English

In the Spring

William Faulkner

Course Descriptions

Department of English

Ouachita Baptist University

Spring 2005

Table of Contents

Course Page

ENGL 2013 English Studies, Dr. Doug Sonheim 3

LATN 2213 Elementary Latin II, Dr. Johnny Wink 3

ENGL 3073 Linguistics, Dr. Susan Wink 4

ENGL 3093 Advanced Creative Writing/Poetry, Dr. Jay Curlin 5

ENGL 3113 American Literature Since 1877, Dr. Tom Greer 5

ENGL 3233 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century 7
English Literature, Dr. Susan Wink

ENGL 3303 Children’s Literature, Dr. Amy Sonheim 8

ENGL 4013 Special Methods in English, Mrs. Beverly Slavens 9

ENGL 4113 Studies in the American Novel, Dr. Jay Curlin 9

ENGL 4253 Lewis, Dr. Johnny Wink 10

ENGL 4903 Senior Literature Seminar, Dr. Tom Greer 10

Appendix: Why Study English Language and Literature at 12
Ouachita?, Dr. Doug Sonheim

ENGL 2013 English Studies

Dr. Doug Sonheim MWF 11:00-11:50 Lile Hall 200

When I checked out The Field Book of Ponds and Streams for the second time, I noticed the book’ card. It was almost full. There were numbers on both sides. My hearty author and I were not alone in the world, after all. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

As described in the OBU catalogue, English 2013 “introduces students to the English major and minor primarily though the study of the genres of literature.” To this end, we shall take a journey together, reading, discussing, and writing about Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and numerous poems, short stories, and plays to be found in Kennedy and Gioia’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama. Along the way, we will glance occasionally at critical theory, and we will sharpen our skills as researchers. We will become more knowledgeable about the traditions of English literature and more skillful in our own use of words. I also hope that we will enjoy the company we will keep along the way. Assignments for this course will include several essays and one long research paper over Great Expectations.

We will have three or four exams.

LATN 2213 Elementary Latin II

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

The goal of this course is to continue the enterprise of the first half of the course, which is to enable its participants to begin learning to read, write, and speak Latin.

ENGL 3073 Linguistics

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

This course presents a survey of the various branches of linguistics such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.

The aim of this course is to provide you with a broad knowledge of the primary concerns and methods of modern linguistic theory, analysis, and investigation.

By the end of the course, you should be able to

1) transcribe regular spelling and speech into broad phonetic transcription,

2) transcribe broad phonetic transcription into regular spelling,

3) demonstrate an understanding of basic phonology and phonological rules,

4) identify free and bound morphemes,

5) demonstrate, with diagrams and transformational sequences, a basic understanding of modern English syntax and the theories and methods of transformational grammar,

6) describe and apply the basic methods of investigation used in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics,

7) describe current ideas and theories concerning language acquisition,

8) describe current ideas and theories concerning how language means and demonstrate an understanding of methods of semantic investigation,

9) and sing the Ouachita Alma Mater in reverse.

ENGL 3093 Advanced Creative Writing/Poetry

Dr. Jay Curlin TTh 11:00-12:15 Lile Hall 200

This poetry workshop will focus on the craft of the poet by examining the tradition and elements of closed and open form in British and American verse. Guided by Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, workshop participants will study and imitate the works of both British and American poets to produce original creations of their own. Along the way, they will have the pleasure of occasional reading quizzes, will know the infinitely greater pleasure of filling their memories with at least two hundred lines of verse, and will write a number of original poems in a variety of forms both old and new.

ENGL 3113 American Literature Since 1877

Dr. Tom Greer TTh 8:30-9:45 Lile Hall 200

This course, the second part of a two-semester survey of the literary history of America, begins with that period just after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Sometimes called the Gilded Age, the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century contain literature commonly referred to as realistic and naturalistic. Familiar names such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton appear in this period. Spiller and Thorpe, in their work A Literary History of the United States, refer to the period between World War I and the Great Depression as the Second Renaissance of American Literature, the first having been the 1860’s. During the decade after World War I, the names of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Crane, Eliot, Anderson, and Cather grace the literary stage. From the 1930’s to the present, a collage of ideas including existentialism, absurdist drama, black comedy, and ethnicity appear. Writers such as Steinbeck, Faulkner, Baldwin, O’Connor, Welty, Morrison, and Updike dominate the American literary scene.

