Dr. Thomas L. Long, Associate Professor of English

The imminence of the year 2000 has stimulated the apocalyptic anxieties and millennialist expectations of many Americans, already the most future-oriented people in the modern world. This course, offered on-line using Web-site texts and on-line asynchronous discussion forums, will explore the cultural extent and history of apocalypticism and millennialism in diverse world cultures and literatures.  The prerequisite for the course is ENG 112 (College Composition II) and the course fulfills the literature survey or humanities requirement in TNCC curricula.

This is not a religion course and it does not espouse any religious point of view.   Students will be expected to conduct academic, literary and cultural research and analyses, and not to preach, witness, or prophesy.  While students' own faiths may inform how they make use of what they read, the work for the course entails assuming some critical distance from the texts we read, trying to understand how they came to be written and to understand how they have subsequently been used, not trying to believe in them, not trying to espouse doctrines about them, and not trying to convert others.

Software/Hardware/Internet

To take this course students must have an email account, access to the Internet's World-Wide Web, and computerized word processing software (preferably Microsoft's Word 97). The college provides all those resources (free of charge to registered TNCC students) in its Academic Computing Lab, located behind the library.

Texts

The texts for this course will all be on line, accessible using your Web browser.  Some students find it easier to read off line rather than while they are "live" on the Internet.  A couple of ways of doing this: 1.) Save the HTML (Web page) file on your hard or floppy drive; 2.) Print out the texts and reading from the hard copies (please don't do this in the Academic Computer Lab, however).  Students should familiarize themselves with Web browsers' features in order to make the course more accessible. Click here to review the schedule of readings, tutorials, and discussion forums.

Tutorials & Discussions

Tutorials will include my notes on a culture, historical period, and related texts.  Each tutorial represents the topic and discussion of one week; since there are fifteen weeks in the semester, there are fifteen tutorials.  The discussions will all be on line using your Web browser to access discussion forums that I will set up. These discussions will not be in "real time" but will occur over several hours or days as students post their responses on the discussion forum.  For each tutorial you will be expected to read the notes, respond to my prompts, and respond to at least one other student's comments.  This will take the place of a classroom discussion.  Since the course does not happen "in real time" (i.e., not in one three-hour period in one place), you will have from 12:01 a.m. Tuesday to 11:59 p.m. Friday to read the tutorials and post your two responses.  Click here to review the schedule of readings, tutorials, and discussion forums.

Assignments