2009 Summer School Course Offerings
Term 1
ENGL 111.10 1:00-2:30 daily Mary Ellen Cowser
The first semester of one of the first-year composition sequences. Students must have an ACT English subscore of 19 or higher to qualify for this course. Students who do not meet the prerequisite may take English 100 in the fall.
ENGL 112.10 9:15-10:45 daily Tim Hacker
Graphic Novels
The different forms that writing can take—letters, essays, short stories, and novels, for example—are called genres. Most genres have been around for a long time; it’s a rare occurrence when a new one comes along. So we’re lucky that in the past 15 years or so we’ve seen a new kind of writing emerge: graphic novels. Although they may look like comic books, they’re not. For one thing, they’re longer. And they are meaningful to us in ways that we expect serious writing to be.
We will learn about the visual craft of graphic novels by reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. We will apply what he says by writing in response to three graphic novels: Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, about the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990’s; Maus, Art Spiegelman’s recounting of his parents’ experiences in the Holocaust; and American Widow, a memoir of one year in the life of author Alissa Torres, beginning with September 11, 2001. Each student will, in addition, complete a research project inspired by the work of our class.
Students must have successfully completed English 110 or 111 to take this course.
ENGL 112.11 1:00-2:30 daily Neil Graves
The final semester of the first-year composition sequences. Students must have successfully completed English 110 or 111 to take this course.
ENGL 250.10 11:00-12:30 daily Chris Hill
British Literary Tradition I
This will be a fast-paced, reading-intensive introduction to the beginnings of English literature. Starting with Beowulf, we will read multiple works involving knightly heroism, love and desire, and how people determine what makes for true goodness. We will focus on social and material 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 and Donne.
ENGL 251.10 11:00-12:30 daily Neil Graves
British Literary Tradition II
“Ah, what is so rare as a day in June?” asks James Russell Lowell. Though he wasn’t British, his sentiments echo those of the Nature-focused Romantic and Victorian poets we’ll be reading in English 251, a wide-ranging survey of the literature of the British Isles that starts around 1800 and comes close to today. Not all the poets, playwrights, and story tellers whom we’ll read are up-beat, of course: Some modernist pieces mirror the decline of Empire and the anguished traumas of two world wars. In addition to Romantic poets including Blake and Keats and Victorian stalwarts such as Tennyson, we’ll read modern masterpieces by Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and others. Your independent writing projects and reports can indulge certain personal interests in literature, culture, and the arts, with a full range of women writers also adding topical diversity. The chance to read classic writers is a “rare” privilege, and summer is a good time to take in this 200-year panorama of great art that many other liberally educated people are already familiar with.
Students must have successfully completed English 112 to take this course.
ENGL 260.10 1:00-2:30 daily Tim Hacker
American Literary Tradition I
While 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 and countries. Most of the major periods, genres, and movements in our literature during these times, including Puritan literature, Southwest Humor, the Slave Narrative, and Romanticism, will be examined. The assigned readings will be selected based upon their value as examples of significant trends in the development of American literature. These readings will include works by such authors as Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lectures and discussions will concentrate on the explication of these essential texts but will also allow time for covering relevant historical and aesthetic contexts. The increasing national consciousness developing in authors during this period will provide some additional focus for and continuity to our discussions.
Students must have successfully completed English 112 to take this course.
Completion of first-year composition is a prerequisite for all English classes 200-level and above.
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/.