Is it true that the first American literature was neither "American" nor "literature"? What relevance can something written in the early 1600's have to life in the 1990's? Have there been any significant changes in the way colonists and modern Americans view life, love, women, God, nature, family, patriotism? You'll find answers and probably raise even more questions in American Major Authors.

Take an armchair tour of our British literary heritage. Fight the monster Grendel with Beowulf, make a pilgrimage to Canterbury with Chaucer's motley crew, and float down the Avon with the Bard while reading about the thankless daughters of King Lear. Learn how paradise was lost with Milton, and regain Eden in the nature poetry of Wordsworth. Be a mental traveler like Blake by studying British Major Authors; you will find it a delight-filled journey.

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
--Hemingway

For a journey that will take us from Dostoyevski to Dickens and beyond, sign up for Great Books.

Our course will serve as an introduction to world literature, ranging from the ancient Middle East to the contemporary world. We will rely on The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, expanded edition in one volume. This course will emphasize non-European literature; we are not likely to view more than one work originally written in English. Come prepared to find familiar ideas in unfamiliar contexts. Students taking either of these two sections of World Literature must complete a service-learning project to fulfill course requirements.

Yes, Virginia, there are writers who are not Greek, Roman, French, Russian, and general western European. Literature is everywhere and we investigate it in Oriental, African, Hispanic, New World, and Native American writings. Past and present, these show the qualities of the men and women writers of countries most of the survey texts still neglect. Especially good for minorities and multi-ethnic concentrations/minors, but also for pre-professional programs, communication, and social sciences.

As they share our lives, animals move through literature, from the magical mythologies and fables of old to contemporary poetry, fiction, and scientific and philosophical writings. Literature exposes our thoughts about animals: the ways we see animal-human interactions, the functions we perceive animals to fulfill in nature, and the entities we perceive animals to be. In this class we examine the writings of such authors as Swift, Darwin, Eiseley, Lewis Thomas, Richard Adams, and James Herriot to understand the importance of animals to their works. Students submit a reading journal, several brief response essays, a book report, and an essay and oral report resulting from an in-depth study of an individual topic. The course is both oral communications and writing intensive.

A shadow hovering at the edge of darkness, a stealthy footfall on a fog-shrouded street, a whiff of decay on a misty summer's night, a child's wicked laughter, a portrait that transforms itself, a mansion with a mind of its own. Is the supernatural a manifestation of the "dark side" of ourselves? We will explore several "case histories" with classical and contemporary authors who present fascinating and frightening possibilities.

Literature goes global as we consider texts produced by cultures that span both globe and time. We start with a look at Robert Coles' The Call of Stories as we reflect on the way literature speaks directly to our lives. Then we begin with the end: Death, and how various cultures respond to it in their literature. Following our study of such topics as "Nature and Seasons" and "Time," we move to the beginning: Creation, and the creation myths produced by different cultures to account for the world in which they find themselves placed. Sean Kane's Wisdom of the Mythtellers is also examined a work that considers the mythic thought and stories of Native Australians, Native Americans, the Celts, and the Greeks. Finally, we end with Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, whose subject, a spiritual quest, might lead us to reflect upon our own journey through life. Note:  This course satisfies both the writing intensive and oral communication intensive requirements.

This is an introductory linguistic course that explores the fundamental aspects of language. We will study phonetics and phonology (the articulation, description, and organization of sounds in meaningful sequences), morphology (word structure and word formation processes), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (meaning of words and sentences). In addition to these formal aspects, we will consider the following questions: What language did Adam and Eve speak? Can chimpanzees learn English? What parts of the brain are responsible for the production and processing of language? Why do people speak differently? How do children acquire their first language? These issues will be explained through readings, discussions, brief linguistic surveys, and videos.

The writing intensive course will combine a traditional study of satire from the classical period to the present with an examination of current trends and different styles. In addition to the text, Satire from Aesop to Buchwald, each student will read one major work of satire and report on it to the class. The class as a whole will study additional work such as plays by Aristophanes, Catch 22, Gargantua and Pantegruel, and A Confederacy of Dunces. Students will examine satire in the media, anticipating no small contribution from the White House, the ETSU administration and other such arbiters of taste, decorum, morality, beauty and truth. We shall discover at least 77.6 percent of what cannot be known.

