Course Description / Overview
The class meets twice per week for 1.5 hours per session.
Texts & Other Course Materials (Required and Recommended)
Margaret Jacob, The Enlightenment. A Brief History with Documents
Descartes, Discourse on Method, all.
Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
J. Hector St. John de Cr??vecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Recommended: McKay, Hill, Buckler, A History of Western Society II: From Absolutism to the Present (A Western Civ textbook, for background reading.)
Assignments
Attendance and class participation is mandatory. Students will write two five-page papers and a ten-page paper. There will be a cumulative final exam at the end of the term. Each assignment will be weighted as follows in the calculation of the final grade, although these calculations will also take into account improved performance during the course of the semester:
Class Participation
|
20 points |
| Two Five-Page Papers |
30 points each |
| Ten-Page Paper |
60 points |
| Final Exam |
60 points |
|
| TOTAL |
200 points |
Cheating and Plagiarism
Statement on Cheating and Plagiarism: The web now hosts many sites which offer college-level papers of varying quality on a variety of topics. I am well acquainted with these sites, and with others that offer detection services to professors. Buying a paper and submitting it as your own work is cheating. Copying sections from someone else’s print or online work into your own without an acknowledgement is plagiarism. MIT has strict policies against both activities that I will fully enforce. For the appropriate MIT definitions and policies, visit the following websites.