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General Requirements and American Literary Tradition (English 260-261) I. Content Our 200-level literature courses 1. involve students in critical reading to facilitate active engagement with texts. Students will read approximately 50 pages each week. 2. involve students with the full range of literary periods and genres within those periods appropriate to a course. A. English 260 1. begins with the exploration of America and ends at the Civil War. Examines all periods in between, including Colonial Writers, Revolutionary America, American Renaissance, Transcendentalism; and 2. includes examples of journal, essay, sermon, poetry, short story, novel, sentimental fiction. Recommended authors include: Columbus, Bradford, Rowlandson, Bradstreet, Edwards, Franklin, Creveceour, Wheatley, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Stowe, Douglass, Whitman. B. English 261 1. begins with Realism and ends with Contemporary Literature. Examines all periods in between, including Naturalism, Modernism, Harlem Renaissance, Postmodernism; and 2. includes examples of poetry, short fiction, regionalism, local color, imagism, confessional poetry, formalism, autobiography, biography, essay, drama, and novel. Recommended authors include: Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Jewett, Chopin, Crane, Gilman, James, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, Hughes, Ellison, Wright, Steinback, Lowell, Rich, Ginsberg, T. Williams, Miller, Carver, Morrison, Pynchon. 3. help students to connect literature with history and culture. A. English 260 helps students understand the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena, such as the discovery of the continent, Puritan culture, colonial development, revolutionary America, abolotionism, democratic evelopment, the Civil War. B. English 261 helps students understand the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena, such as Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution, immigrant experience, suffragism, WWI, civil rights movements, the Depression, WWII, post-war culture. 4. help students to connect reading, writing, and thinking about literary texts with the development and analysis of personal values. II. Classroom Approaches Our 200-level literature courses 5. employ a variety of strategies in the classroom to introduce students to literary texts (for example, lecture, discussion, collaborative group projects). 6. employ both lower-and higher-order thinking skills in the analysis of literary texts. Students should be able to recall certain facts and should be able to develop their own arguments of support. 7. employ a college-level anthology (e.g., McMicheal, Anthology of American Literature; Lauter , Heath Anthology of American Literature and supplement (selection of the latter at the instructor's discretion). Critical engagement with a wide variety of texts provides preparation for upper-division English courses and major field test. III. Methods of Assessment Our 200-level literature courses 8. have at least two in-class exams, parts of which will include essay writing.9. engage students in other relevant writing activities. Over the course of the semester, students write at least 10 pages of finished written work outside of exams, focused particularly on literary texts. Finished writing may be done in or outside of class. Some writing may include work with secondary sources. IV. Utilization of Faculty Expertise Our 200-level literature courses 10. reflect our commitment to capitalizing on the strengths of the faculty. A. Faculty teaching sophomore literature courses must have the educational background and/or experience to teach the courses. B. Any person teaching as an adjunct faculty member for the UTM English department or teaching this course in a situation that offers students dual credit must meet the SACS requirements of holding a master's degree and of having 18 graduate hours in English. |