Do your participles dangle? Do your commas splice? Are your infinitives split? If you suffer from these or other chronic maladies that plague the writer, a generous dose of English 3130 can provide a relatively painless cure.

Our introduction to writing poetry, fiction, and "literary" nonfiction will focus on expressing our responses to the natural environment in these three modes. Participants will be asked to keep journals of self and nature, "adopt" and chronicle a particular natural area, and develop a short story and a poetry sequence based on these and other personal writings relating to nature.

How do we discover our own identities and learn to cope with perceived threats to our community, death and dying, and evil; how do we learn to give and receive love and friendship and become responsible members of our communities? We will consider these and other questions as we read works such as The Plague, Heart of Darkness, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and O Pioneers.

The course will begin with a study of comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, using that text to begin our definition of mythology. We will then study a variety of specific mythological figures, Hermes, Dionysos, and Aphrodite, for example, alternating with readings in literature which develop mythological themes in the context of human stories.

This course will provide an introduction to the folk cultures of the South, including the southern Appalachians. We will view southern folk culture through such windows as oral narrative, music, material culture, and religion. In addition, we will discuss the roots of southern culture in English, African, Scotch-Irish, German, French, and Native American traditions; consider the function of gender in configurations of folk culture; and examine the response of folk culture to mass culture. Readings will include numerous case studies in southern folklore and one novel, Lee Smith's Oral History. Sound recordings, slides, and films will supplement class discussion. Students will write a term paper based on field or archival work and will give group and individual oral presentations. The course will carry oral communication intensive credit.

To be literate in American culture, everyone needs to know mythology, the Bible, and children's literature. This course is well suited to the English major because it provides a foundation for the study of all literature. It also treats genres (picture books, for example) and classics that are not covered elsewhere in a major's curriculum (The Wind in the Willows or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example). For graduate students, children's literature offers excellent opportunities for original research and criticism. If you have ever been a child, if you ever expect to be a parent, (or ever expect to be a child again!), you need this course! Texts: Children and Books, The Great Gilly Hopkins, The Wind in the Willows, Lily's Crossing.

Separate puzzles
joining to make one.
Thus a Liberian poet describes Africa. In an attempt to make the separate puzzles of African literature into one, this course will balance short and long fiction with poetry and drama. Although it will concentrate on works written in English in Sub-Saharan Africa, it will also include translations from the French and Arabic of other African writers. In an introduction to African Short Stories, one of the eight texts that will be used, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe has written, "The rich contrasts of Africa are well displayed in this book . . . [but equally] striking is a certain spirit of unity which is more than a political cliché." English 4032 hopes to capture that same sense of unity within contrast. It is a writing intensive course.

Designed for those students at the upper division level who plan to become secondary teachers or librarians, the course offers wide reading of books attractive to young persons from twelve to eighteen. Participants will examine patterns of reading interests, issues and trends in the field, bibliographical materials, and ways to build a literature program beyond the traditional curriculum. Parents and public school teachers are welcome.

In this course, you will learn how different forms of language are used in communication. The course will examine the differences between spoken and written texts. Some of the other issues that we will consider in this course include pragmatics and discourse context, the role of context in interpretation, staging and the representation of discourse structure, information structure, the nature of reference in text, and coherence in the interpretation of discourse. We will also analyze a variety of spoken and written texts to determine how speakers and writers assign information to their discourse for the purpose of achieving specific communicative goals.

An advanced course in the writing of short fiction. To enroll, one must have completed English 3140, Creative Writing I, or receive the instructor's permission based on a writing sample.*

This will be a workshop, with students submitting three stories for close analysis by the class and instructor, followed by revision. Since a certain level of experience and competence is to be assumed, the writing exercises that were done in Creative Writing I will not be assigned, though students are of course encouraged to do any kind of exercise free writing, clustering, journal-keeping, and so on that they find helpful. Students will be expected to revise their work.

I hope to use a classic text, Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (3rd ed.), which has been reissued by Prentice-Hall; however, availability is uncertain at this time, so The Story and Its Writer, by Ann Charters (4th ed.) is the fall-back text. We will read a number of classic and more modern stories during the term, and each student will be asked to choose a story and lead class discussion and analysis of it.

* Those found to have enrolled improperly will not be allowed to remain.

This oral intensive class will include the tradition of poetry in America, major critical approaches, and an examination of how a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Poets include Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, Sexton, Baraka, Brooks, Dove, Silko as well as regional writers. Requirements: reading from The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, analyses, explications, oral presentations, and some activities designed to help students experiment with creative writing.

