Home Page for English 264 Online
Welcome to the web site for my online English 264 course. This course, like my traditional face to face section of English 264, provides a chronological survey of English literature from the Romantic Age to the Modern period. We will read, discuss, and respond in writing to a variety of texts, representing various periods, movements, genres and forms. While the purpose of the course is to provide an overview of many authors and their works, we will also attempt to analyze in detail particular texts and to understand how important cultural events and controversies affected the literature.
Unlike my usual sections of this course, though, in our online course this summer we will move my lectures, your ideas and comments and our discussions out of the classroom and onto the web. For the authors and topics you will be reading about in our textbook, I will provide lectures in the form of podcasts. You can download them from this site, and listen to them on an iPod or on your computer. You will create a blog for this class, in which you will write your reactions to and analysis of the readings; you will also read each other's blog entries, and comment on them. We will use our Blackboard site to have weekly online chats about the readings, which will give you a chance to share your thoughts in real time. This may be the first online course you have taken, but I hope you will enjoy exploring this great literature through this new technology.
This web site complements and supplements our class. From here you can conveniently access our syllabus, assignments and handouts from class. Also available are visual aids (such as paintings, maps and manuscripts) and electronic texts which will deepen your experience of our assigned readings. Finally, you can explore links to many other web sites dedicated to the authors and periods we will study—these sites are a useful place to begin your research for your essay assignment, or to find ideas and background to work into your blog entries. While there is a Blackboard page for this course, which will provide support and resources not easily available on the web, this web site will be the center for our online English 264 explorations.
I have prepared a one page instruction sheet to help you in Getting Started.
Please contact me if you have any comments or questions.
Jonathan C. Glance
Professor of English
Mercer University
Last updated 15 May 2014
