English Electives Summer 2008
Undergraduate (For Graduate electives click here)
ENG 30-1 Grammar and Usage
Phyllis T Dircks
This course surveys English grammar using traditional terminology and focusing on the syntax of sentences. Although there are no long papers, a good deal of exercise material is assigned as homework, and students can expect to be called on for recitation several times in each class period. The study of traditional grammar is a useful intellectual exercise for any educated person but particularly for anyone entering a profession requiring clear thinking and precision in writing. However, students with a good grounding in school grammar should take a more advanced course like LIN 41 Applied Linguistics.
ENG 55-1 Romantic Period
D Randolf Greene
This course will focus on the works of seven major writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Leading colorful lives in a time of revolutionary fervor, the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats forged a new poetic idiom while working in a variety of new ways. Among prose works of the period, William Blake’s prose poem The Marriage of Heaven Hell and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein provide a new mythology for understanding the relationship of man and God.
ENG 85-1 Research and Criticism
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 Seminar in English – Syntax and Stylistics
Edmund Miller
This course is a sophisticated look at the grammatical and rhetorical featuress of English prose. Topics will include the figures of speech or tropes (figurative use that changes the meaning of words) and schemes (emphatic use of special arrangements of words). There will be written homework exercises and take-home exams. Students will learn to do a full stylistic analysis of a single sentence and will complete a project involving statistical analysis of word counts and other forms in an essay.
ENG 100-2 Seminar in English – Shakespeare: The Late Plays
This course will explore the plays of Shakespeare’s late period. These plays, called tragicomedies or romances, combine elements of tragedy and comedy in a fairy tale plot. Primary attention will be devoted to the three major plays The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, but some attention will also be given to the minor plays Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. In addition to literary values and sources, the special stage conventions of this unusual combined form will be examined closely.
ENG 100-3 Seminar in English – Victorian Poetry
Deborah Lutz
Most Victorian poets were late Romantics. They wrote personal poems about inwardness, about their own thinking, like the Romantics. But Victorian poetry broods more, has deeper doubts, a darker picture of the world. This is true of the works of Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Other poets of the time were more interested in telling stories in verse, such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti. And then there were the decadents: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Michael Field. In this course we will read closely the works of these poets, and we will consider the historical period that nurtured them. You will be required to join in discussion, write two analytic essays, and take a cumulative final exam that tests your comprehension of the poetry and class content.
Graduate Electives
ENG 510-1 Research and Criticism
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 511-1 Syntax and Stylistics
Edmund Miller
This course is a sophisticated look at the grammatical and rhetorical features of English prose. Topics will include the figures of speech or tropes (figurative use that changes the meaning of words) and schemes (emphatic use of special arrangements of words). There will be written homework exercises and take-home exams. Students will learn to do a full stylistic analysis of a single sentence and will complete a project involving statistical analysis of word counts and other forms in an essay.
ENG 512-1 Descriptive Linguistics
Marlene San Miguel Groner
This course will provide an introduction to descriptive linguistics (structural) linguistics using English as a model and various other languages for comparison. The goal of the course is to describe the structure of language on three levels: phonological, morphological, and syntactical. There will be an outline of the sound system of English with a study of the speech organs and an inventory of the phonemes (minimum units of sound). There will also be a survey of the system of morphemes (minimum units of meaning) and a description of the syntax (sentence structure and word order).
ENG 643-1 Shakespeare: The Late Plays
Edmund Miller
This course will explore the plays of Shakespeare’s late period. These plays, called tragicomedies or romances, combine elements of tragedy and comedy in a fairy tale plot. Primary attention will be devoted to the three major plays The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, but some attention will also be given to the minor plays Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. In addition to literary values and sources, the special stage conventions of this unusual combined form will be examined closely.
ENG 684-1 Seminar in a Major Author – Yeats
Jonna Semeiks
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)—poet, statesman, dramatist, mythologist, cultural activist, and Irish nationalist—is generally acknowledged as the finest poet Ireland has ever produced. Indeed, many critics regard him as the finest poet writing in English in the 20th century. Heavily influenced by and interested in Celtic mythology and folk tales, which continued to linger among the rural population of Ireland, Yeats was largely responsible for the creation of the Irish National Theatre Company and wrote a number of plays based on Irish legends himself, plays which were performed by that company. Yeats was religious by temperament but was unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy. He sought all his life—in sources as various as mysticism, folklore, theosophy, Neoplatonism—for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. In this search for religious passion and belief, though not in the places that he found them, he was like another great modernist, D.H. Lawrence.
In midlife Yeats developed his own elaborate (sometimes quite baffling) symbol system, a aesthetic resource which informs some of his important poetry and which allowed him to express his vision of history and contemporary life. Yeats served as a senator in his country’s new government once it achieved its independence from England after World War I, and some of his best poems are political in nature. But there were many other themes which recur in his poetry: his love for the beautiful, ardent revolutionary, Maude Gonne; his admiration for Byzantium (the ancient name for modern-day Istanbul), where, according to Yeats, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one; the conflict between the spirit and the body. These various themes were resolved differently in different poems. We shall examine examples of all of these resolutions. Yeats’s career spanned some five decades, and it is interesting to see the evolution of his verse from the soft, dreamy poems much influenced by the pre-Raphaelites to the clear, chiseled, powerful lyrics he wrote after World War I. Some of his best poetry was written in the late 20s and early 30s, and his Crazy Jane poems, composed when he was quite an old man, constitute one of the most impressive final phases of any poet’s career.
Required texts:
Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Mask. New York: Norton, 2000. ISBN 0933008592. (Students should have read this biography before the course begins.)
Yeats, William Butler. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. James Pethica. New York: Norton (Norton Critical Editions), 2000. ISBN: 0393974979.
ENG 688-1 Special Literary Topics – The Novella
Dan Levin
This course will examine short novels of the Modern period. Possible texts include Gustave Falubert, The Simple Heart; Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground; Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych; Henry James, The Aspern Papers; André Gide, The Pastoral Symphony; James Joyce, The Dead; Jean Toomer, Cane; and Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
ENG 688-2 Special Literary Topics – Victorian Poetry
Deborah Lutz
Most Victorian poets were late Romantics. They wrote personal poems about inwardness, about their own thinking, like the Romantics. But Victorian poetry broods more, has deeper doubts, a darker picture of the world. This is true of the works of Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Other poets of the time were more interested in telling stories in verse, such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti. And then there were the decadents: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Michael Field. In this course we will read closely the works of these poets, and we will consider the historical period that nurtured them. You will be required to join in discussion, write two analytic essays, and take a cumulative final exam that tests your comprehension of the poetry and class content.
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