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Current VCU Policies & Notices

English 483/499:
Literary Texts & Contexts:
Alcott, Stowe, & Twain

English 499:
Senior Seminar: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn

English 499:
Mark Twain Seminar-- 
The Writer in His Own Time

English 605:
Bibliography & Methods of Research

.English 611:
Mark Twain Seminar-- 
The Writer in His Own Time

English 624/Theater 791:
Seminar in American Theater and Drama

English 614/490/391:
Huckleberry Finn

A note about the course pages above: I have not taught many of the courses recently, since I have been a full-time administrator for several years. I have kept the pages on my website, however, to show the coures' concepts and materials. As I am now returning to a full-time faculty position, I will begin teaching the courses again and I will update these pages as I do.

.About the "course-enhancement" projects in English 205 and 206:  

As a method of computer for teaching, the course-enhancement projects in 205 and 206 have been particularly successful.  There are two each for each course--for 205, one contrasting Woolman and Edwards and the other on Melville and Poe's attitudes towards Hawthorne's tales; for 206, one contrasting Crane and Whitman's war poetry and the other on a poem in the carpe diem tradition by Williams (with Christopher Marlowe's poem and Walter Raleigh's rejoinder included, too).  Students work on these projects entirely on their own, using workstations in several locations around campus or at home-- anywhere, really.  No reports or papers based on these projects are required; student work on them is tested on the midterm (for project #1) and on the final (for project #2) by way of a question devoted exclusively to the respective project.  All the primary works except for Poe's review are in the textbook, and an electronic version of that piece is linked to that project; students are to have read the works before they begin to study them on-line.

The results since 1994, when I initiated these projects, show that students understand the material well with no additional aid from me or teaching assistants. What's more, students enjoy the web aspect of the lesson--especially for the 206 projects which feature pop-up windows containing explanatory material about a highlighted section of the primary text.  Then, too, students can work at their own pace and on their own schedule.

And even more importantly, students appreciate the flexibility of the medium--they can move forward and back within the project, repeat sections as needed, or take up part of it on one visit and the rest on another.  The projects are designed like mini-tutorials.  Of course students could do that with a book, too, but perhaps not quite as efficiently since these projects have been tailored for easy and focused use with the computer.  It's not better than a book, just enjoyably different.  That helps these projects be truly an "enhancement."  At least in these cases, with suitable primary works and carefully designed guides and aids, the web projects allow an extra lesson to be incorporated smoothly into the course--something extra, beyond the lecture material, which the students can pursue independently and individually.  They clearly like that part of it, too.

I hope that you, too, enjoy and benefit from the materials for 205 and 206 as well as the others.  The Honors course (399) is a "module" (five-weeks, 1.5 credits--the university Honors program offers many of these modules during each of the three five-week units within a semester).  Mine is specially designed to allow concentrated attention on a single subject: the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) along with literature of the period that explores the same issues.  Plessy is the decision that declared "separate but equal" laws regarding race and public facilities to be constitutional.  One highlight of that course was a field trip to the Supreme Court; another was a classroom visit by Oliver Hill, one of the NAACP attorneys joining Thurgood Marshall in arguing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that overturned Plessy.  The graduate seminar in Early American Theatre (624/791), a cross-listing between the English and Theatre departments, features student teams of an English and a Theatre student working together on joint projects, thereby heightening cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches.  The senior seminar in Twain (491) was offered in an eight-week summer session and focused on the late Twain, when he was most political and most public.  The graduate course in bibliographical methods (530) aims to develop student savvy about what constitutes literary research and how to do it, and the course always includes textual study of a work by one of our own writers--most recently The Watch, the sixth novel by Dennis Danvers, a graduate of our department's Creative Writing Program.  Dennis provided various drafts, notebooks and correspondence to guide us in establishing an authoritative edition of his novel, and at the conclusion of the project he graciously met with the students to discuss his (and their) texts.

Please feel welcome to use these materials. I only ask that you credit my Web Site as you would credit any print source that you use.  If you use the materials, won't you let me hear about your experience?  I could improve them based on what you tell me.

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