(Looking for pre-recorded lecture videos? They are now linked directly at the Schedule of Readings and Assignments.)
Welcome to ENG 281: Writing About Literature.
This page contains all the material that would normally be on a course syllabus, including our schedule of readings and assignments, as well as broader course policies, all assignment prompts, and other useful information. (I recommend reading all the material on this front page thoroughly first — and then following the “right-click or command-click here” links for any items you feel need further explanation.)
[NB: To arrange accommodations and modifications for ENG 281, including accommodations for ESL/EFL, or medical or accessibility-related reasons, right-click or command-click here as soon as possible.]
[NB: If you join our course late, you are still responsible for the material you missed, which we’ll assess via weekly in-class sentence prompts: right-click or command-click here to learn how to catch up on missed sentence prompts. However, up to three of the real-time sessions you missed prior to registration will not count toward your attendance limit. Most importantly, email your TA immediately — see below for contact info. After that, you should immediately watch the video for Lecture 281-0, which will guide you through this syllabus page.]
I’m your professor, Matthew Sergi. You can call me Prof. Sergi or Matthew; you can contact me at sergi.utoronto@gmail.com, but I encourage you to approach me in Office Hours (right-click or command-click here for times and location) and to consult this website thoroughly first (you may also want to check my Student FAQ list — click here — but note that the FAQ has not been updated for the 2020-21 pandemic). I’ll only be able to answer emails sent to sergi.utoronto@gmail.com; if you send an inquiry about ENG 281 to another email address of mine, it will likely be delayed or missed.
Your TA for ENG 281 will be either Angela Du (tutorial sessions 101, 9101, 201, 9201 — eng281angela@gmail.com) or Rachel Windsor (tutorial sessions 102, 9102, 202, 9202 — rachel.windsor281@gmail.com). They’ll be in touch with you immediately after the first day of tutorial, Monday 11 January (10am-11am or 11am-12pm), to gather your preferred email address, establish a schedule for their weekly Office Hours, and make sure you’re getting class update emails. After Week II, all our communication with you will be done by email (not Quercus).
IMPORTANT: You must enroll in a tutorial session to take ENG 281 — and you must attend the first day of your tutorial on the morning of Monday 11 January (before the first full-class session meets). Take a look at our Schedule of Readings and Assignments to learn more about what you’ll be doing that day. Zoom links for each tutorial session will be posted at this site (below) in the week of 4 Jan; make sure you have installed, and know how to use, Zoom — well ahead of time. Right-click or command-click here for more information on Zoom meetings.
ENG 281: What We’re Here To Do (Course Description)
Most of the literature courses you’ll take in the English Department (and beyond) will require you to write an essay about class readings. In ENG 281, “Writing About Literature”, our class readings are essays about literature, which we will discuss in depth. Our lectures, tutorials, and practical exercises, meanwhile, will sharpen and strengthen your own craft as a writer of literary scholarship, and particularly as a writer of analytical, argumentative, and critical essays about literature. In short, this class will guide you through some excellent examples of written literary scholarship, while training you to learn from those examples, in order to generate excellent written literary scholarship of your own.
And we’ll do it all without assigning you much to write outside class. ENG 281 is a new process-based course: we are testing out new techniques that respect your time, your individuality, and your intelligence. There will be much hard work to do — readings, discussions, ongoing exercises in and out of class, intensive training in various skills, collaborative writing projects — but it all goes toward preparing you to write for the future, rather than for this class.
This class will help you understand why we write all these essays in the first place — which will make you a better writer and thinker. Every professor in the English Department writes about literature for their life’s calling, as much as for their livelihood. Every professor takes a different approach to the process and purpose of writing about literature, and thus will have different expectations for you when you write an essay for their class. That’s why the primary course readings in “Writing About Literature” will be essays in literary criticism, interpretation, and analysis published by English Department faculty, usually paired with guest appearances by the profs, who will each give their own take on the process and purpose of writing about literature.
Each week, prompted by our discussion of a different professor’s work of literary scholarship, we will focus on a different key element of essay-writing: tone/proofreading, precise wording, grammatical clarity, close reading, innovation, stakes, logical rigor, focus/organization, depth, complexity, grammatical economy. ENG 281 will help you understand the humanities essay as a training ground for future writing and critical work, applicable across multiple fields, careers, and discourses. We will help you weave your other university classes’ writing assignments (past and future) into a coherent training program, enhanced by variations in instructors’ expectations, in ways that will strengthen your writing style, your argumentation, and your verbal clarity well beyond the university. We also offer ample Office Hours, where we can work with you individually according to your needs, tastes, strengths, and weaknesses at every level: perhaps by drilling fundamentals of English grammar where necessary, or by helping you understand comments made on papers from other classes, or by following you into a deep philosophical dive into the very idea of good writing, or by simply helping you find your voice.
ENG 281 Weekly Routine/Class Times/Zoom links:
Our course will be online only for the Winter 2021 term. A typical week in ENG 281 during the pandemic will go like this —
Every Monday morning (either 10:00am to 11:00am or 11:00am to 12:00pm) — your tutorial group meets on Zoom for real-time discussion. During the first half of term, you’ll often have a collaborative task that the group will have to figure through together, based on that week’s readings; during the second half of term, your primary task in these meetings will be to work on your CSP. See the bottom of this section for Zoom links.
