English Department Course Descriptions Spring 2008
Spring 2008 Undergraduate (for graduate courses click here)
ENG 6-1 Writing in Business (WAC)
Hugh Patterson
In-depth instruction in the format and style appropriate for writing in a wide variety of business situations. Writing assignments include letters, memos, résumés, and a substantial formal report involving research.
ENG 12-1 Survey of British Literature II (WAC)
Isaac Cates
This course is an introduction to the major literary periods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, and Contemporary. In the interest of getting students oriented to these periods, we'll mix some sustained engagement with particular poets and writers of prose with some contextual matters having to do with science, religion, politics, and other cultural matters. Our main focus, however, will be on the amazing proliferation of excellent literature during this period.
The reading pace for this course will be steady, and fairly intense. You can expect to be asked to read a fairly long novel in two weeks; in general, you can expect to prepare more than fifty pages of reading per class session.
Most of your grade for this course will come from of three essays that you will draft and revise.
ENG 12-2, -3 Survey of British Literature II
Sheila McDonald
We shall begin with the Romantic Period (or Age of Feeling) as depicted by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold will be viewed as transitional figures, echoing the Romantics while heralding the Victorians. The prose of Dickens and Carlyle will be regarded primarily as reactions against Romanticism. Hardy and Wilde are the Victorian rebels. The poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden and the fiction of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce together with the drama of Shaw and Synge bring this survey to a resounding close.
ENG 16-1 Modern Novel
Suzanne Nalbantian
A comparatist examination of the modern novel of the twentieth century and the variations of modernism that are presented by this genre. Readings include novels by Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Woolf, Hesse, Breton, Rosamel del Valle, Camus, and Anaïs Nin. The craft of this fiction will be featured. The varieties of Modernism will be highlighted by the study of the innovations that such writers brought to modern fiction in connection with avant-garde views of aesthetics, philosophy, science, and culture. Students will be encouraged to present short oral reports based on their investigation of leading literary critics who have treated these works. A twelve-to-fifteen-page paper with a comparatist approach is required.
ENG 22-1 Shakespeare: Tragedy and Romance
James P Bednarz
This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare’s later career and focuses on the two important genres—the tragedies and romances (or late comedies)—he perfected during his second decade of involvement with London’s thriving commercial theater. Its sequence of readings (which consists of seven plays) is arranged chronologically to demonstrate the continuing evolution of his dramaturgy from the late Elizabethan to the Jacobean period. Its broadest aim is to provide students with a theatrical, literary, philosophical, historical, and social framework for understanding Shakespeare’s tragedies and romances in relation both to their original Renaissance context and to our own contemporary perspective as readers. It will explore, on its most abstract level, how Shakespeare became relevant both to his age and for all time by analyzing the complexities of human identity and the forms theater employs to represent it. To this end, not only will readers be invited to examine closely the brilliant nuances of his language, characterization, and plot, but they will also, more importantly, be challenged to come to terms with his richly ambivalent conception of experience, with a “Shakespearean” worldview that defies ordinary logic and reason and examines with startling subtlety the basic contradictions in the human condition.
ENG 25-1 Hawthorne and James
Dennis Pahl
In this course, we will examine two major American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, writers whose works have much in common despite the fact that James attempts to mark out his own place within American literary history—a place quite different from the position of his most important literary precursor. In the first half of the class, we will read Hawthorne's work, starting with The Scarlet Letter, the story of an independent woman, Hester Prynne, trying to live within the oppressive confines of Puritan America. How, we will ask, does this novel speak to Hawthorne's own era in the middle of the nineteenth century, the era of Transcendentalism and early feminism? What kind of freedom is possible within the moral constraints of American society? Such questions lead to the issues dramatized in The Blithedale Romance, a novel that depicts experiments in communal living and in establishing a new morality outside the world of convention. In addition to reading these works, we will also examine a wide selection of Hawthorne’s most important short stories, which, blending history and romance, have implications for Hawthorne’s aesthetics as well as for his development of fiction portraying what James called the “deeper psychology.” In the second part of the course, we will read James’s Daisy Miller (a re-writing of Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”), The Portrait of a Lady (where we meet a more sophisticated, more worldly version of Hester Prynne), and such other of James’s works of fiction as resonate with the life and writings of Hawthorne (for example, Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and The Aspern Papers). Along the way, we will look at James’s critical study Hawthorne, a work in which he pays tribute to Hawthorne’s early influence while trying to indicate more cosmopolitan directions for American literature (the “international novel”) and for his own brand of realism. This critical work, as well as James’s essay on the "art of fiction," will force us to consider questions about the profession of writing in America, about how authors en-gender themselves (defining themselves in masculine or feminine terms), and about the degree to which American writing is socially conscious and engages the problems of history. These and other issues will be addressed through close readings of texts, and therefore students are encouraged to purchase the editions of the books that have been ordered through the bookstore. Class format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: two short papers, one longer research paper, some in-class writing or take-home questions for reflection, a final exam, regular attendance.
