Lecturer: Charbel El Amm

Email: ce26@aub.edu.lb

CVSP204 – section 3: MWF 1-1:50pm.

CVSP204 – section 4: MWF 2-2:50pm.
Office hours: MWF 12-12:30pm and 3-3:30pm.

Outline of the course CVSP204 (Contemporary Studies) – sequence 2 CVSP course:

Civilization Studies Program

CVSP 204: READING SCHEDULE Fall 2021-22
COORDINATOR: Dr. Sirène Harb

Weeks and Dates Assignment

Week 1 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books), Chapters. 1, 2, 8. (CVSP
Reading Selections)

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Mentor). (CVSP Reading Selections)

Week 2

Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan (OxfordWorld's
Week 3 Classics). (CVSP Reading Selections)

Week 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. (CVSP Reading Selections)

Sigmund Freud, Civilization, and its Discontents (Norton). (CVSP Reading Selections)
Week 5

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice in Death in Venice, and Other Stories

Week 6 (Vintage). (CVSP Reading Selections)

Week 7 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Faber & Faber).

No new assignments
Week 8

Week 9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (CVSP Reading Selections)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Penguin), pp. 1-49 (Introduction & chapter 1). (CVSP
Week 10 Reading Selections)
Week 11
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Heinemann).
OR alternative reading: Elias Khoury, Little Gandhi
No new assignments
WEEK 12

No new assignments
WEEK 13

READING PERIOD

FINAL EXAMS
Critical skills you acquire through he course:
(1) to listen to and recall salient features of an academic lecture;
(2) to read a text in different ways and appreciate it in its own historical and cultural context – an
exercise in empathy;
(3) to identify basic elements of a text;
(4) to formulate questions about a lecture/a text;
(5) to discuss ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect and freedom;
(6) to ground one’s arguments in a text;
(7) to analyze in depth excerpts of a text in English in both verbal presentation and written form;
(8) to relate a text to the contemporary world/one’s own life;
(9) to compare texts and shuttle between different historical and cultural contexts;
(10) to evaluate texts with increasing complexity;

Most of the reading selections are uploaded to Moodle, they are available on the course “Meta”
page you have access to. You only must buy two books: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Tayeb
Salih, Season of Migration to the North. Additionally, I will upload to Moodle supplementary
texts. I will inform you, one week in advance, what passages to read. The course does not include
mandatory common lectures; however, you can always check the common lectures and flysheets
of previous CVSP204 classes, all being available on the CVSP website. When we resume teaching
on campus, you must have available the texts we will be working on.

Grade distribution:
Attendance: 5%
Class participation: 15%.
Team debate session: 5%.
Midterm 1: 20%
Midterm 2: 20%
Final: 35%.
The midterm and the final are on-campus written exams. If the situation deteriorates and access to
campus becomes impossible, the mode of examination will be amended accordingly. In that case,
instead of a written on-campus exam, you will have to write a paper.
The conversion from numeric to letter grades follows the table available on the AUB website:
https://www.aub.edu.lb/Registrar/Pages/academic-information.aspx

Attendance: For each session you miss without proper justification, you lose a point. On campus,
a justification must be provided by someone with relevant authority, like a doctor.

For online teaching, we will use Webex. First, you should download the Webex app on your laptop
or smartphone. I will schedule a meeting for each session, and you will automatically receive an
invitation by email that contains the meeting name and the access password. To access the session,
you should logon to Webex by going to aub.webex.com and sign in by inserting your AUB email
and password. You then join the meeting by selecting the meeting name and using the password
you would have had received.
All the sessions will be recorded as audios and uploaded to Moodle.
Your video feed must be on. That way you are more actively partaking in class discussions.
Each online session will begin with a 5-minute recap of the previous one.

Participation: Class discussions are based on the reading selections you are required to read. You
are encouraged to participate frequently in these discussions. When you do, you will be graded.
The grade will be based on the quality of your participation. Repeated participations will increase
your overall participation grade.

