The University of Tennessee - Martin

Literature Survey Courses Spring 2010

English 200, 250, 251, 260, 261, 271

Each spring semester, the English Department offers 250, 251, 260, 261, and 271 to meet the Humanities requirements in the general education core and the Humanities requirements in your degree programs, whether you are a student in the Colleges of Agriculture and Applied Sciences, Business and Public Affairs, Education and Behavioral Sciences, Engineering and Natural Sciences, or Humanities and Fine Arts. 

English 200 is required of all English majors and recommended for English minors.  We also recommend that you take it as early in your academic career as you can.

English 200 (Introduction to Literary Style)

Do you know how to write an explication? What is a villanelle? Why are sonnets written in iambic pentameter? What is iambic pentameter? English 200 is a one-hour course designed to introduce students to the principles of and practice in literary analysis. Because we meet twice a week, we finish at mid-term.  Required of all English majors and recommended for English minors, English 200 covers terminology and writing techniques used in English studies and should be taken as soon as possible.

English 250 (British Literary Tradition)

This will be a fast-paced, reading-intensive introduction to the beginnings of English literature.  Starting with the epic of Beowulf and the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we will read multiple works involving quests, knights, lust, love, piety, flattery, heroism, and humor.  We will focus on historical contexts of the works we read, but we will also spend a good amount of time discovering how writers respond to each other and to the demands of the forms they choose to write in:  epic, romance, lyric, drama, religious prose, and so on.  Major writers we are sure to cover include Shakespeare and Chaucer, Milton and Pope, Jonson and Johnson, Sidney, Marvell, and Donne.  There will be a hefty amount of reading, and some writing of both the graded and the ungraded variety.
Section 001       MWF    1-1:50                CRN 20315      Chris Hill

Section 002       MWF    11-11:50            CRN 20390      David Williams

English 251 (British Literary Tradition)

English 251 features poems, essays, stories, and plays by canonical British writers from the last two centuries when three dynamic literary periods—the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern—have signaled revolutionary cultural change. Romantic innovators such as Wordsworth and Coleridge laid the foundation for the vital lyrics of Shelley and Keats. Energetic Victorians including Tennyson and Arnold explored the role of the artist in a fast-changing society when England was a world power. And Moderns including Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf experimented with new forms and modes to catch the tenor of the times. Iconoclasts including Mary Wollstonecraft and Oscar Wilde helped round out this eclectic mix of voices.  English 251 may be taken before English 250.

Section 001       TR        2:30-3:45          CRN 20299      John Glass

Section 002       MWF    10-10:50           CRN 20359      Jeffrey Longacre

Section 003       TR        1-2:15                CRN 20363      Daniel Pigg

English 251 Honors  (British Literary Tradition)

What are the legacies of revolution, alienation, mechanization, and evolution for modern society? English 251 surveys literature written in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The course considers writers such as Wordsworth, Keats, Woolf, Eliot, and Lessing in historical, political, artistic, and philosophical contexts.  English 251 may be taken before English 250.  This section is for students in the Honors Program only.  

Section 001       TR        11-12:15          CRN 20514      David Williams

English 260 (American Literary Tradition)

Hope, Memory, Irony:  Early American Literature and its Discontents  

While we will look at some of the seminal texts and authors that make up the American Literary Tradition, our task will be to read, discuss, and describe the complexity and richness of American literature before the Civil war and its relationship to other cultures, both indigenous and foreign. We will move triumphantly—and certainly naively—from European discovery and exploration through colonization. Then, according to God’s sovereign pleasure we’ll suffer with the Puritans and reason our way into the 18th Century and Revolutionary War. We will end our class, rising above petty convention with the help of the transcendentalists and Romantic writers. We’ll also see what voices left out of these grand narratives have to say about America and being American. Certainly women, Native American, African American and other writers will offer exception and richness to our literary tradition.

Section 001       MWF    3-3:50                CRN 20208      Charles Bradshaw

Drawn from the time when indigenous tribes peopled the American landscape up until the Civil War, the literary artifacts that we study in this course reflect implausible sagas of settlement, unification, and the evolution of a genuinely American character, grounded in the Enlightenment but audaciously Romantic at the core. Our readings and discussions highlight canonical essays, poems, and stories that reflect a kaleidoscopic national experience, with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe emerging as salient voices. Writing projects stress quality rather than length and allow writers a range of topics that can mesh with individual interests. Students interested in American art and culture or in American thought may find that the course helps explain our modern peculiarities, opportunities, and challenges.

Section 002       W          2-4:50                 CRN 20307      Neil Graves     

English 261 (American Literary Tradition)

American Voices, Changing Times

Between the Civil War to the present day, America has experienced changes in just about every area of society.  And men and women took a pen in hand to not only document the changes but to react to them.  This class covers various essays, stories, poetry, and drama that represent both of those.  Expect to read shorter, well-loved works from some of America’s best-known writers—Twain, James, Dickinson, Glaspell, Faulkner, Hemingway, Baraka, Giovanni, Momaday, Tennessee Williams, and a plethora of others.  We will strive for lively class discussions as well as written and oral projects.  Expect to draw upon skills you gained from ENGL 111 and 112 to successfully complete ENGL 261.  English 261 may be taken before English 260.

Section 001       TR        2:30-3:45          CRN 20277      David Carithers

Section 002       TR        11-12:15           CRN 20291      Pam Davis

This course will survey American literature from the Civil War to the present. Works are chosen based on their historical significance, others from their social and political insights, and others for their cultural virtues.  As we will see, these works form a rich collection of consciousness through imaginative and critical writing.  The premise of this course will be to analyze these works as diverse representation of the American experience. As such, we will pay close attention to the social and literary movements and conflicts throughout this span of time. Also, we will examine these works through a philosophical and theoretical lens giving considerations to ideas such as the American Dream, Assimilation/Alienation, Man/Nature, Humanity, the Harlem Renaissance, Marginalization, Autobiography, and Civil Rights. Emphasis upon critical thinking and close reading will add to the understanding of the American experience.

Section 003       MWF    2-2:50                 CRN 20472      Melvin Hill

English 271 (World Literature)

What distinguishes good from evil? What is the value of suffering? What is the place of the individual in society? These are all questions raised by writers from the eighteenth century to the present. Explore these and other crucial concerns of the modern world in texts such as Goethe’s Faust, Voltaire’s Candide, works by Tolstoy, and other important figures in western European literature.  English 271 may be taken before English 270.

Section 001       TR        1-2:15                  CRN 20286      Mary Ellen Cowser

Completion of the first-year composition sequence is a prerequisite for all 200-level English classes.

If you have any questions about these classes or about the English Department generally, please call Lynn Alexander at 731.881.7300 or visit our website at http://www.utm.edu/departments/chfa/english/.