ENG 30-1 Grammar and Usage
Marlene San Miguel Groner
ENG 30 is a course which examines rules of grammar, both descriptive and prescriptive. Topics include defining grammar, sentence patterns, word classes, parts of speech, punctuation, usage, and diction. The underlying theme of the course will be understanding and employing knowledge of grammar to achieve rhetorical goals.
ENG 31-1 Theories of Academic Literacy
Belinda Kremer
Intended for undergraduate students working in the Writing Center and as fellows in the (WAC) Program, this seminar focuses on alternative theories of reading, writing, and literacy to prepare writing tutors. The course will also examine definitions of intellectual work in various disciplines as well as the literacy needs of students from a range of cultures, language backgrounds, and life experiences.
ENG 32-1 Contemporary Literature
John Scheckter
In this course, we will examine literature that has appeared recently—within the past decade or so. Readings will be drawn not only from the United States and Great Britain, the traditional sources of “English,” but from all over the expanded world of English users who constitute, by now, a global and sometimes borderless audience. We will look at how contemporary prose and poetry reflect local situations and traditions at the same time as they participate in wider circles of awareness; how literature intertwines with concerns of other realms, such as politics and law, and those of other media, such as film and television; and how measures of literary beauty are sometimes challenged and sometimes surprisingly affirmed. We will look at how contemporary critical theories may be used as tools in forming an understanding of the works, and how theory reinforces definitions and expectations of literary endeavor.
The class will operate as a seminar, so participation will be assumed. Three papers will be required, involving varying degrees of research. A final essay exam will focus upon topics chosen by the students.
ENG 35-1 Literature and Childhood (WAC)
Margaret Hallissy
The class will read and discuss works of recognized literary quality which trace the development of a child or adolescent. We will pay particular attention to the way in which children are imagined in literature of the past, in preparation for our reading of contemporary works. As a foundation for our examination of childhood, we will read variants of classic fairy tales and view selections from film versions of these tales. In reading childhood classics from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will focus particularly on the way in which social and cultural expectations of children are transmitted in literature for children. Finally, with our reading of contemporary works for and about adolescents, we will consider how childhood has remained the same as well as how it has changed. Throughout the course, the way in which parents and other adults around the child will also require our attention, as we consider the changes in the depiction of adult characters over time.
ENG 44-1 Horror in Literature (WAC)
Sheila Gunther
This course is an analysis of the development of horror in world literature. The course focuses on discussion of horror as a pervasive element, expressing the values and aspirations of many cultures from ancient times to the present. Lectures and classroom discussion will provide insights into the reading. Film will supplement the lectures and provide a basis for comparisons of approaches to horror. Writings of papers and essays will encourage improvement in writing skills and analytical thinking. The course is designed to promote an interest in foreign cultures through a study of diverse literary influences on the development of horror literature. There will be written essays, examinations, in-class writings, and a final essay examination.
Texts:
Holy Bible (selections).
Homer. Iliad (selections).
—. Odyssey (selections).
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, eds. Fairy Tales.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
Pushkin, Alexander. The Stone Guest.
Gogol, Nikolai. The Portrait.
—. The Terrible Vengeance.
—. “Viy.”
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
—. Short Stories (selections).
Baudelaire. Charles. The Flowers of Evil (selections).
