British Literature II (ENGL 2323)

Instructor:

 

This 2323 English Literature course will cover British Literature from the beginning of the Romantic period up through the present, while teaching analytical college writing and beginning literary theory. It follows the curricular requirements described in the HCC English Department. We will talk every class about some vital aspect of writing, including invention, rhetorical techniques, structure, and style. We will also discuss the historical contexts and influences of different writing movements, and you will learn to analyze literature through a variety of scholarly lenses. But I want you to think of this class as a workshop, not a rhetoric manual — a place where you will test certain kinds of writing and attempt to recover your own recollections as part of larger cultural experiences that eventually become a people’s "history" (i.e., a people’s collective account of itself through its literature). The kinds of writing in this course are varied but include writing to understand, writing to explain, and writing to evaluate. All critical writing asks that you evaluate the effectiveness of a literary piece, but to be an effective evaluator, one must understand and explore. The essence of scholarship is the combination of these three approaches to writing. In order for this class to function as a true workshop, therefore, you will write a good deal, and you will revise certain pieces of your writing into polished final drafts. You will also produce a final writing portfolio — a kind of individual writing archive. In the process of these workshops, you will be exposed to critique your conscious choice of effective and appropriate diction, your ability to create varied and effective syntactic structures, your capacity for coherence and logical organization, your ability to balance generalizations with specific and illustrative details, and overall, your ability to combine rhetorical processes into an effective whole. What I expect most of all from our class is hard work on the part of the individual writer and careful reading and discussion on the part of the class.