English
In the Fall
Course Descriptions
Department of English
Ouachita Baptist University
Fall 2004
Table of Contents
Course Page
2023 Advanced Grammar, Dr. Susan Wink 3
2043 Introduction to Creative Writing, Dr. Jay Curlin 3
3013 Technical and Professional Writing, Beverly Slavens 4
3103 American Literature to 1877, Dr. Tom Greer 4
3223
Medieval and Renaissance English Literature,
5
Dr. Johnny Wink
4073 Literary Criticism, Dr. Jay Curlin 6
4213 Studies in the British Novel, Dr. Amy Sonheim 6
4223 Shakespeare, Dr. Doug Sonheim 7
Appendix:
Why Study English Language and Literature at 8
Ouachita?, Dr. Doug Sonheim
English 2023: Advanced Grammar
Dr. Susan Wink TTh 12:30-1:45 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. Jay Curlin TTh 2:00-3:15 Lile Hall 200
This courses introduces students to both the craft and the profession of the creative writer. To explore the major genres available to the writer, we shall read a handful of successful works in the areas of poetry, prose fiction, and drama and compose original works in each of these genres. As a writing workshop, the class will provide students a forum in which to read and discuss one another’s material. In addition to the original works generated by the workshop participants, we shall read Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, 7th ed.
English 3013:
Technical and Professional Writing 
Beverly Slavens Th 6:00-8:30 Lile Hall 122
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 TTh 8:30-9:45 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 3223: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature
Dr. Johnny Wink MWF 10:00-10:50 Lile 200
From the glories of the harsh-tongued Anglo-Saxons to the Golden Age of English drama shall we ramble, getting a firm grip on the historical contours of the first nine-hundred years of English literature and deepening our pleasure in same as we go. I’ll ask members of the class to take weekly quizzes, to write weekly papers in response to their reading, to commit to memory a tiny vein of ore from the treasure trove of early English poetry, and to take a midterm and a final exam.
This course substitutes for either ENGL 3203: English Literature to 1800 or ENGL 3213: English Literature Since 1800.
English 4073: Literary Criticism
Dr. Jay Curlin TTh 11:00-12:15 Lile Hall 200
This course is designed to provide at least four services for the student of letters. To begin with, we shall survey, in a regrettably condensed form, the history of literary criticism, providing as stable a foundation as possible by which to understand what may often appear to be the babble of the present age. Secondly, we shall examine, in more thorough fashion, eleven basic schools of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism, employing Charles E. Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice to set each school in its historical and philosophical context. Thirdly, we shall enjoy a brief respite from such theoretical matters by reading a great nineteenth-century novel by one of the century's greatest novelists, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Lastly, we shall see what modern literary criticism makes of such a novel by examining Tess of the d'Urbervilles through the lenses of five modern critical approaches: New Historicism, Feminist and Gender Criticism, Deconstruction, Reader-Response Criticism, and Cultural Criticism. Along the way, you will have the pleasure of taking daily reading quizzes, writing two scholarly papers, and performing any number of impressive feats on two examinations, the first administered at midterm, the second at the close of the course.
English 4213: Studies in the British Novel
Dr. Amy Sonheim Monday night, 6:00-8:30 Lile Hall 200
This course offers you a chronological reading of the richly varied types found in British novels. We will trace the story of stories, the development of the novel. To do so, we will read five books, representing five distinct types: Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), representing a picaresque novel; Scott’s Waverly (1814), representing a historical romance; Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), representing psychological realism; Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), representing metafiction; and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), representing a dystopia. To stay our course, I need all hands on deck performing the following labor: with three weeks allowed to sail through each novel, we will each read twenty-seven pages, five days a week (two days a week you are on leave). To engage with the novels, you will compose a two- to three-page essay about each book, typed out of class. I will also collect reading logs from you each time we meet, as a way of charting our understanding. Class time will be devoted to discussing the novel itself as well as its publishing controversies and literary history. The stiff winds of autumn accompanied by brisk cups of tea will offer us the perfect time to hideaway with these classics.
English 4223: Shakespeare
Dr. Doug Sonheim MWF 11:00-11:50 Lile Hall 200
In this course we will read ten to twelve of Shakespeare's plays. Along the way, we will investigate the following topics as they relate to the plays: Renaissance contexts, conventions of romantic love, comedy, tragedy, and archetypal imagery. For one of the plays, we will examine several film versions (and, if possible, a live production) in order to explore interpretive and artistic decisions made by directors, actors, and stage crew. We will take frequent (at least once a week) quizzes over the reading, and there will be a mid-term and a final examination. Four times during the semester, students will turn in a response to the reading, with a larger project involving research and interpretation capping the semester.
Why Study English Language and Literature at Ouachita?
The English faculty here at Ouachita believes that through your diligent study of the English language and of English literature, you will gain practical skills. You will learn to read carefully and analytically, looking for ways the parts relate to the whole. You will wrestle with complex ideas, ambiguity and multiple interpretations. You will learn more words, and you will learn more about words--their histories and complexities and mysteries. In short, you will learn to read complex texts and you will learn to write more clearly. Whether your future holds law school, Sunday school, high school, or homeschool, your diligent studies in English will enrich your work for God's kingdom.
To these very useful skills of analysis, synthesis and verbal expression, studying English will increase your appreciation for beauty and design. You will study the forms of language and literature in a way that will allow you to move beyond impulsive reactions to works of art; you will gain an appreciation for whatever is truly lovely, and you will discriminate between the tawdry and the genuine, the false and the true, the mediocre and the excellent.
Because literature by its very nature explores what it means to be a human being, it confronts the questions that humans have always faced, questions about fate and free will, about our place in the cosmos, about our relationships with each other. Literature does not merely tell us about these questions; rather, literature presents human experiences in a concrete form. Thus, if we as readers will submit ourselves momentarily to the premises and demands of the work before us, then we can safely encounter a limitless number of human stories. We agree with C.S. Lewis, who describes the expansive effects of reading by saying “I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”
Above all, while there are many skills we gain from studying language and literature, we believe that such study changes us; we study literature not merely for what it will do for us, but for what it does to us.
On behalf of the English Department faculty, I hope you will be enriched and challenged by your studies in English. God be with you.
Dr. Doug Sonheim
Professor of English