Evans, Jonathan
TBA
No Classroom Required
ENGL 2310e ENGLISH LITERATURE TO 1700 SUMMER 2021
Instructor: Dr. Jonathan Evans
Department of English
University of Georgia
jdmevans@uga.edu
Course Description
ENGL 2310, "English Literature to 1700," is designed to perform two functions (1) to satisfy one of the College of Arts & Sciences General Humanities requirements for the baccalaureate degree at the University of Georgia; and (2) to give an overview and introduction to several of the great works of English literature from the beginnings in the Old English period to end of the 17th century. More specifically, the course covers literature of the Medieval and Renaissance periods (from Beowulf to Paradise Lost), concentrating on major works of literature from the two periods both for their unique qualities and what they can suggest about English culture at the time these works were written. If you take a look at UGA’s online Course Bulletin, you’ll find a pretty sketchy description for the course:
Course ID: ENGL 2310. 3 hours.
Course Title: English Literature from the Beginnings to 1700
Course Description: Writers typically include Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Duplicate Credit: Not open to students with credit in ENGL 2350H
If you’d been a UGA student several decades ago, you’d have found a more prescriptive statement requiring instructors to spend at least half of the course on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. That requirement was thrown out (in my judgement, unwisely) long ago, and much greater freedom was extended to professors teaching the course. In my course, we omit Chaucer but include Sir Thomas Malory, and in the 7+ weeks which you’ll be spending in this course, you’ll be required to read selections from Old English poetry & prose, selections from The Morte D’Arthur, and selections from Paradise Lost; you’ll be reading all of Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and Henry IV, Pt. 1. A summary of the course schedule, with each week running from Monday through Saturday, follows:
Schedule: June 11 - August 6, 2021
Week 0 June 11-12 Introductory; Autobiographical essay
Week 1 June 14-19 Old English poetry & prose
Week 2 June 21-26 Beowulf
Week 3 June 28-J3 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Week 4 July 5-10 Mid-term essay
Week 5 July 12-17 The Morte D’Arthur
Week 6 July 19-24 Henry the Fourth, Part 1
Week 7 July 26-31 Paradise Lost
Week 8 Aug. 2-6 Final exam
For any who wish to complete all of the week’s work before Sunday, the due day and time for written work will be 11:59 p.m. on Saturday in each week; for any who wish to complete their week’s work before sundown on Saturday, any time earlier on Saturday or even earlier in the week will be acceptable. Details for each week’s work may be found in the “Content Browser” in the left-hand column of the course home page after that course-page has been updated.
Written work
Most of the actual work of the course will be simply reading the assignments; but there will be three kinds of assignments which you’ll have to complete for grades leading up to the final overall grade for the course. These are: quizzes, essays, and exams. Here are the details:
Quizzes: the lesson for each week’s work contains reading material which is divided up into smaller sections. For each section, there will be a quiz–generally pretty short, but of varying length–which you’ll have to take before you can move on to the next section’s quiz. Most of the questions are multiple-choice questions, and they are designed primarily to test your reading knowledge or guarantee that you’ve actually read the material. These quizzes are graded instantly, and as soon as you’re finished you will know what grade you got on it. If you’re dissatisfied by the outcome of your first attempt, you can try again immediately or within 24 hours, and whichever grade is the highest will be the grade that will “stick” for the final course average. Each completed quiz will receive a grade based on a 100-point ratio of correct to incorrect answers. The numerical average of all the quizzes will represent 25% of the final course grade. You’ll be required to complete all the quizzes in each quiz set before you can go on to the next item, which is the group discussion and group response.
Group discussions: For each lesson, after completing the readings for that week, students will be required to post two messages to the class discussion area in ELC – either two comments, or two replies to others’ comments, or one of each – before the essay assignment will open. These are not graded, and they will not be monitored closely by the instructor; but I will look in on the discussions from time to time to see how things are going and to guarantee a congenial discussion for all.
Essays: At the end of each week’s lesson, there will be two or three suggested essay topics for which I’d like you to write a 500-700-word essay. You’ll have to submit your essay in the “Dropbox” by 12:00 midnight (actually, 11:59 p.m.) on Saturday of each week. You may wish to submit your essay earlier and move on to the next week’s reading & writing assignments, but you must do so at the latest by midnight Saturday. I will grade each week’s essay on a 100-point scale and will attempt to return a grade with comments by Wednesday of the next week; however, sometimes I lag behind. The numerical average of all the essay grades will represent 25% of the final course grade. Students will have the option of exempting one essay before the midterm and one between the midterm and the final exam. Neither the midterm or the final may be exempted.
Exams: The mid-term exam is scheduled for Week 4; it will be an essay exam, but unlike the regular weekly essays, given the fact that the previous week-end includes Sunday, July 4 week-end, you’ll be required to submit it by 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday July 7. I will grade the exam on a 100-point scale; it will represent 25% of the final course grade.
The final exam will consist of an essay question for which you’ll be required to write a 750-1,000-word essay in response. The final essay must be submitted in the assignment dropbox by 11:59 p.m. August 6. It will represent 25% of the final course grade.
Course Grade
As indicated above, the fincal course grade will be calculated in this way:
Quiz average 25%
Essay average 25%
Midterm exam 25%
Final exam 25%
Texts for this course.
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, ed. & tr. The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. ISBN #0192835475.
Tolkien, J.R.R., ed. & tr. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975. ISBN #0345277600.
Vinaver, Eugene, ed. King Arthur & His Knights. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975. ISBN #0195019059.
Bevington, David, ed. Shakespeare: Henry IV Part 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN #0192814494.
Leonard, John, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN #0140424261.
I’ve deliberately ordered the material for this course in short paperbacks for several reasons, the first one financial. You can get new copies of these 5 books pretty inexpensively; but if you order the texts in advance online from Amazon or Half.com, you can get them literally for almost pennies plus postage. And if you want or need to purchase them one at a time as you go, you’ll only really need to get the first two books for the first three weeks of the course; you can order the others later. I’ve listed them in chronological order from the first to the last according to the weekly schedule.
A second reason I’ve ordered the books I have is that it’s lots easier to carry around a short paperback for the week’s work than it is to haul around a big fat bulky textbook such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, The Longman Anthology of English Literature or others like it. I mean, those books are huge. And most of what’s in them is wasted, as nobody can read all that’s in them for one course–summer school or otherwise. So there’s a lot of wasted effort and wasted paper involved in those things. And we’re all “green” now, right?
If for some reason you already own one of these anthologies or you have access to one, you might find much of the material we’ll be reading in it, whereby you might be able to avoid having to purchase one or more of these short paperbacks. It really doesn’t matter to me what book you read the texts in. The page numbers will differ, of course, and for the translated material in the first half of the course, the wording might differ, perhaps considerably. But basically it’ll be the same thing for all the most important elements of the lessons. It’ll be up to you to translate the page numbers and sections of the literature from those given in the lesson outline to the resources you use.
You can also find much of this material online on any of the myriad internet resources in which classic works of English Literature can be found for free. So I don’t really insist that you read this stuff in books: your Kindle, Nook, i-Pad, i-Phone, laptop, desktop, or any other device for text transmission is alright with me. But again you’ll have to do the conversion from one medium to another. I’ve noticed reading books on Kindle there aren’t page numbers, exactly, but location numbers, which frankly I find very confusing.
In the end, your best choice is to get either new or used copies of the books listed above.