization of the Course

I have divided the course into seven lessons, each of which has a different focus. Taken as a whole, the lessons will teach you what it means both to read and to make fiction. All this will become clearer as you get into the individual lessons; for now I want to outline the course for you so that you can get an idea of what is coming.

Lesson One: Reading Fiction to Make Fiction

I will begin with two stories which are simultaneously about reading and making fiction (Guy de Maupassant's "The Jewelry" and Elizabeth Talent's "No One's a Mystery"). As will also be the case in Lessons Two, Three, and Four, I will discuss the first of the two stories in detail in order to introduce you to the focus of the lesson. Then you will write a paper on the second story modeled on my analysis of the first. The aim of Lesson One is to understand both what it means to look closely at a piece of fiction (to read it), and to understand that whenever we read fiction we are always actively engaged in the making of fiction out of our own life histories, beliefs, and psychological disposition.

Lesson Two: Plot

The focus of this lesson will be plot. Through a close reading of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," we will explore the way in which a fiction is organized, and how that has consequences both for how we experience a fiction and also what it means. I will analyze the plot of Baldwin's story and suggest how it helps create meaning, and I will ask you to do the same for Faulkner's fiction. Once we get to the lesson itself, this will all become clearer.

Lesson Three: Characterization

In this lesson we will learn something about characterization. We all know how to read an author's analysis of a character, but what we might feel less sure about is being able to explain the nature of a narrator in a piece of fiction. Hence, what I am aiming for here is to see how someone reveals herself in the very act of telling her story. After I discuss how the narrator of Amy Tan's "A Pair of Tickets" gives her self away (reveals herself) through the way in which she tells her story, I will ask you to do the same in a paper about Doris Lessing's "Our Friend Judith." Once you finish this lesson, you will forever be more alert to storytelling, and you will also begin to notice things about your friends which previously escaped your eye.

Lesson Four: Reading the Whole Story

This will be the final lesson in which the focus will be on reading analytically. Here I will move away from emphasizing single aspects of fiction which make up the previous three lessons, and turn instead to reading the "whole" story. I put whole in quotation marks because I actually believe that it is never possible to get all of a story. However, we will try in this lesson to get more out of the next two stories than we did in the first three lessons. I will write a series of questions about Hemingway's "Clean, Well-Lighted Place" as a way of showing you what we need to think about if we read the "whole" story. Then I will ask a similar set of questions about Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father," and ask you to write an essay about her story which reflects your engagement with my questions. Once you finish writing the paper for this lesson and put it alongside your three earlier papers, you will be able to say that when it comes to fiction you see both the forest and the trees.

Lesson Five: The Place of Fiction in Human Experience

In this lesson and the next, we will switch our attention from learning to read closely to exploring the place of fiction in human affairs. Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club is a novel centrally about the need for stories (for making fictions) as a basis for living. We will use her novel to think about such questions as whether we can know the "real" world without stories, whether all stories are equally successful for dealing with the "real" world, and whether people who lack stories are human at all. I will discuss the novel at length, and then I will ask you to write a paper about some issue of storytelling in The Joy Luck Club. More about that when we get to the lesson.

Lesson Six: The Dangers of Fiction-Making

Iris Murdoch's Book and the Brotherhood is a rich story which provides sustenance for readers who are seeking adult stories to lean on in their lives. But it is also a novel about the dangers involved in leaning on the stories which Murdoch admits we cannot do without. So while the emphasis in Lesson Five is on the need for and positive uses of fiction, in Lesson Six it will be on the potential hazards of leaning too heavily on the fictions we create. I will introduce you to the dangers of stories by discussing part of Murdoch's novel, then ask you to write about an issue growing out of those dangers. When you finish this and the previous lesson, you will have a fuller understanding of why we need fictions and of how to use them most productively in our lives.

Lesson Seven

This lesson will involve preparation for the final examination for the course. The final exam is the only time during the course in which you will write in the presence of a proctor, but I can tell you now that the exam will cover Richard Ford's "Great Falls" (which appears in The Norton Introduction to Fiction). I will explain more about the final when I come to Lesson Seven in this guide, but I believe you can now see at least the shape of how you will finish off English 242.

