English

in the

Spring

Course Descriptions

Department of English

Ouachita Baptist University

Spring 2002

English 2013: English Studies

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

Required for all English majors and minors.

The purpose of this course is to introduce fledgling English majors and minors to the discipline of the literary scholar, and the primary goal to equip students with every tool needed for a successful completion of a major or minor in English. To achieve these ends, we shall explore the major genres of literature, learn the terminology and techniques associated with those genres, and acquire the basic skills needed to conduct the type of research practiced by the literary scholar. While using X. J. Kennedy’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama as our primary introduction to the genres, we shall take particularly close looks at the genres of verse and narrative by reading the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Austen’s Emma and the medieval narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For these studies, we shall also employ three reference texts essential to the library of any student of literature: The Harper Handbook to Literature, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, and The MLA Handbook. The grade for the course will be based on quizzes, recitation of memorized lines of verse, two examinations, three literary essays, and a research paper.

English 3003: Advanced Composition

Dr. Amy Sonheim 8:30-9:45 TTh Lile Hall 127

Prerequisite: English 2013.

Samuel Johnson said that prose should be "familiar but not coarse, elegant, but not ostentatious;" such will be our goal for Advanced Composition. Building on the foundation laid in Grammar & Rhetoric, this course offers you the creative opportunity to design four essays on subjects of place, pain, faith, and film. Instead of spinning these essays out of yourself as a brown recluse in a dark corner, you will hunt and attack as a tarantula in the open cold. In other words, you will go beyond your private musings to actively track the thoughts of others through interviews, photographs, maps, published articles, and travels. To start, as you read Breathing Lessons by novelist Anne Tyler and learn about Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, you will research and compose your own essay describing and contrasting the past and present of the same place. Next, as you read surgeon Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons, you will research and articulate the situation of an unsolvable problem in an 8-page essay, linking technical explanations with life's greatest mysteries. To learn to write about faith without using cliches, you will read theologian Philip Yancey's Disappointment with God, as you create your own fresh metaphors and analogies for religious experience in a 5-8 page essay. Finally, for our shortest but equally perspicacious essay of 3 pages, you will read film critic Pauline Kael's Reeling, a collection of her movie reviews, as you persuasively argue for your own view of a film. To stay the course, we will need a book of rules at each elbow: the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Besides writing the four essays, you will complete daily exercises concerning the grammar of prose from Style. There will be two open-book tests on MLA rules and one final exam comprehensively covering the lessons from Style.

English 3083: Advanced Creative Writing/Fiction

Dr. Jay Curlin 2:00-3:15 TTh Lile Hall 200

This seminar in creative writing will focus upon the process of writing the narrative prose of short fiction. The primary texts for the class will be the short stories generated by the seminar participants, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Gilbert Morris’s How to Write and Sell a Christian Novel, and a collection of American short stories. By examining and practicing the standard techniques used by writers of short fiction, seminar participants will become better readers, better critics, and, most especially, better writers of narrative prose. Prerequisite: ENGL 2043 or consent of instructor.

English 3093: Advanced Creative Writing/Poetry

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

We shall practice the craft of poetry by writing in a variety of forms. Nims and Mason's splendid Western Wind will play Vergil to our sundry Dantes, as we try to become better arrangers of words. Ghostlier demarcations and keener sounds, here we come!

English 3113: American Literature Since 1877

Dr. Jay Curlin 8:30-9:45 TTh Lile Hall 200

This course, the second part of a two-semester survey of the literary history of our nation, picks up where we left off in the fall, moving from Walt Whitman to as far as we can get in the twentieth century. As with the first part of this survey, our focus will be primarily on tracing the development of a literary voice unique to America. Along the way, we shall continue to enjoy the pleasant diversions of daily reading quizzes, two examinations, and a final scholarly paper, while also committing two hundred lines of verse to memory.

The sole text required for the course is George and Barbara Perkins’ American Tradition in Literature, Vol. 2, 9^th ed.

English 3213: English Literature Since 1800

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

Much like a Christmas feast, this survey offers an assortment of the best. With choice selections from poetry, prose, and fiction, The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Vol. 2) serves samples from our four main courses: the literary periods known as Romantic, Victorian, Edwardian, and Modern. During the Victorian section, we will linger over the meaty novel of Eliot's Mill on the Floss. To clean your palate, I will proffer daily reading quizzes, an assignment for one 10-15 page paper, a mid-term, and a final exam.

