A survey course studies samples of literature from various time periods and styles of lit from that culture. For example, it would not be unusual to find a course entitled “American Literature from 1865 to 1900.” This would cover only those things written from the end of the Civil War through the turn of that century. A survey course in American Literature, though, would sample a little bit of writing from every time period and every mode of writing in American Lit. So you’d get stuff going all the way back to colonial times, and you’d get prose, poetry, novels, pamphlets, rhetoric, etc.

Often, people will take a survey course in the beginning of their studies, so that they might find a time period or a type of writing upon which they would like to focus. OR, there may be a requirement that students take a literature course, ANY literature course, to fulfill certain requirements for graduation. Then a survey course is good because it gives a broad base of knowledge in that particular field, like Japanese Literature.

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