English

In the Fall

Course Descriptions

Department of English

Ouachita Baptist University

Fall 2003

 

 

 

Table of Contents

Course                                                                                                                            Page

2023 Advanced Grammar, Dr. Susan Wink                                                                            4

2043 Introduction to Creative Writing, Dr. Amy Sonheim                                                        5

LATN 2203 Elementary Latin I, Dr. Johnny Wink                                                                   5

3013 Technical and Professional Writing, Mrs. Debbie Pounders                                             6

3103 American Literature to 1877, Dr. Tom Greer                                                                 6

3243 Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Dr. Amy Sonheim                                               7

4073 Literary Criticism, Dr. Johnny Wink                                                                               8

4203 Studies in British Poetry, Dr. Doug Sonheim                                                                   8

4213 Studies in the British Novel, Dr. Jay Curlin                                                                     3

4233 Chaucer, Dr. Susan Wink                                                                                              9

 

 

Second Summer Session, July 7-August 1:

4213 Studies in the British Novel

Dr. Jay Curlin

The Palliser Novels

 

Dr. Jay Curlin              1:00-2:50 MTWThF                Lile Hall 200

Those who can join me in July for a lovely month immersed in the six novels of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series will quickly understand not only why Trollope was greatly beloved in the nineteenth century but why modern readers continue to rank him among the masters of the English novel.  My ambition for the course is simply to spend the humid days of July absorbed in the political novels of one of our language’s best novelists, learning something of his life, something of the issues and themes with which his novels are most commonly concerned, and something of what modern scholarship has ventured to say of his work.

 

 

 

English 2023: Advanced Grammar                                                  

Dr. Susan Wink                2:00-3:15 TTh                     Lile Hall 210

Prerequisite: English 2013.

Following an intensive review of traditional grammar using an adaptation of the Reed-Kellog diagram, we will consider the insights provided by generative-transformational grammar into the fascinating and challenging questions regarding how the English language–-indeed, human language–-works.  Do not be intimidated by either of the following:

 

1) thinking that you “hate grammar”–-most people who think they hate grammar don't; even if they do hate something they call grammar, it's almost always what is properly called usage–-how to make verbs agree with subjects in Standard American English, when to use semicolons–-stuff like that. This course is NOT a usage course.

2) the reputation that this course has for being difficult–-there's no question–-it IS difficult, but you shouldn't be intimidated by that; grades in this course are generally higher than in any other course I teach, and it's not because I grade leniently; it's because students rise to the challenge and love doing it.

 

We will have three or four exams.

 

 

English 2043:  Introduction to Creative Writing

Dr. Amy Sonheim                   8:30-9:45 TTH           Lile Hall 200

Since the business of creating art is very human and thus very limited in the most tender of ways, we will relish limits.  Limits will serve as the  cornerstone around  which we build the course.  We will set limits of forms, scenarios, subjects, models, audiences, and even deadlines to actually inspire our compositions.  

 

Conducted as a workshop, the course asks each writer to try a variety of approaches to writing poetry, then a variety of approaches to writing short fiction.  To mark our bearings through the wide world of poetry, we  will work through Kenneth Koch’s Making Your Own Days:  The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (1999). As we make our own poems, we will memorize others’ to get the words and cadence in our blood.  To navigate the course of writing fiction, we will read Stephen King’s On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft (2000).  Likewise, we will read short stories and plays along the way. 

 

Our goal is not to sound like each other, but to find our own best voices.  Working well with writers from all different disciplines—chemistry, music performance, graphic design, dietetics, political science, and yours--Introduction to Creative Writing is based on the premise that good writing is born of honest reflection, coupled with a routine of daily discipline that employs those limits mentioned in paragraph one, and polished off  with the responses of understanding colleagues.

Latin 2203: Elementary Latin I

Dr. Johnny Wink        2:00-3:15 MW                          Lile Hall 200

The purpose of this course is to help people begin to pronounce, read, and--in some small measure--write Classical Latin.  We take up a chapter a week of Wheelock and LaFleur's fine text on the topic.  A good time is had by all who come to class prepared.