—. “The Bad Glazier.”
—. “The Rope.”
Stoker, Bram. Dracula.
Wiesel, Elie. The Golem.
ENG 44-2 Graphic Novel
Isaac Cates
This course offers a survey of the recent literary movement in English-language long-form comics (also known as “graphic novels”). Don't expect any superheroes or manga romances: the texts we examine will mainly be in the genres of memoir, autobiography, and realist fiction.
We'll be looking at the ways in which these recent comics are genuinely literary-not only in their content or their meaning, but in their approach to meaning, and in the techniques their author-artists employ.
Texts will include works by Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, Craig Thompson, Jessica Abel, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and others. An option to create original comics (within fairly strict guidelines) will be available at the end of the course, but the majority of your grade will come from in-class examinations.
ENG 60-1 Victorian Rebels
Deborah Lutz
When we think of the Victorians, many stereotypes come to mind: they were sexually repressed; their architecture and furniture was overly elaborate and fanciful; their literature is long and dull. In this course, we will explore these stereotypes, but we will also blast them out of the water. We will read the literature of powerful women and early feminists—George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. We will explore the writings and paintings of sexual radicals of all stripes—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley. We will study the poetry and criticism of political and social revolutionaries—William Morris, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, and John Ruskin. Finally, we will discover that all the good rebellions of today have their roots in the Victorian period. Come to class with a willingness to be exposed to utterly new ideas. Be prepared to do a good deal of serious reading and writing; you will also be required to discuss your ideas in class.
ENG 68-1 Mythology
Wendy Ryden
This course will acquaint students with various approaches to myth (including the popular, literary, psychological, folkloric, and anthropological) and the theoretical conflicts and overlaps that exist among disciplines. Students will examine past and current trends in the study of mythology and consider the relevance of myth for ancient as well as contemporary peoples.
The study of myth is an international and interdisciplinary endeavor that has produced controversy with regard to what myth is and how or why it should be studied. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to this eclecticism and to trace the shift in theoretical orientation from the nineteenth century preoccupation with origins to the twentieth century concern over metaphoric content, structure and function. Selected myths, legends, and folktales, from within and outside of the Indo-European group (including South Pacific and Native American), will be encountered as these issues are considered. To begin, the course will assume the familiar Jungian “archetypal” approach as popularized by Campbell and others and then, as students gain familiarity with their subject, will progress to other lesser-known academic perspectives, including those inimical to Jung’s concepts, such as Malinowski's functionalism and the performance-oriented analysis of folklorists.
ENG 72-1 American Literature II (WAC)
Thomas Fahy
In this course we will focus on the fiction, poetry, drama, art, and music of (and/or influencing) major American artists after 1865. We will cover a range of literary, intellectual, and artistic periods, including Realism (William Dean Howells, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent), Naturalism (Stephen Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Bellows), and Modernism (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Susan Glaspell, e.e. cummings, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Duke Ellington). We will also examine how the works that follow this period are responding to the artistic innovations and trends of Modernism (starting with John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White). Since this is a writing-intensive course, students can expect to do at least thirty pages of writing and will be asked to come prepared each week with a “response paper.” There will be two formal papers, totaling twenty pages of revised writing, and the rest of the writing will consist of informal in-class papers and other kinds of assignments. Format: lecture/discussion.
ENG 72-2 American Literature II
Arthur Coleman
In this survey of American literature from 1865 to the present, the English major will get a chance to read some of the most influential works in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and enjoy them as great writing. We will be reading essays, short stories, poetry and parts of novels.
ENG 75-1 American Drama
Phyllis T Dircks
Drama always reflects its culture, so American plays, interesting in themselves, also show America finding its voice in the theatre, and reflecting American civilization. The plays to be discussed range from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, including such early plays as Tyler’s Contrast, Boucicault=s The Octoroon, and Glaspell’s Trifles and concentrating on playwrights Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. Reports include those elements that helped shape our indigenous drama, such as staging, touring, off-Broadway, melodrama, musical comedy, circuses, vaudeville, and burlesque.
