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DartmouthX: DART.ENGL.01.x The American Renaissance: Classic Literature of the 19th Century

AmRenX Syllabus

About this Course

The American Renaissance: Classic Literature of the 19th Century (DART.ENGL.01.x) explores the literary, political and historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. The information below will guide you through the course and provide important resources to allow your learning experience to be more successful. 

What You Will Learn

      • The connections between the disparate locations, myths, and traditions found in nineteenth-century American literature.
      • The historical turning points involved in the production of an American literary tradition.
      • The ways in which Dartmouth College participated in the creation of American literature.

Course Staff 

Prof. Donald E. Pease Jr., AmRenX Instructor
Prof. James E. Dobson, AmRenX Instructor

Mike Goudzwaard, Instructional Designer
Erin DeSilva,  Instructional Designer

Memory Apata, Lead TA
Alex Ganninger '16, Undergraduate TA
Robert Sayegh '18, Undergraduate TA

Textbook

All the required and recommended readings are contained within the Lacuna Stories annotation tool. At the start of each author module, you will find a list of the required and recommend readings for the module. You may also find the full list of readings as PDF files and the ISBN numbers for recommended printed copies on the course companion website. 

Course tools and technologies 

edX platform: AmRenX is offered as a free course (audit) on the edX platform.  Additionally, we are utilizing two other technologies:

Yellowdig will be used for our discussions.  Each post will have a pin, and you can feel free to create pins yourself as well.  Yellowdig will appear for all optional and required discussions within the course content in edX.  For more information on how your participation in these discussions will be graded, see below.

Lacuna Stories (developed by Stanford University) will be our reading platform for the course.  We chose this tool because it allows you to annotate the texts we will be reading, and make these annotations either public (to be shared with the class and course staff) or private (for your own use).  There will be some assignments that ask you to annotate in Lacuna Stories. You may prefer annotating printed texts; in this case, you could copy your marginal comments into Lacuna Stories.  

To gain access to Yellowdig and Lacuna Stories, please see the Getting Started section of the course site.

Educational method

This course will utilize lectures, conversations, keyword videos, interviews with experts, readings, discussions, multiple-choice self-assessments and one graded essay per week. 

audit or Earn a verified Certificate

You have two options when you sign up for this course. You can either Audit the course for free or enroll as an I.D. Verified Certificate learner ($50 U.S.). See edX Verified Certificates for more information. You cannot receive Dartmouth College credit for this course.

To receive a Verified Certificate in this course, you must enroll or upgrade to Verified Certificate and have a final score of 60% or greater. Click Progress on the top menu to view your current score. 

You can You will be graded on:

    • Discussions in Yellowdig (board points in Yellowdig transfer to edX Progress page every 2 hours) 40%
    • Writing Assignments (peer assessed for audit or instructor assessed for Verified Certificates) 40%
    • Annotations in Lacuna Stories or in another place (self-assessment at the end of each module) 20%

In order to be successful, you should:

    • Watch all of the required videos and optionally participate in the questions below each video
    • Contribute to all required discussions in Yellowdig
    • Complete all required reading assignments
    • Annotate the readings in the Lacuna Stories tool for requested assignments.

Course Schedule

This course is offered from February 16th through April 5th, 2016. After the course closes, you will still be able to access the course content as an archived course. 

Module

Topic

Release Date

Module 0

Start Here - Course Introduction

February 16th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 1

Ralph Waldo Emerson

February 16th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 2

Frederick Douglass

February 16th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 3

Walt Whitman

March 1st, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 4

Nathaniel Hawthorne

March 1st, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 5

Herman Melville

March 15th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 6

Harriet Beecher Stowe

March 29th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Module 7

Mark Twain

March 29th, 2016 17:00 UTC

Getting Help

If you have a question about the technology or problems with the edX platform, please click the Help button to the left of your screen to contact edX Help. They will respond to your question within 24 hours (weekdays). 

If you have questions about the course content or general course administration, please post in the Yellowdig pin "How do I get help in this course?"

Discussion Forum Etiquette

The Yellowdig discussion forum is a unique opportunity to engage with learners from all over the world. In order for us to take advantage of this wealth of knowledge and viewpoints, please consider the following when you post:

      • The best posts are constructive, thoughtful and respectful.
      • Participate. You will get out what you put in, so be active.
      • If you disagree with a post, respond using evidence and reasoning obtained from this course or a reputable sources. 
      • Use your own words. If you include a quote or reference, when possible also provide a citation.
      • Slang words and abbreviations vary across cultures, so please avoid whenever possible.

Things You Should Know:

      • Please limit your posts to 200 words or less. This is an edX standard.
      • Use the Yellowdig tools, such as Bookmark for updates, Love it! or Like to endorse the thoughts of your classmates, and Not Relevant for misuse. If you see an inappropriate post, mark it as "Not relevant" instead of adding your own commentary.
      • A badge on a post means a member of the course staff has endorsed it.
      • Any technical questions or concerns should be posted in the Course Information Yellowdig Board.

People We Would Like to Thank:

The AmRenX Course Team who built this course.

Mike Murray, Video Producer 
Sawyer Broadley, Video Editor
Tom Dooley, Video Production
Laura Braunstein, Course Librarian 

DartmouthX:

Josh Kim, Director of Digital Initiatives   
Susan Zaslaw, Director, IT Project Services
Barbara Knauff, Associate Director of Educational Technologies
Jing Qi, Learning Analytics 

edX:

Kathleen Carr, Partner Manager

All of our guest appearing in the videos and all of our beta testers. 

edX Mobile App

You can access the course videos on the edX mobile app (iOS or Android). See Take edX on the Go for more information. To fully participate in this course, you will need to view the course on a desktop/laptop browser. 

Permissions and reuse of Course content:

Creative Commons License
Introduction to Environmental Science DARTX.ENVS.01.X by Dartmouth College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.