Since the course is a survey, the requirements will be along that line. A lot of reading will be assigned, and major tests will be given, the main purpose of which will be to evaluate one’s understanding of the scope of literature from the late nineteenth century to the present.

In this, the second of our four courses in British literature, we will study the poetry, drama, and prose from 1603 (excluding Shakespeare, whose work was covered in the previous course) up to about 1790, a hundred and eighty-seven years of literary production extraordinary for its great variety as well as its excellence. We will consider the cultural and political changes and conflicts that informed to a very great extent the literature of these two centuries. Among the writers we will study are Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Webster, Herrick, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson.

Our texts will be the second and third volumes of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition (NOTE: the second volume was one of the texts in the first of the four survey courses, offered this fall). We will read from 30 to 50 pages a week and will discuss as much of it as we can get to in class. You will have a reading quiz over every assignment to encourage you to keep up and to reward you for doing so. Two exams, a mid-term and final, will give you the opportunity to display your growing knowledge of and insight into the works and lives of the writers considered.

In addition to the examinations and quizzes, you will be required to memorize 200 lines of poetry by the writers we will study, and I will ask you to write two papers of modest length.

One of the many things I love about this course is that it includes the work of the three poets whom I consider the greatest religious poets in the history of English letters. Take the course to find out if you agree with me on this.

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

You may have heard of children's literature courses taught as means to ends—the ends of influencing or teaching children. These goals are good; our goals are different. The English Department offers in Children's Literature ways to appreciate fairy tales, fantasies, and picture books as art. To engage with fairy tales, we will read the Grimm Brothers' The Juniper Tree and George MacDonald's The Light Princess, afterwards doing a comparative study with Walt Disney's version of Snow White. To engage with fantasy, we will read MacDonald's Victorian classic At the Back of the North Wind, J. R. R. Tolkien's beloved The Fellowship of the Ring, and J. K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Because picture books are designed as hand-held art, we will approach them as such. Turning the pages ever so slowly, we will examine Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, The Gardener, and Golem. To understand better what you have examined, at the close of each genre study, you will compose a 4-5 page essay. The course culminates with the most artistic approach to children's literature that of creating it. Our class will host an author and an illustrator to share with us their creative processes.

If you plan to teach English and/or social studies in middle/secondary schools, take this course to explore methods of presenting and evaluating the literature, composition, and grammar skills required of your students. The text is a practical guide to using those pedagogical skills and terms tested by Praxis II and used in teacher-certification programs. In addition to the text, you will work with secondary-school textbooks and small groups of high-school students as you develop objectives, lesson plans, and evaluation instruments to use in your classroom. (Also open to social-studies majors.)

This variable-topic course will have as its focus the novels of Mark Twain, one of our nation’s greatest novelists and one of the most enjoyable writers of all time. Using the Library of America’s four-volume edition of Twain’s novels, we shall trace Twain’s career from its beginning to its end, placing his works within the context of his life and times. From such Mississippi writings as Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn to such historical romances as The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, we shall see the extraordinary range of a writer whom many modern readers know for only one or two novels. While spending a magical semester under the spell of a master storyteller, we shall also enjoy such pleasures as daily quizzes, examinations, epistolary essays, and a scholarly paper. By the end of the term, we shall have read the lion’s share of Twain’s novels and shall end lamenting that so brief a semester prohibits our reading his many other writings in other genres.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the novels of C.S. Lewis. While our primary emphasis will be on Lewis’s fiction, we shall also become acquainted with the major details of his life and times and read selections from his inspirational and literary criticism.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was the towering figure in American literature during the first half of the twentieth century. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in both 1951 and 1963, Faulkner wrote 20 novels, a book of poetry, and scripts for films. He always saw himself as “one who likes to tell stories,” and those stories were mostly about the American South in general and his home state of Mississippi in particular.

Faulkner will be the focus of Senior Literature Seminar, a course designed so that the student can engage in “advanced research activities.” The class will meet on Tuesday evenings in three-hour sessions so that the material read can be discussed and analyzed in depth. Each student will write a scholarly paper to be presented at the Senior Literature Symposium at the end of the term.

In addition to various literary essays dealing with Faulkner’s works, presented by the professor, the following novels will be read:

The student should note that some novels can be dealt with in one session, while others will demand two sessions. If time permits, a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, is not out of the question, provided funds can be secured.

The committee that awarded the Nobel Prize to Faulkner in 1949 noted Faulkner’s “powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” Such praise would, in itself, merit William Cuthbert Faulkner a place in any student’s study of American literature.

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.