English 3793: Taoism in Perspectives

Dr. Gu Zhengkun 2:00-3:15 TTh Lile Hall 220

The purpose of the course is to introduce the students at Ouachita Baptist University to the essentials of Taoism and help them know how the Taoist doctrine can be applied to politics, economics, society, and cultures at different levels. The course is designed to begin with a theoretical background against which Taoism finds its standpoint; thus theories of the Ying and Yang and Five Elements are to be taught. What is unique about Taoism is that it is not only a speculative philosophy but also a practical means by which human beings can possibly approach the Tao, the truth of the world, as efficiently as a Taoist expects. The course is going to discuss how various schools of Taoism exerted strong influence on the making of Chinese history, to compare the Taoist concepts with some western philosophical ideas, and to sort out the similarities that Taoism bears to Buddhism and Christianity. Moreover, the course is meant to help students realize the importance of rebuilding a system of values that human beings have lost for a long time. To deepen understanding of Taoist culture, many pictures or primeval data related to the doctrine are to be shown with the aid of the computer and Internet. The recent Chinese archeological discovery closely tied up with the Taoist text of Lao Zi will be also introduced; and a completely new conclusion concerning the dates of Taoism and Lao Zi, the originator of the Taoist school, is to be reached at the very beginning. Students are required to have at hand the Chinese-English text of Lao Zi: The Book of Tao and Teh, translated by Gu Zhengkun, Peking University Press, 1995. The grade for the course will be based on quizzes, recitation of some quotations for Lao Zi, two exams, three essays, and a research paper.

ENGL 4013: Special Methods in English and Social Studies

Mrs. Beverly Slavens 3:30-4:45 MW Lile Hall 210

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.)

English 4023: History of the English Language

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

One of the brightest and liveliest of our recent graduates told me recently that, although it had a lot of tough competition (Advanced Grammar, music, and literature courses among them), this course was finally the one she enjoyed the most at Ouachita. We will study the origins and development of the English language from its Indo-European roots through Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. Old English—the language in which Beowulf was composed), Middle English (the English of Chaucer), Early Modern English (the English of Shakespeare), to Modern English.

Not only should this course give you a deeper understanding of and appreciation for English, but it will also give you a clearer notion of how all human language is interconnected. Furthermore, where else are you going to learn to dazzle your friends by reading passages from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Old English!

We’ll have a couple of exams, almost daily workbook exercises to prepare, and one project/paper that I think you will very much enjoy doing.

English 4103: Studies in American Poetry

Dr. Johnny Wink 11:00-12:15 TTh Lile Hall 221

My own undergraduate study of Shakespeare consisted of one semester on the tragedies and non-dramatic poems and a second devoted to the comedies and histories; even at that, we didn't come close to reading everything and not within about a gazillion miles of considering everything worthy of consideration in even one of the plays or poems. However, even one of the two semesters would have given me the most valuable ability that I carried away from them: the ability to read Shakespeare's language with understanding largely because I could hear it--thanks to my professor, Haldeen Braddy--as real people talking to each other. So, as much as I would relish offering a two-semester course in Shakespeare, I know that, from even one, much can be gained.

For this course, in addition to some ten or eleven plays of all sorts--early, middle, and late comedies, histories, tragedies, romances-- we will be reading all of the Sonnets, “Venus and Adonis,” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” We will talk about elements of drama and elements of poetics in class; there will be a lot of reading aloud in class--I'll do some of it, and you'll do some of it; you will be memorizing 200 of the Bard's lines, at least some of which will be said in class as part of ensemble presentations of scenes from the plays. You will probably be doing a short (7-10 pages) paper, writing weekly response sheets, and taking daily reading quizzes. We'll have two exams. Come join us; you'll love it.

English 4903: Senior Literature Seminar

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

In this year’s seminar, we will read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, widely considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century. As the capstone course for graduating English majors, the senior seminar will be conducted as a graduate seminar, reflecting the entire process of independent research: reading; discussing; and writing a proposal, article review, annotated bibliography, and research paper, the last being delivered in a symposium to English-department faculty at the close of the course. The texts required for the course, volumes that will surely have a hallowed spot on your book shelves for the rest of your lives, are Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin) and The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Ed. Richard Bales). After a semester absorbed in one of the greatest masterpieces of world literature, none of us will ever be the same. Prerequisites: ENGL 2013 and senior standing.

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

Associate Professor of English