Film Criticism is a new course that fulfills part of the core requirement for the new film studies minor. In this course, students survey the wide range of available published film criticism and then write their own critical approaches to film. Readings move from the simplest and most general approaches to more specialized and difficult ones. Representative films will be viewed.

A study of selected films of Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa.

Come hither to the literature of the English Renaissance: a literature of passionate love ("My love is as a fever, longing still"), of soulful religion ("Show me dear Christ, thy Spouse so bright and clear"), and of internal tumult ("Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell").  We will survey the art forms of the period (utopian writing, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, epic, essay), the major authors (More, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Donne), and some of the minor authors (Wroth, Lanier, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Vaughan). English 4407/5407 is also a writing intensive course.

Text: Miller, Susan, and Kyle Knowles. New Ways of Writing: A Handbook for Writing with Computers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. ISBN 0-13-531260-4.

Computers have the potential to change the ways we write -- the styles, heuristics, forms, and functions of writing -- more than any single invention since the pencil. Writing with a computer entails more than just knowing how to use a word processing program; it requires a greater level of knowledge and ability in the areas of layout, collaboration, reader response, and manipulation of sources. This class will meet in the English Department Computer Lab, allowing students access to internet research sources, desktop publishing software, and the Daedalus interactive writing program. Among the topics, readings, and exercises that make up this class are "one-draft writing and editing"; using the computer to extend the writing process and to facilitate process interruption; the importance of layout/format in technical and expository writing; personal and professional publishing; research and collaboration via networks (and in the larger context of the internet); electronic writing groups; and writing for the World Wide Web.  Although students will learn about computers and the internet as part of the class, the focus of the course is writing. Note: This is a UIT-intensive course.

A bawdy, buxom Wife who has outlived five husbands; a dainty Nun who prefers animals to people; several lecherous churchmen; an intrepid scholar; a stately Knight; a Cook with open sores; a Miller who makes Andrew Dice Clay look tame; come meet them and their cohorts in The Canterbury Tales as we examine the reality behind the appearances of 14th century England.

This course will cover a wide range of major writers including Hawthorne and Melville, James and Jewett, Twain and Norris. Romanticism, realism, American mythology, and the problems of nature, of the new world, and of identity will be some of our chief areas of concern.

World War I (1914-1918) was a watershed for Great Britain as a nation and British literature as an expression of the national consciousness. This course will start with World War I poets such as Owen and Sassoon and will proceed to other writers including Yeats, Larkin, Woolf, Greene, Waugh, Pym, Shaffer and Pinter. Poetry, drama and fiction will help us to examine Britannia as she enters the twenty-first century.

Major American fiction of the twentieth century is the subject of this course. Beginning with the Realist and Naturalist traditions as represented by Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, we continue with novels by the Modernist masters Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. The second half of the course takes up representative works by writers such as John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Toni Morrison.

What is "nonfiction," anyway? Technically, the term covers any text that is, well, not fiction. That could include Thoreau's Walden, or the back of a Chex cereal box.

Not to worry; we won't be reading cereal boxes in this course. We will, however, be reading an eclectic group of texts, including work by some of America's canonical nonfiction authors: Mary Rowlandson; Emerson and Thoreau; Frederick Douglass; W.E.B. Dubois. The course will also include a special four-week unit focusing on nonfiction writing about southern appalachia, some of which is often overlooked but, in my judgment, first rate, including work by Helen Hunt Jackson, Donald Culross Peattie, Wilma Dykeman, and others.  We'll start the course with a more recent piece of literary nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard.  (This is a remarkable book.  See the reviews at Amazon.com for more information.)  (Please note:  This description supercedes the description in the printed version of the Clarion.)

Our course will serve as an introduction to some of the more influential African American authors in American literary history. We will study works ranging from slave narratives to contemporary literature, paying attention to the authors' attempts to define "African American"; these works will include Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, and Morrison's Sula. We will rely on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. Come prepared to set aside preconceived notions of race, to take on a rigorous reading schedule, and to participate in spirited, considered discussions of sensitive topics. Beginning this semester, this course will have an oral-intensive designation; students in this class will also perform service learning in the Tri-Cities community.

See ENGL-4017-201.

See ENGL-4077-001.

See ENGL-4127-001.