The written on-campus exam is either a straightforward question where you express the material
you studied, or a question requiring analysis and interpretation. You must consider an exam
question as a sentence you have to decode. You must first identify its key concepts and then see
how they are connected. This connection can either be a mutual exclusion, a bipolar opposition, a
complementarity, a gradual amplification, a mutual explication etc. Once the connection is
discovered, the answer must be structured accordingly. For example, if two concepts, A and B, are
contraries, you must explain each then show how they exclude one another, and then finally
envision a possibility where their contrariety can be overcome. That way, the ans wer will be
relevant, it thus would answer the question adequately. If you condense all the correct information
without answering the question, i.e. without seeing and explicating the connection between the
main concepts, your answer is not relevant to the question, and so you will not have a very good
grade. When your answer is relevant, quantity, which is the number of correct information you
introduce, comes into play. A relevant answer must also have quality, it should display the logical
constituents that interconnect concepts, paragraphs, and theses. The answer should be clear. If the
answer has a certain degree of originality, while being relevant, substantial, and of high quality,
then your grade will be excellent. When I finish correcting the exams, I explain the mistakes most
of you made and the ideal way(s) of answering the questions.

The paper (in case having an on-campus exam becomes impossible) is aimed at evaluating how
well you understood the material covered, and how efficiently you can use it to analyze a text. You
will be graded based on the relevance and the quantity of the information you introduced, as well
as on the quality (clarity, coherence, structure, etc.) of your writing. You can also gain points on
originality if you introduce perspectives not covered in class. Once the papers are graded, I will
explain in class the ideal ways of analyzing the text and will correct the general mistakes that were
made. I will teach you how to write a paper, in detail.

The team debate session: I will split the class into 2 groups. We will have one topic covered by 2
thinkers. Each group will choose one thinker and research his theses concerning that topic. You
will have to produce a bibliography. In class, the two teams will present their findings separately
and then, through debate, each group will try to disprove the ideas of the other.

You are encouraged to always check for resources online. The AUB library also provides valuable
information accessible online.
COURSE POLICY
Academic integrity and honesty are central components of a student's education. Ethical conduct
maintained in an academic context will be taken eventually into a student's professional career.
Academic honesty is essential to a community of scholars searching for and learning to seek the
truth. Anything less than total commitment to honesty undermines the efforts of the entire
academic community. Both students and faculty are responsible for ensuring the academic
integrity of the University. (AUB Student Handbook, p. 33). For definitions of cheating and
plagiarism as well as the consequences for such, see the AUB "Student Code of Conduct" as found
in the Student Handbook (esp. pp. 85-86 and 88) and on the AUB website.
http://pnp.aub.edu.lb/general/conductcode/158010081.html
At minimum, anyone caught in violation of academic integrity will receive, as per the "Student
Code of Conduct", a failing grade of forty points for the assignment in question. Should the
violation deserve greater punishment, it will be referred to the Dean and the Dean's Administrative
Committee.

STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

AUB strives to make learning experiences as accessible as possible. If you anticipate or experience
academic barriers due to a disability (including mental health, chronic or temporary medical
conditions), please inform your instructor immediately so that we can privately discuss options. In
order to help establish reasonable accommodations and facilitate a smooth accommodations
process, you are encouraged to contact the Accessible Education Office: accessibility@aub.edu.lb;
+961-1-350000x3246; West Hall, 314.

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AUB is committed to providing a safe, respectful, and inclusive educational and professional
environment for students, staff, faculty, Medical Center patients, and visitors. AUB policies protect
against discrimination based on sex, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other
protected categories. Sex-based discrimination, including sexual harassment and sexual violence,
is prohibited by both university policy and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which
applies to US federally funded education. The Equity and Title IX Program provides an avenue
for members of the AUB community who have experienced discrimination or discriminatory
harassment to report and get help. The university maintains an Equity and Title IX coordinator
based in the Office of the President, and the program is supported by a network of faculty and staff
volunteers including an Advisory Council, Deputy Title IX Coordinators, and qualified panel
members for formal investigations.