Course Content and Outcomes Guides (CCOG)

CCOG for ENG 104 archive revision 202404

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Effective Term:
Fall 2024

Course Number:
ENG 104
Course Title:
Introduction to Fiction (ENG104=ENG104Z)
Credit Hours:
4
Lecture Hours:
40
Lecture/Lab Hours:
0
Lab Hours:
0

Course Description

Provides opportunities for the appreciation of fiction, including deeper awareness of craft and insight into how reading fiction can lead to self-enrichment. Covers a variety of types of fiction, from diverse perspectives and eras, and develops skills in discussion, literary analysis, and critical thinking. Invites engagement with the complexities, and challenges of being human by entering imaginative narratives. This course is part of Oregon Common Course Numbering. ENG 104 and ENG 104Z are equivalent. Audit available.

Intended Outcomes for the course

Upon successful completion of the course students should able to:

  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.
  4. Read a diverse selection of fiction.

Integrative Learning

Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.

General education philosophy statement

English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding each other and navigating our differences.

In literature classes, students explore significant texts from diverse cultures and periods in history. Students look closely at texts from a range of genres, articulating the way elements of writing, content, form, and style are interrelated, and considering how values and interpretations have changed over time and through different theoretical lenses. Students engage texts through critical analysis and creative response, learning to use evidence to support their interpretations and to navigate critical conversations. Students explore literature both as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms, and as an expression of human experience.

Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.

Outcome Assessment Strategies


Assessment tools may include informal responses to study questions; evaluation of small- and full-group discussion; in-class and out-of-class writing; formal essays, as well as informal responses to study questions and other types of informal writing; presentations by individuals and groups; short and long essay exams; close reading exercises using support/ evidence; writing exercises which include evaluation of various interpretations of a text and their relative validity. Both instructor and peer evaluation may be incorporated in the assessment process.

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

Themes, Concepts, and Issues:

  • setting
  • plot
  • point of view
  • tone/voice
  • narration: 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, omniscient, etc.       
  • unreliable narrator gender
  • narrative styles
  • rhetorical strategies      
  • diction
  • character
  • climax 
  • denouement
  • symbol                         
  • imagery                                               
  • intertextuality 
  • flashback
  • ambiguity
  • irony
  • allusion
  • form/structure
  • dialogue                       
  • theme
  • structuralist theory                       
  • feminist theory
  • psychoanalytic theory
  • Marxist theory
  • postmodern theory
  • reader response theory
  • new historicism
  • biographical criticism
  • race
  • evidence
  • documentation
  • thesis
  • regional or national literatures
  • censorship
  • stereotyping
  • class
  • contextualizing
  • sources/influence
  • explication of the text
  • genres of fiction
     

Competencies and Skills

  • analysis
  • synthesis
  • understanding prose fiction through contexts such as society, politics, 
  • artistic conventions, multiple interpretations of an author, etc.
  • writing about fiction
  • close readings
  • critical reading employing reviews and critical essays
  • speaking and listening reflectively
  • small-group collaboration