See ENGL-4147-001.

See ENGL-4407-001.

As a component of the Kellogg III Grant, which seeks to build community partnerships between four rural east Tennessee counties and ETSU, this course will encourage students to broaden their understanding of the nature of community life in Appalachia. Communities are made up of individuals who co-exist with other individuals in planned as well as unplanned ways. In this course, students will learn to analyze, in order to more deeply understand, community life in northeast Tennessee. After we read and discuss texts presenting folkloric, sociological, and/or anthropological critiques of select communities in Appalachia, we will study field work techniques (the oral history, still photography, video, etc.), with the ultimate goal of documenting the lives of people living in rural communities in Hancock, Hawkins, Unicoi, and Johnson Counties. While working in partnership with these people, students will learn how tradition works. This graduate-level course will be interdisciplinary and will involve team teaching.

This seminar will be directed to close reading of eight plays and the sonnets, with particular focus on the relationship of each play to an important issue of authorship, text, performance, sources, language, and English Renaissance culture. Plays covered will be Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Loves' Labours Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, and Richard II.

Beginning with playwright Aphra Behn, this course will focus on the politics of writing and being published/performed in Restoration and 18th-century England, taking into account that "politics" go beyond government to include sex, gender and religion. Emphasis will be on covert or economically struggling writers like Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood and Samuel Johnson and on more overtly political writers like Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine. Though the topic lends itself to Marxist and feminist theory, students will be encouraged to practice a variety of theoretical approaches and encouraged to submit a seminar paper which could be read at a conference.

This seminar will sample the works of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian Age. Dickens had the mysterious creative genius that linked him with Chaucer and Shakespeare the power to invent characters who come to life in a reader's mind. Dozens of his characters assume this illusion of reality, many of them minor performers appearing only on a page. The intensity with which he portrayed corruption and injustice impressed people who might otherwise have overlooked the social wrongs of the day; and the improvement of those conditions can be attributed partly to his influence.

The secret of his vitality was his emotional participation in the story as he wrote it. He laughed and cried with his characters. With the reporter's eye for detail and odd behavior and the moralist's ability to embody a ruling attribute in a typical figure, Dickens could appeal to readers of every type, from childhood to old age.

The class will read and discuss eight novels, one novel a week, with the longer works occupying two weeks. Occasionally, open-book questions will be assigned for written answers in class. As a complement to the readings and discussions, the class will see condensed film adaptations of scenes and novels, including episodes from the 1935 MGM production of David Copperfield, starring W. C. Fields. There will be a course paper to be shared with the seminar, a mid-term exam and a final exam. The reading list, in order of reading: The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Oliver Twist (1837-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).

One of the notable poets, dramatists, and critics of the literary world, east as well as west, Eliot made a strong and lasting impact on his time and after. Probably he is the only 20th century author whose work is found in both British and American anthologies as well as AP high school texts and freshman literature texts. A seminar that will encourage you to experiment with both research and teaching with much open discussion and minimal lecture.

The seminar will study in depth Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, two of the major writers of the twentieth century, writers who have distinguished themselves in their ability to tell a good story and in their ability to be innovators in technique. The seminar meetings will include an introduction to each author and each novel by the instructor and a discussion of each novel by the class. The discussion will include: narrative forms, prose styles, plot, point of view, use of narrators, character development, symbolism, imagery, theme, etc. Requirements will include two short class presentations and one paper (12-15 pages).

See ENGL-4777-001.

See ENGL-4797-001.

See ENGL-4817-001.

See ENGL-4837-001.

See ENGL-4897-001.

Students in this course will learn the history of folklore as a field- its theory and methodology. In our discussions of this history, we will draw from traditional cultures worldwide for examples of the various categories and genres of folklore. We will also study more contemporary concepts of folklore and folklife. Through careful analysis of literature from different literary genres, students will learn to identify the ways in which elite-culture and pop-culture authors have incorporated folklore materials into their works. Having gained a sound grasp of folklore theory and methodology, students will then conduct a well researched and fully documented project which illuminates one folklore genre (i.e., ballads, square dances, quilts); each student will give an oral summary of her/his project in class. This project should be multi-media. The course will require a reading of a variety of texts (including Brunvand's The Study of American Folklore, a novel, a non-fiction work, a folklife study, and hand-outs). Students will also be expected to participate in class discussions and to take a number of written and oral quizzes and two written exams.