ENG 81-1 Creative Writing Workshop I
Dan Levin
Geared toward creative writing in all forms, this course requires regular submission of original material. Writing is commented on in the workshop classby both instructor and peers with a view to helping the writer and with a view to developing the critical abilities of workshop participants.
ENG 82-1 Creative Writing II
Dan Levin
The course will involve consistent writing throughout the semester in any genre congenial to the student poetry, essay, short story, part of novel, short play, or what-have-you. Students are encouraged to attempt writing of a larger scope that in ENG 81Cor writing with a more organized unity or simply in different genres than they have tried before.
ENG 85-1 Disciplinary Literacy in the Humanities (WAC)
John Lutz
In this course we will explore the basic elements that contribute to insightful scholarship. Throughout the course, we will discuss how to apply various methods of analysis to the explication of literary texts, the basic features of clear and effective writing, and effective methods of research. In addition, we will explore various theoretical disciplines in literary theory and apply these theories directly to the reading of literature.
ENG 100-1 Irish American Fiction (WAC)
Margaret Hallissy
Beginning with the mid-nineteenth-century wave of emigration due to the Great Famine in Ireland, the Irish became a formidable presence in American life and in American fiction as well. We will read representative samples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction as a foundation for the major focus of the course, which is the contemporary novel of the Irish American experience. For our purposes, we will define Irish American fiction not by the ethnicity of the novelist but rather as fiction which examines the connections between Ireland and America, the influence of the Irish past in the lives of the American characters, the search for a precarious balance between being Irish and being American. Possible authors include Tom McHale, J.P. Donleavy, John Gregory Dunne, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, William Kennedy, and Pete Hamill.
ENG 100-2 Classical Rhetoric (WAC)
Richard McNabb
This course is an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of classical rhetoric—the art and craft of persuasion. Through class readings and discussions, you will learn ancient techniques of argument and rhetorical analysis. You will also gain an understanding of the influence of ancient rhetorical theory within Western culture and the history of Western education. Readings will include selections from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian among others.
Required texts:
Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (handout).
Plato. Phaedrus and Gorgias.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric, Nichomachean Ethics.
Isocrates. Against the Sophists and Antidosis.
Cicero. De Oratore, Brutus.
Quintilian. The Institutes of Oratory.
ENG 101-1 Internship
Staff
Career-oriented course with placement and supervised work in a professional setting in law, publishing, public relations, or the like to provide direct practical experience in the application of skills from academic course work. Independent study, not a regular classroom course. Prerequisite: nine-credits of upper-level English. A student will usually be a participant in the COOP Program who has completed EEE-1. A student must arrange through the Department Advisor to work with a particular faculty member before registering for this course.
ENG 350-1 BODIES ON DISPLAY: PERSPECTIVES ON THE BODY IN AMERICAN CULTURE FROM 1820 TO THE PRESENT
Thomas Fahy
This course seeks to explore some of the rich historical materials treating aspects of the human body as it has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and objectified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine some key primary works, fiction, film, photography, and a selection of interpretive studies that consider the social and cultural construction of bodies in America. The readings in this course are intended not to add up to some neat thesis but to raise questions of interpretation and meaning. From the history of blackface minstrelsy and freak shows to more contemporary displays of female and male bodies, these readings—both primary and secondary—will challenge us to think about some of the forces that have shaped—and continue to shape—the ways in which we think about the body.
Required Texts:
Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995)
Wesley Brown’s Darktown Strutters: A Novel (1994)
Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988)
Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005)
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
John Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in American (2000)
David M. Lubin’s Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (2003)
Graduate English Electives Spring 2008
ENG 505-1 Classical Rhetoric
Richard McNabb
This course is an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of classical rhetoric—the art and craft of persuasion. Through class readings and discussions, you will learn ancient techniques of argument and rhetorical analysis. You will also gain an understanding of the influence of ancient rhetorical theory within Western culture and the history of Western education. Readings will include selections from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian among others.
Required texts:
Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (handout).
Plato. Phaedrus and Gorgias.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric, Nichomachean Ethics.
Isocrates. Against the Sophists and Antidosis.
Cicero. De Oratore, Brutus.
Quintilian. The Institutes of Oratory.