Between your Monday tutorial and Wednesday full-class meeting, you are responsible for watching two pre-recorded lecture modules, which will be uploaded to YouTube and our class Google Drive. (These pre-recorded modules are meant to replace, roughly, the first 30 minutes of lecture, usually scheduled for Wednesday mornings.)
Every Wednesday morning, our entire class meets on Zoom for an 80-minute meeting, 10:30am-12pm — class opens 10:30am, with all students expected to be present and ready to participate at 10:40am. See the bottom of this section for Zoom links. That session will usually, but not always, proceed like so:
10:30am: Zoom chat opens unofficially; unstructured time for informal chat (this is the usual 10-minute buffer period before a U of T class)
10:40am-11:10am: student-led Q&A and discussion about the week’s readings and pre-recorded lectures
11:10am-11:35am: prof-led interview with a guest speaker (the writer of that week’s scholarly reading)
11:35am-11:55am: student-led Q&A with the guest speaker
11:55: our weekly in-class sentence prompt (see below)
***IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: CLASS MEETINGS ON WED 24 MAR, WED 31 MAR, and WED 7 APR WILL MEET AT THE OFFICIALLY SCHEDULED TIME OF 10AM-12PM.***
After each Wednesday meeting, you’ll begin work on a set of readings and exercises. All are due by the following Monday, though you often may not have the chance to discuss the readings until the following Wednesday.
Zoom link for Prof. Sergi’s Wednesday full-class meetings:
https://zoom.us/j/94490336818?pwd=bG9jc1F2aXZwbTNLczNrYjZUQTdoQT09
Meeting ID: 944 9033 6818 | Passcode: 2R4PD5
Zoom links for Monday tutorials:
Angela’s 10am tutorial, 101/9101 (passcode free, video on, no waiting room):
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86299197384
Angela’s 11am tutorial, 201/9201 (passcode free, video on, no waiting room):
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86011035201
Rachel’s 10am tutorial, 102/9102:
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89585213576
Meeting ID: 895 8521 3576
Rachel’s 11am tutorial, 202/9202:
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82734173581
Meeting ID: 827 3417 3581
[NB: The current structure of our course is built on the assumption that Toronto public elementary schools will remain open throughout term. If Toronto public elementary schools shut down again, with no childcare available, I will have to modify and simplify our course in order to cover childcare responsibilities for my daughters. Should that happen, I will ask for your patience, understanding, and flexibility with changes to our course.]
ENG 281 is all about Office Hours.
Your TA will hold about two hours of online Office Hours every week; Prof. Sergi will hold 75 minutes on top of that.
That’s a lot of Office Hours. Click here for scheduling information.
That’s because the elements of ENG 281 that focus on improving your skill as a writer
are best done in one-on-one advisement, or in small groups.
We encourage every student to attend Office Hours as frequently as they can:
at Office Hours sessions, we invite you to talk through ENG 281 course material with us,
to work on troubleshooting your writing or developing your writing process,
or (and this is our favourite) to work on your writing assignments from other classes (yup!).
In ENG 281, our Office Hours are essentially personal writing tutorials, allowing you
close one-on-one training with a professional academic writer. Take advantage of this resource!
Each student in ENG 281 will be required to have one final one-on-one meeting with their TA at the end of term.
We strongly recommend that the final one-on-one meeting should not be your only meeting with your TA or Prof. Sergi.
ENG 281 Google Drive File and YouTube Channel:
Materials we use for class, including pre-recorded lectures, will always be uploaded to our
ENG 281 Google Drive file: right-click or command-click here to access the file.
Pre-recorded lectures will also always be uploaded to our ENG 281 YouTube channel,
for easy streaming: right-click or command-click here to access the file.
ENG 281 Schedule of Readings and Assignments:
Right-click or command-click here for our course schedule.
ENG 281 Course Requirements/Marking Weight:
Engagement and Participation in tutorial and full-class Zoom sessions, 15%
Right-click or command-click here for more.
Actual Attendance during at least 19 of our 23 required Zoom sessions, 10%
(18 of 23 sessions attended = 5/10; 17 or fewer = 0/10)
Right-click or command-click here for more.
Real-Time Sentence Prompts, asked at the end of each full-class Zoom session, 24%
Right-click or command-click here for more.
Pre-Tutorial Exercises, which you’ll work on in Weeks II-V, 24%
Right-click or command-click here for more.
Collaborative Scholarly Paper (CSP), presented in groups at the end of term, 20%
Right-click or command-click here for the assignment prompt.
20-minute One-on-One TA Meeting, after the final class meets, 7%
Right-click or command-click here for the assignment prompt.
ENG 281 Required Course Texts and Materials:
There is only one book you are required to purchase for ENG 281 this year: Seeds, a play by Annabel Soutar, which we’ll be referring to in two or three of our class sessions. You can buy it at the U of T Bookstore, or order it on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle edition (I’ll be referring to the pages of the paperback in class, so I recommend you use that).
