This description is not intended to replace individual instructors' syllabi, but rather it is a general description of general, departmental goals to be achieved in the course.

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 the genres and styles within those periods appropriate to the course

A. English 250

1. begins with the Early English (Anglo-Saxon) period and ends with the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. All periods in between, including the Medieval, Renaissance, Jacobean, and Seventeenth Century, are examined; and

2. includes examples of the epic, romance, sonnet, lyric, drama, essay, and novel. Recommended authors and/or works include: Beowulf, Sir Gavain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Malory, Everyman, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Dryden, Behn, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Johnson.

B. English 251

1. begins with the Romantic period and ends with the Contemporary period. All periods in between, including the Victorian, Edwardian, Modem, are examined; and

2. includes examples of a variety of poetic types, essay, drama, short story, and the novel. Recommended authors include: Blake, Bums, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, M. Shelley, P.B. Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Pater, Wilde, Hopkins, Dickens, G. Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Sassoon, Owen, Yeats, Woolf, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Smith, Auden, Thomas, Lessing, Heaney.

3. help students to connect literature with history and culture

A. English 250 helps students understand the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena, such as the invasion of England by various groups (e.g., Germanic tribes. Vikings, and Normans), chivalry, monarchy, the feudal system, humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, civil war, the Enlightenment, colonialism.

B. English 251 helps students understand the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena, such as the Industrial Revolution, suffragism, the Irish Troubles, WWI, colonialism, Post-War culture.

4. helps 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., Abrams, Norton Anthology of British Literature; Damrosch, Longman Anthology of British 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 the major field test.

III. Methods of Assessment

Our 200-level literature courses

8. have at least two in-class exams, parts of which 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 the literary texts. Finished writing may be done in or outside of class. Some writing may include some 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 a sophomore literature course must have educational preparation and/or experience to teach the course.

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 requirement of holding a master's degree and of having a minimum of 18 graduate hours in English.