ENG 515-1 Sociolinguistics
Richard Auletta
This course provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics and relates sociolinguistics to other branches of language theory. It surveys the various sub-branches of sociolinguistics and cites case studies illustrating these areas of study. Students are introduced to linguistic variation according to geographic, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, age, occupational, religious, and other social variables. The course presents some of the sociolinguistic problems in the USA today and relates them to classroom teaching and language acquisition. There is some study of languages in contact, code-switching, pidgins and creoles, and linguistic pluralism in a multicultural society. During the semester, the class will view and discuss the videos Yeah, You Rite and American Tongues. The main text will be Language in Society by Suzanne Romaine.
ENG 531-1 Theories of Academic Literacy
Belinda Kremer
Intended for graduate students working in the Writing Center and as fellows in the (WAC) Program, this seminar focuses on alternative theories of reading, writing, and literacy to prepare writing tutors. The course will also examine definitions of intellectual work in various disciplines as well as the literacy needs of students from a range of cultures, language backgrounds, and life experiences.
ENG 650-1 Chaucer
Margaret Hallissy
Born in the middle of the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer was a man at the center of his society. England in the fourteenth century was a society in transition, in some ways similar to our own and in other ways radically different. In addition to a serious professional career in public service, Chaucer pursued a parallel career as a writer. Several times he depicts himself in his writing as a bookworm, always in his library, surrounded by piles of books from which he drew ideas for his masterwork, The Canterbury Tales. In this course, this collection of stories told on a fictional pilgrimage from London to Canterbury will be studied by means of close reading and analysis within the historical context of fourteenth-century beliefs and practices. We will begin by reading several tales in a modern translation, then move gradually to the original Middle English so as to experience Chaucer’s language directly.
ENG 684-1 D H Lawrence
Jonna Semeiks
D.H. Lawrence, one of the twentieth century’s great modernists, found his career dogged by controversy almost from the moment he began to write, primarily because of the sexual frankness of his fiction. We will study the place of the erotic in his work as well as assess his view of the twentieth century as a spiritual wasteland, his depiction of the devastating effects of the Great War (World War I) on the psyches of his fictional characters, his use of myth and archetype, and his radical critique of the dominant forces of Western civilization: capitalism, materialism, and bourgeois conformity. We will also examine what he meant by “blood consciousness” (as opposed to mental consciousness) and by organic (as opposed to mechanical) patterns of being. Lawrence called the novel “the bright book of life” and asserted that it could teach us how to live. Accordingly, we will read four novels (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover), one novella (“St. Mawr,” several stories, a number of poems, and some of Lawrence’s brilliant and idiosyncratic criticism of other writers’ work—e.g., Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy.
ENG 688-1 Poetic Forms
Isaac Cates
This course begins with the idea that the best way to understand the mechanics of an artistic medium is to practice it. By reading broadly in several centuries of poetry, taking up examples of each form, and by imitating the verse structures found there, students will internalize the principles of English prosody and the "rules" of several prominent verse forms. After some initial training in meter (and blank verse in particular), we will spend time with the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, and assorted other fauna in the menagerie of English-language verse, including so-called free verse. Texts will range from the Renaissance to the present, and some attention will also be given to poets' prose defenses of verse practice. Short but obligatory weekly writing assignments will be creative (or "practical") in nature; there will also be a short essay toward the end of the term.
ENG 688-2 American Studies: Bodies on Display: Perspectives on the Body in American Culture from 1820 to the Present
Thomas Fahy
This course seeks to explore some of the rich historical materials treating aspects of the human body as it has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and objectified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine some key primary works, fiction, film, photography, and a selection of interpretive studies that consider the social and cultural construction of bodies in America. The readings in this course are intended not to add up to some neat thesis but to raise questions of interpretation and meaning. From the history of blackface minstrelsy and freak shows to more contemporary displays of female and male bodies, these readings—both primary and secondary—will challenge us to think about some of the forces that have shaped—and continue to shape—the ways in which we think about the body.
Required Texts:
Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995)
Wesley Brown’s Darktown Strutters: A Novel (1994)
Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988)
Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005)
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
John Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in American (2000)
David M. Lubin’s Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (2003)
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