Negotiating the Course

This section contains the nuts and bolts of the course guide. There is more substance with respect to reading and understanding fiction in what I write in the various lessons, but here I will cover my assumptions, expectations, and advice for the course. This is where you will learn about me and what pedagogical positions I hold. If you make use of what I say here, I think you will find the course more accessible and interesting, and your final grade more to your liking.

Using the Course Guide

In every lesson, I encourage, and almost insist, that you read the assigned fiction before you read what I have to say. This does not mean that what I have to say about the fiction is worth skipping, but I think it is important for you to form your opinions about a work before you encounter my remarks. And furthermore, if you read what I have written in any particular lesson first, you may find that I give away how a story ends before you read it. I hate to think that I might pre-empt the suspense of your reading, and so please do the required reading for a lesson before you read my commentary. The purpose of this course is to help you become a better reader of fiction, and if you lean too early on my readings, it will be harder for you to fulfill that purpose. The more you experience fiction and think about it independently, the better you will become at reading fiction, and the better your papers for the course will turn out. We always work better when we begin from our own center, rather than borrowing one from someone else.

Consistent with the advice in the previous paragraph, I strongly discourage you from going to the library to find commentaries on the assigned reading in this course. Having once been a student, I know the motive for seeking out those commentaries. We all want to stand on solid ground, and to approach paper-writing with as little apprehension as possible. But the trouble is that what you can find in the library is written by professionals for professionals. When a non-professional tries to use the commentaries on fiction which are available in the library, the results are almost never positive. You will do better in this course if you stick to the course guide and trust yourself, your intelligence, and your own ideas.

Once you have read the assigned fiction for a lesson, then it is time for you to read what I have written for that lesson. As you do so, try to remember the following. First, it is the product of several years of teaching and writing about literature. It is written with confidence, insight, and clarity (and perhaps arrogance?) that the author did not have when in your shoes, so do not judge your efforts against it. Second, despite the fact that I am a "professional" student of literature, I am still one human being among many, limited by my perspective, prejudices, and commitments. What I have to say in this course guide about fiction is my effort to tell a truth about it as I know it, but it is not the truth. I am not infallible. Hence, when you find yourself disagreeing with some general proposition I advance about reading, or with some specific claim I make about a piece of fiction, try to take what I say seriously but do not give up your position if you find what I have to say unconvincing. I will never lower your grade on a paper because you disagree with me.

Writing Assignments

There are six papers and one final examination in this course. Topics and directions appear at the end of each lesson in this course guide, but here is where I make my general introduction to writing.

The best advice I can give to help you write well is something you will often find hard to follow. It is this: you will have to reread, and in some cases reread again and again, the assigned fiction in a lesson, and you will also have to rewrite, and in some cases rewrite again, your assignment for a lesson. I know this advice sounds tiresome, daunting, and too teacherly, but I speak out of my conviction that the main reason student writing does not rise to the levels it is capable of is that most students write before they know what they are talking about. Rereading and rewriting allow us to speak from knowledge and understanding. My job in this course is to help you realize your potential, and I offer you rereading and rewriting not out of some sadistic pleasure, but because I know you will perform better if you follow my advice.

If the above paragraph is about a condition for writing well, the aim in this and the three following paragraphs is to give you my sense of what good writing is. First of all, good spelling, grammar, and syntax are not the sole ingredients of good writing. They are instead conventions we follow if we wish to be members in good standing of the writing public. If we violate these conventions, we invite others to think as ill of us as they do when we defy other conventions. Avoid writing rudely, but do not think that in doing so you will automatically turn out good writing.

To produce good writing, you have to write in a human voice. This is one which is neither generic (generic voices are those often employed by used car sales people or telephone solicitors), nor formulaic (a formulaic voice is one which automatically announces at the beginning of a paper that "in this essay I will . . . "), nor borrowed from someone who already has a voice in his writing (don't try to sound like me, for example). It is the voice we use when we write to our best friend or talk with her on the phone; it is a voice which includes the pronoun "I" when it is appropriate; it is a voice which is sad when you are sad, angry when you are angry, excited when you are excited. If you write with your own unique voice, you have a much greater chance of turning out good writing.