Prices will vary — but if you are being asked to spend more than $25 CAD on a copy of Seeds, then you are being conned and should find another option. Needless to say, you are expected to move proactively in securing a copy of this text early; coming to class or tutorial unprepared, because you haven’t been able to get the book yet, won’t reflect well on your Engagement and Participation grade.
Beyond that, all readings will be available online for you to download and read (or print out, if you wish). Those that are not immediately accessible through your U of T Library membership will be downloadable in pdf at our ENG 281 Google Drive file: right-click or command-click here to access the file.
ENG 281 Ongoing Student Feedback:
If you there is any element of ENG 281 that you would like to see improved, changed, or removed, you don’t need to wait until the end of term to give your opinion. In fact, I welcome ongoing feedback about this class throughout term, which you can offer in three ways:
Bring it up in class discussion! I don’t have a thin skin and I don’t mind dedicating some class time to course housekeeping — and I love talking through solutions to make the course better. If you feel comfortable doing so, feel free to just bring your issue up in class discussion so that other students can share their opinion too.
Email me.
Comment anonymously at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/KVW7TLS — I’ll receive an email with your comments, which will not reveal your identity. Note: if you wish to leave anonymous comments more than once, SurveyMonkey may try to prevent you from doing so (I haven’t yet figured out how to turn that setting off, though I’ve tried). If that happens, you can try opening the survey in a different browser, or using your browser's incognito/private function. Or, failing that, use my second survey link — https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HX9N367 — same questions, but technically a new page.
From there, I’ll either respond to you directly (if possible), bring up the proposed change in class, or start a quick anonymous student survey in which fellow students can vote on whether to make the proposed change to our course.
ENG 281 Course Policies and Practices:
Each item below offers a brief, incomplete summary of course requirements and policies.
Read all the summaries thoroughly and with close attention.
Right-click or command-click on the link below each item for a more in-depth explanation of the policy.
I use Zoom, Google Apps, and Gmail, not Blackboard or Quercus,
for class announcements and contact.
Since all of our 281 assignments are process-based, collaborative, and/or delivered by
presentation, extensions on deadlines aren’t possible (or even relevant) here.
The only thing you’ll be doing on your own is the four pre-tutorial exercises;
we ask that you submit those by the assigned dates, but as long as you get them
to your TA before the final class meeting, you’ll get full credit with no penalty.
All students must attend real-time class Zoom sessions at the time they are scheduled,
including Monday tutorials and Wednesday full-class sessions.
The course attendance policy allows for four missed sessions before any points are deducted.
After you have registered for ENG 281, if you miss more than four sessions,
we will deduct points from your Actual Attendance grade (see above).
There are no exceptions available for this attendance policy.
I never require proof, documentation, or any reason for a student’s absence.
You can use your allowed number of absences for any reason;
if the allowed number is exceeded, I deduct credit regardless of the reason.
Note: as of May 2020, only online class meetings are available.
Right-click or command-click here for more.
If you miss a full-class session for any reason, including illness or late registration,
you are responsible for making up that session’s content (and demonstrating
your work via a make-up sentence prompt).
Right-click or command-click here for instructions on what to do when you miss a class.
Active participation in class discussion, in real time (during the time the discussion is occurring),
is a core requirement for all students in this course, with no exceptions:
every student must participate actively in tutorial discussion in order to earn course marks;
participation in full-class sessions is not required, but encouraged,
and can significantly improve your participation grade.
Right-click or command-click here for more.
For students who may have trouble speaking up in discussion,
whatever the reasons may be (and you don’t have to tell me what they are!),
I offer alternative avenues for real-time participation,
which earn equal participation credit toward course marks.
These alternative avenues are custom-made for my classes and must be custom-fit to each student;
if you’d like to take advantage of them, you must contact me in Office Hours or by email.
Request the alternative avenues as soon as possible.
It’s never too late to request them, but if you request them later than Week IV,
you may not be able to earn full participation credit.
Right-click or command-click here for more.
If you are a student who has difficulty speaking up in class,
or who wants extra help in English grammar and usage (including ESL/EFL),
or who has a health consideration or atypical learning style that affects classwork,
or who frequently has trouble with, or feels inadequately challenged by, classwork,
or who is interested in investigating or applying to graduate school,
I encourage you to approach me for an array of accommodations and course modifications that I offer,
to customize this course to your needs or your style.
Right-click or command-click here for more.
I offer accommodations and course modifications to any student who requests them,
by email, within the first three weeks of class.
I never require proof or documentation of a student’s need for accommodation.
The accommodations I offer will be customized to fit this course;
if a different format would work better for you, just ask.
I do not ask you to provide me with the reason you need accommodations;
just ask for what you need (tell me what, not why).
I cannot arrange accommodations or course modifications requested later than the fourth week of class.
Right-click or command-click here for more.
Online meetings still happen in real spaces with real voices and bodies,
so I still acknowledge that anyone who is participating in this class while on campus does so on the shared territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and under Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas and subsequent settlers; those of us participating while in Scarborough/Toronto east of Woodbine Avenue (including me, usually) do so on lands additionally covered by the Williams Treaties, signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands.