Required work for the course includes careful reading of all assigned material and active participation in class discussions. Please come to class prepared with questions and comments about the assigned reading for each day—the success of the course depends on your involvement.
Participation/Class Citizenship: This grade is based on a combination of class attendance, participation in discussion, being prepared, coming on time, paying attention, and having the required materials with you each day.
Class Project: Much of the written work in the class this semester will lead toward a full-class final project—writing and designing a WordPress blog site on the female Gothic. Students will serve on different teams of designers and content providers to build the site, and the short papers you write throughout the semester will contribute to the content of the site.
Papers: You will write three short papers for the course. Paper 1 involves defining the Gothic. Paper 2 asks you to research the criticism of a specific novel and present your findings to class. Paper 3 offers you a choice—you may either write a short analytical paper on one of the works we read in class, or you may choose a more creative option. I’ll give you more information about these papers well in advance of their due dates.
Blog: For every day that we have assigned readings in the course, students may post a response on our class blog. I will provide a prompt for each of these days to get you started thinking. You may respond to the prompt if you like, but you may also respond to other students’ comments, or to anything else that interests you in the reading. Blog posts must be at least 200 words to receive full credit for the day, and they must be posted by 9:00 a.m. on the day they’re due. Blog posts will not receive letter grades, but you will receive credit for the number of comments you post, with 10 posts throughout the semester equaling 100%.
Exams: There will be a Mid-Term and a Final Exam in the class. We’ll talk in more detail about the exams before they’re scheduled.
Grading
Your final grade will be determined according to these percentages:
- 10%–Participation/Class Citizenship
- 15%–Class Blog
- 10%–Paper 1
- 10%–Paper 2
- 5%–Presentation
- 10%–Paper 3
- 15%–Mid-Term Exam
- 15%–Final Exam
- 10%–Contribution to Class Project
Letter grades assigned will have the following numerical values:
- A+/98 B+/88 C+/78 D+/68
- A /95 B /85 C /75 D /65
- A- /92 B- /82 C- /72 D- /62
F = 50 Paper not turned in
Attendance
Regular attendance and participation are requirements to pass the course. This is a face-to-face class, and I expect you to attend in person, unless you have a COVID-related issue. If so, please contact me immediately so we can work out a plan. Excessive absences will seriously harm your grade.
Late Papers
Late papers will be penalized five points for each day or fraction of a day they are late.
Accommodations for Students with Disabilities
The college will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented disabilities. Students should apply for services at the Center for Disability Services/SNAP. Students approved for accommodations are responsible for notifying me as soon as possible and for contacting me one week before accommodation is needed.
Academic Integrity
All work submitted must be your own. Incorporating others’ words or ideas in your own work, including from artificial intelligence programs, without proper acknowledgment, or any other form of academic dishonesty will be considered plagiarism and a violation of the CofC Honor Code.
You MAY NOT turn in writing for this class that has been produced using ChatGPT, Grammarly, or other similar generative artificial intelligence (GAI) writing tools. While you may use such tools to find sources and to edit grammatical mistakes, you may not use them to generate text, to organize text, or to “improve” writing you’ve already done (for instance, you may not ask Grammarly to make a paragraph more persuasive, to make your style sound more academic, to rewrite whole sentences or paragraphs, etc.)
In the humanities, we believe that writing is thinking. You learn by doing your own writing. I want to hear what you think, not what a machine predicts you will think. Using GAI tools to generate or substantially revise text will be considered plagiarism and a violation of the CofC Honor Code.