 

English 3013: Technical and Professional Writing   

Debbie Pounders        11:00-11:50 MWF                    Lile Hall 200

Technical writing is a problem-solving process involving the central elements of good composition.  Using selected models, we shall consider the nature of technical writing, learn the qualities of good technical writers, and practice the techniques of effective formal and informal technical writing.  We  shall move from simple writing assignments such as memos, e-mail, and report writing, to major writing such as résumés with accompanying letters and projects appropriate to the student's professional needs.  The course culminates in a major writing project and class presentation of that project.

 

 

English 3103: American Literature To 1877                                   

Dr. Tom Greer           8:30-9:45 TTh                           Lile Hall 210

This course, the first part of a two-semester survey of the literary history of our nation, starts well before our forefathers began to agitate for independence from Mother England, when seventeenth-century English colonists of the New World first began to pen journals and travelogues of their adventures in a wild and alien land.  From these colonial beginnings with such luminaries as Captain John Smith and the poet Anne Bradstreet, we shall move happily through two and a half centuries of American literature and history, noting the parallels of American colonial literature with literary movements in England and Europe and tracing the gradual development of a literary voice unique to America.

 

English 3243:  Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Dr. Amy Sonheim                   11:00-12:15 TTH                   Lile 200          

Ten years from now, when Hollywood asks for the movie rights to this college course, the suits will title it Farrago,  Farrago because the leading cast is a confused mixture of politicians, philosophers, novelists, poets, painters, and fantasists.  The rhyme and reason of 1830-1901 will be under the direction of Queen Victoria; but, the scenes and actions will be as varied as life itself.  If you cannot wait until the movie comes out , take the course this fall.  Here is what it holds:

 

Conducted something like a great-books course,  Victorian Literature holds an entry from each of the following writers:  Carlyle, R. Browning, Gaskell, Arnold, Dickens, Gosse, and Lear. Reading will be our main work, complemented by Tuesday quizzes.  At the start of the course , as we read Sartor Resartus (1833), we will also be researching and writing an 8-page essay.  We will relish Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842), one of which will be yours to explicate in a 3-4 page essay.  Through the voice of  Elizabeth Gaskell, we will hear a woman’s perspective on industrial troubles in her novel Mary Barton (1848).    We will enjoy the murder mystery of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865).  Then, we will hear the high-brow criticism of Arnold in Culture & Anarchy (1869).  Summarizing the century with the story of his life, Edmund Gosse  offers   Father and  Son (1907).  Then, we will end the class with the light verse of Edward Lear (1812-1888), writing some of our own.  Besides the quizzes, 2 papers, and limericks, there will be a final, comprehensive essay exam.

This course substitutes for either ENGL 3203: English Literature to 1800 or ENGL 3213: English Literature Since 1800.

English 4073: Literary Criticism

Dr. Johnny Wink        1:00-1:50 MWF                        Lile Hall 200

Using as our text “Criticism: The Major Statements,” we will study a reasonable sampling of literary critical writings of the Western world, beginning with Plato's “Ion” and concluding with Henry Louis Gates's “The Signifying Monkey.”  Students will be asked to take weekly quizzes, to write brief weekly responses to what they're reading, and to train their own burgeoning literary critical skills on a poem, play, short story or novel in their magnum opus, a final paper of some length.

 

ENGL 4203: Studies in British Poetry

Dr. Doug Sonheim     12:30-1:45 TTh                         Lile Hall 200

 

"There was a ship. . . "

 

Thus the Mariner begins his strange tale of guilt, isolation and reconciliation in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  Our semester will be devoted to this and other stories told in verse.  We will spend the semester reading narrative poems from different historical periods. All these narrative poems will be middling in length; we will avoid both the narrative lyrics and the longer, epic-length works.  Our reading list will include Beowulf (using the recent Seamus Heaney verse translation), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel" Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes," Morris's "The Haystack in the Floods," Rosetti's "Goblin Market" and others.  In addition to weekly quizzes, we will write three essays and take two exams.

 

"Had she come all this way for this,

To part at last without a kiss?"

 

 

English 4233: Chaucer

Dr. Susan Wink          3:30-4:45 TTh                           Lile Hall 200