Good writing also requires that you care about what you write. If you are taking English 242 for purely cynical reasons, you will approach the writing in it cynically, and without any interest except in finishing the course to receive credit for it. If you are not interested in your writing, the writing will be dead, and furthermore, if you are not interested in it, can you really expect me to be? Do you want me to respond to your papers cynically, to grade them only in order to get paid for doing so? The answers to these two rhetorical, didactic questions are obvious, and so I will end my sermon. But I do want to acknowledge that students often feel a need to slight what they are interested in when writing, because the teacher has the power of the grade and because too many teachers use it in unconscionable ways. As I have said earlier, I will never lower your grade on a piece of writing because you do not agree with me. Be interested in what you write and I will be too, and that cannot help but increase my valuation of your writing.

Finally, you will produce good writing if you read well, and that is what this course is about. You will learn how to better read fiction, and that will help you to better write about fiction, too. But there is a general point to be made here about good reading, one which I and my colleagues take for granted, but which many students doubt: there is no such thing in a piece of fiction as a hidden meaning! The fact that we can't all see what is there to be seen doesn't mean there is something hidden. I can explain this by using an example from football. If I watch a game, I can rarely keep track of more than where the ball is: I cannot see the receivers running their pass patterns, I cannot see the trap blocks being thrown by linemen, I cannot see what scheme the defensive backs are using. But the fact that I can see none of that doesn't mean it is hidden. It can all be captured by film, and the evidence is that professional quarterbacks can see it all happening in front of them. I could learn to see it too were I to take a course in reading football or were I to become a professional player, but I am likely to do neither. But neither will I subscribe to the notion that there are hidden things happening in a football game. What happens in a game or what happens in fiction is there to be seen if we just know how to see it. The purpose of English 242 is to extend your ability to see what is there in fiction, and I assure you it is an ability which can be nicely cultivated in this course. You will learn to read fiction better in English 242, and will write the better about it as a result.

Evaluation

The six papers and the final exam in this course each count one-seventh of your final grade, but because it takes a while for us to get to know each other, I will make allowances for improvement in the course. If you steadily produce better work, your final grade will reflect that fact.

At the same time, I know that you will worry about being evaluated; I worry about it also. I have already said twice in this course guide that I do not lower grades for those who disagree with me, but I think this point requires elaboration. I know my political, religious, and ethical biases, and I keep them out of my grading. But if a paper truly upsets me, however, I make an extra effort to give it the benefit of the doubt. In other words, I think you will receive fair treatment from me. Also, I try to explain my evaluations when I return papers to you. If my explanations make sense, I hope you will try to write your next paper with them in mind. But if they don't, let me know; I am always happy to reconsider an evaluation if you find my explanation of it inadequate. Finally, I hope I can inspire your confidence in me by explaining what I take evaluation to be in the case of writing papers about fiction. It is not at all like marking a problem in mathematics; it is much more like deciding who gets into a symphony orchestra or onto a professional basketball team. If a mathematics teacher sets a problem (for example, to solve a quadratic equation), anyone who is given the answer should be able to mark a student accurately. But only those with years of inside experience can make informed, defensible decisions about whom to select for a symphony or a team. This doesn't mean that they can't be "wrong" or that they are free from biases; it only means that in some areas evaluation is something which comes more easily for those who have been on the inside for a long time. Given that I have been teaching for a number of years, I believe I am about as good at grading a paper about a piece of fiction as a professional basketball coach is at choosing players for a team. My problem is not whether I can grade you well, but whether I can explain my grading well. But conductors and coaches have the same problem. It goes with any human territory which is unlike mathematics, that is, which entails interpretation.

About the Course Developer, Malcolm Griffith

I am an associate professor in the University of Washington English Department. I received my Ph.D. from Ohio State. During my graduate studies and since that time, three main areas of study hold my interest: Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Criticism, and American Literature.

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