[Omega_X13]

I took this course in Fall 2009 with Dr. King.

The mark breakdown was:
Essay 1 (500 words) - 30%
Essay 2 (1000 words) - 40%
Final Exam - 30%

Note that this course may not be offered every year. As far as I understand it, the availability of most of the open elective English courses change each year, and they only have two or three of them each term.

Lectures
This course offers a survey of major works in British literature in the 20th century. It is usually essential that you read the work before going to class or you'll be confused as to what is going on. For certain works, Dr. King did short "reading notes" before his lectures on them, which were more or less a brief summary of important facts. The reading load is pretty heavy, as it includes some short novels.

Some of the authors we covered were: Yeats, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Forster, etc. We covered poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. Towards the end of the term, we watched the film versions of Endgame (not the whole thing though) and The Homecoming. As well, we watched My Beautiful Laundrette.

I personally got bored of the class after the first month, mainly because it was at 8:30 in the morning. As well, Dr. King didn't use the mic, and he doesn't always talk loudly enough. He is very knowledgeable though and definitely has great interest in the topics. I didn't like the fact that he only did one or two lectures for some of the longer works (like Mrs. Dalloway and A Room with a View) because it made reading them less important.

Essays
The two essays were based on works that weren't covered in class. There was choice in the topic to write about in both cases. These essays were worth a lot; more than they should have been based on their length, in my opinion. If you're good at writing essays, then these should be no problem.

Final Exam
Throughout the term, Dr. King told us that he wasn't going to make the exam easy because many people take these classes as bird courses and don't show up to class or read any of the works until the end. I went to almost all of the classes but didn't read a lot of the works, and I found the exam to be fine. It was 60% identifying character/place and 40% essay. As long as you know what each piece is about and who the characters are, you'll be fine.

Final Thoughts
This wasn't my favorite English course that I've taken, and I regret not keeping up with the readings; however, it was still a pretty good course. The themes discussed were usually interesting. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, and it turned out to be one of my higher English marks.

Hi

I need to take this course but I've never taken an English course. In highschool, I never really was interested in Shakespeare so it was difficult for me to engage and do well in. Is the readings in this course something like that?

Thanks in advance.