Emily Dickinson's poetry often reveals a child-like fascination with the natural world. She writes perceptively of butterflies, birds, and bats and uses lucid metaphors to describe the sky and the sea.
After introducing the story of Emmett Till, students will break into small groups and be given one of the three Emmett Till stories (past, present or future). In small groups, students will read their particular story.
This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the growth of ideas about nature and the natural environment of mankind. The term nature in this context has to do with the varying ways in which the physical world has been conceived as the habitation of mankind, a source of imperatives for the collective organization and conduct of human life. In this sense, nature is less the object of complex scientific investigation than the object of individual experience and direct observation. Using the term “nature” in this sense, we can say that modern reference to “the environment” owes much to three ideas about the relation of mankind to nature. In the first of these, which harks back to ancient medical theories and notions about weather, geographical nature was seen as a neutral agency affecting or transforming agent of mankind’s character and institutions. In the second, which derives from religious and classical sources in the Western tradition, the earth was designed as a fit environment for mankind or, at the least, as adequately suited for its abode, and civic or political life was taken to be consonant with the natural world. In the third, which also makes its appearance in the ancient world but becomes important only much later, nature and mankind are regarded as antagonists, and one must conquer the other or be subjugated by it.
Thank you for visiting our Tennessee Board of Regents OER Grant English 1020: Introduction to Literature course. The pilot launched in spring 2023. This Walters State Community College composition course focuses on reading and analyzing poetry, drama, and short stories. The course has been designed with Quality Matters standards, Universal Design for Learning concepts, Growth Mindset fundamentals, and Lumen Circles concepts.
This is a resource for teaching the first half of an English Literature course. The material covers Anglo-Saxon literature through the 18th century, including readings across 1,000 years of literature.This material would be useful for teaching a course that aims to instruct students on how to read, analyze, and write critically about English literature. The resources comprise important terms, readings, and information on how to engage with literary scholarship.
This lesson includes information on how to write an English Composition I essay.
Leading up to a final argumentative research paper in my Composition 1 course, I spend several classes acquainting students with the differences between popular and peer-reviewed sources. This lesson plan spans 3 50-minute periods and includes how I move through teaching these types of sources and the resources that I use.
The lecture begins describing that a T-Chart can be especially effective when writing a compare and contrast essay to better organize the ideas and details which may have been discovered after using the other prewriting activities such as brainstorming or freewriting on a compare and contrast topic. My lecture then moves on to describe the general layout of a simple T-Chart (topic: the advantages and disadvantages of living on campus) and then goes into further detail with another T-Chart (topic: contrasting high school and college regarding course schedules, homework load, and housing).
A lesson for English Composition I that includes a PowerPoint lecture, resources about writing ,and plagiarism.
English Literature: Victorians and Moderns is an anthology with a difference. In addition to providing annotated teaching editions of many of the most frequently-taught classics of Victorian and Modern poetry, fiction and drama, it also provides a series of guided research casebooks which make available numerous published essays from open access books and journals, as well as several reprinted critical essays from established learned journals such as English Studies in Canada and the Aldous Huxley Annual with the permission of the authors and editors. Designed to supplement the annotated complete texts of three famous short novels: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, each casebook offers cross-disciplinary guided research topics which will encourage majors in fields other than English to undertake topics in diverse areas, including History, Economics, Anthropology, Political Science, Biology, and Psychology. Selections have also been included to encourage topical, thematic, and generic cross-referencing. Students will also be exposed to a wide-range of approaches, including new-critical, psychoanalytic, historical, and feminist.
Shakespeare “doth bestride the narrow world” of the English Renaissance “like a colossus,” leaving his contemporaries “walk under his large legs and peep about” to find themselves in “dishonourable graves.” This course aims in part to correct this grave injustice by surveying the extraordinary output of playwrights whose names have largely been eclipsed by their more luminous compatriot: Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Ford, among others. Reading Shakespeare as just one of a group of practitioners – many of whom were more popular than him during and even after his remarkable career – will restore, I hope, a sense not just of the richness of English Renaissance drama, but also that of the historical and cultural moment of the English Renaissance itself. This course will examine the relationship between theatre and society through the lens of the drama produced in response to these changes. However, we will not try to map the progress of drama directly onto the social world, as if the former can simply read off the latter. Rather, focusing on discrete issues and problems, we will try to understand the ways in which a particular text not only reflects but responds to and shapes aspects of the culture from which it derives, developing an aesthetic that actively engages its world. The topics addressed over the course of the semester will be wide-ranging but will include: gender and class dynamics in Renaissance society; money, trade, and colonialism; the body as metaphor and theatrical “object”; allegory and aesthetic form; theatricality and meta-theatricality; the private and the public.
This video offers a summary and analysis of the main themes in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The world’s first recorded epic poem, from Mesopotamia, explores important questions: can humans defy aging and conquer death?
In this lesson, students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that shape the narrative throughout Esperanza Rising. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows into a responsible young woman and the contradictions that she experiences.
An earlier essay writing hub notes that each writer approaches the available information from a specific perspective--influences on which are discussed above as constituting writer biases. The circumstances of an author's life--where the author comes from, when, and from whom, as well as where and when the author is while writing--position the writer such that the mere examination of some evidence will cause an unconscious recognition of a particular understanding of that evidence.
Although this class starts by critically examining the term “ethnic” as it defines a wide range of cultural forms over time, we will focus mostly on contemporary writers. Questions to consider will include: How has ethnic writing changed American culture and renovated forms of literary expression? What are the varieties and nuances of what we might call an ethnic subjectivity? What could it mean to harbor fugitives within the self: transgressive thoughts or a “foreign” identity? And what is the future of “ethnic” literature in a global space?
Practice working with primary documents by comparing accounts of the Chicago Fire and testing the credibility of a Civil War diary.
The student will use the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Jacqueline Woodson, Countee Cullen, and Amanda Gorman to draw conclusions about the historic eras in which they wrote.
FOCUS QUESTIONIs compassion the basis for morality?STUDENT OUTCOMESStudents will:examine and interpret the definitions of morality and compassion as presented in a variety of textsread, analyze, and discuss quotations and/or multimedia sourceswrite an original definition of a moral person (This definition will be used later in an argument paper which cites Atticus Finch's acts of compassion as evidence of his morality.) Image source: "Mockingbird" by skeeze on Pixabay.com.
During days 3-6 of the unit, students will complete a short, focused research assignment to learn about the characteristics of Sourthern Gothic Literature and to begin to view To Kill a Mockingbird through that lens. As is true with the rest of the unit, the three day time frame is a suggestion only and can be adjusted based on your schedule and the needs of the students.Image source: "Mockingbird" by skeeze on Pixabay.com.