[lorend]

I took this class 2008-2009 Term 3 with Dr. Rintoul.

I took this course because I had to: it was neccessary for me to fulfill one of the four areas of English. I wasn't looking forward to taking the class too much.

For a six unit course, there was not much in terms of assignments: two essays, a midterm and a final, which was nice. The reading load could be pretty intense at times...but it's not unlike other English courses.

Some topics we covered
- Nature and the Artist
- Domestic Ideology
- Poverty and Industrialization
- Women and Slavery
- Violence and Body
- Decay and Degeneration

I wish (and would probably enjoyed the course content more) if there was focus on the Gothic (Mary Shelly, Stoker), or children's literature (Secret Garden, The Jungle Book).

The prof was pretty interesting, but it seems like sometimes she doubted herself and her abilities as an intellectual. But she was really accommodating in providing extra feedback on papers and was really good at responding quickly to emails etc.

I took this class in the 08-09 year. This class could have been better if the required readings had been changed a bit. A lot of the pieces focused on the exact same topics without variation which obviously shows a trend but gets a little tedious after a while.

The professor, Dr. Rintoul, was easy to understand although lacked the ability to inspire. I found that she focused too often on very obscure theories that seemed to be stretching credibility based on the evidence of the material.

The reading list wasn't too heavy. Taking advantage of reading week and Christmas to get ahead on the novels is key but other than that it's fairly manageable.

As previously mentioned there were two term essays and one midterm in first semester.

To give you an idea of some of the authors/works we covered (where there is no title it is because we studied more than one piece):

Austen- Mansfield Park
Baillie- Orra
Byron - Manfred
Collins- Woman in White
Wordsworth
Shelley
Keats
Coleridge- Britannica and Rime of the Ancient Mariner
De Quincey- Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Browning
Rossetti
Dickens- Oliver Twist, Walk in the Workhouse
Blake
Hardy
Mayhew
Darwin
Marx
Engels