ENGL 2320 - Course Overview

Writers typically include Pope, Swift, Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, one or two nineteenth-century novelists, Yeats, Woolf, and Joyce.

Instructor: Jonathan D. Evans, Ph.D., Associate Professor, The University of Georgia.

Texts: Abrams, et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, 7th ed., Norton, 2001; Brontë, Wuthering Heights, any edition. Preferred is Riverside Edition, Pritchett, ed., Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Course Overview

Introduction

This course covers literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries (the Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods), concentrating on major works from the two periods both for the unique qualities of the works themselves and for the relationship of those works to the cultures of their ages. The goals of the course are to give students increased knowledge and understanding of the literature of these periods and of the ways it reveals how people thought and felt about themselves and their world during those times. This knowledge and understanding should help students understand our own times better, since we of the late twentieth-century post-Modernist period are the immediate descendants of the cultural continuum covered in this course.

The three centuries and four literary periods dealt with in this course constitute collectively the prologue to and beginning of the era we are now living in. The eighteenth century, with its turn towards rationalism, the scientific method, and centralization, and the early nineteenth century (the Romantic period), with its turn towards introspection and what we would call today "psychological matters," are the prologue to our times. The later nineteenth century (the Victorian period), with its mixture of self-confidence and doubt, and its reactions to the speculations of the geologists and astronomers, of Darwin and later of Marx; and the early twentieth century (the Modernist period), with its technology, World Wars, and its own reactions to Freud, Einstein and others, are the early stages of the culture that is still ours. Knowledge of the thinking and writing of these periods, reflected as always most complexly and most compellingly through literature, is an absolutely essential component of a valid education.

Preparing Lessons

Because this is a correspondence course, most of what you learn you will learn on your own. The key to mastering the material is simple: REREAD. The amount of material to be read is substantial but manageable. In order to do well in the course, you must read it thoroughly, and this means not only one time thoroughly, but several times. A good procedure is the following: read the assigned material once through, highlighting and making notes as you go, before you look at the lesson questions. Then go through the questions carefully, and reread the material with them in mind. As you start to write your answers to the questions, keep looking back at the material. Ideally, you should read it again before you do your final revisions of the answers you have written.

Each lesson represents at least one week’s work, assuming you can spend several hours each day on it. Depending on your individual situation and the time you can devote to reading and thinking, it’s quite likely that each lesson represents closer to two weeks’ work. The answers to all the written assignment questions must be thorough, focused, concise, and well-written. Answer exactly what the question asks. Use details from the literary texts in supporting the general points of your answers. Each written assignment consists of three types of questions: short definitions (about ten per lesson), four medium-length questions, and either two short essays or one longer essay. The short definitions should be precise and concise: maybe a single word will do, or maybe a sentence or two, but not more than that. The medium-length questions should be answered in a paragraph or two. Short essays should take about two or three pages, maybe five hundred words or so. The longer essays should run about one thousand words. These suggestions as to length are approximate; more important than a specific number of words or pages is a thorough, thoughtful, accurate, and concise coverage of the topic. In all your answers, but most importantly in the essays, your grade will be determined not only by the accuracy and significance of the information you provide but by the quality of your writing. I will expect at least the quality of writing required to pass ENGL 1102 or an equivalent introductory composition course. Your essays must be focused, coherent, well-organized and -developed, and written with good grammar, diction, punctuation, spelling, and style.

If you read all the material—the introductory material in the text, the literary works themselves, and the lesson questions—open-mindedly, curiously, and thoughtfully, you will be able to appreciate the power and beauty of some of the finest works of literature that have ever been written.

Grading and Examination

The general format of the final exam will be similar to that of the lessons: short, medium, and essay-length questions. Some of the short-answer questions focus on chronology, e.g., dates of works, general time periods, important historical events, etc., and some are identifications. Many of the medium-length questions are very similar to questions you have answered in the lessons, or they will be somewhat restructured versions of those questions. The final exam essay is on a broader, more comprehensive topic than those of the individual lessons; this essay requires something in the area of fifteen hundred words.

I will grade your final exam according to the standards of accuracy, conciseness, clarity, and good writing that applied to the lessons. Since you will not have your text or other written material available for the final exam as you did for the lessons, I will not expect specific citations from the works or as much precise factual detail as I did for the lessons. I will expect to see clear evidence of your careful attention to the material you have read for the course and reviewed for the final. I will expect standards of writing appropriate to an in-class theme. Especially for the essay, take time to plan and organize your approach to the topic, and at the end take time to proofread and correct errors. See also the information about the final examination following Lesson 9.

Please note that IDL policy requires that you pass the final in order to pass the course, regardless of grades earned on lessons. You are responsible for knowing and abiding by IDL policies and procedures. See your Student Handbook for detailed information.

For each lesson, the first five questions (the identifications and the four medium-length questions) count for 60 percent of the grade. The essay or essays count for 40 percent of the grade (i.e., if it’s a lesson with one longer essay, that counts 40 percent; if it’s one with two essays, each counts 20 percent). On the final exam, the chronology questions count a total of 5 percent; the identifications 15 percent; the medium length questions 45 percent; and the essay 35 percent.

The grade for the course will be calculated as follows: the average grade of the lessons (the nine grades added up and divided by nine) will count 50 percent; the final exam grade will count 50 percent.