Fall 2009 Undergraduate Courses
Return to current courses and course archives.
Note that the courses listed here represent many but not all the courses taught during this particular quarter. Those courses taught by graduate students and part-time instructors are not listed.
Eng 151 - Writing & Rhetoric I
Professor: Eric Eye
Description:
Practice in composing and revising expository essays that are well organized, logically coherent, and effective for their purpose and audience. Topics from personal experience or nonfiction reading..
Eng 151 - Writing & Rhetoric I
Professor: Michael Brown
Description:
Practice in composing and revising expository essays that are well organized, logically coherent, and effective for their purpose and audience. Topics from personal experience or nonfiction reading.
Eng 151 - Writing & Rhetoric I
Professor: Robert Kinsley
Description:
This course will examine the essay by looking closely at essays on and about family and place. We will discuss the importance of content but also examine in detail the how's of the essay both in the text and in your writing about the craft.
Readings:
The Writers Way by Rawlins; On Writing by Stephen King; The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 edited by Zaleski; Good Roots by Watts
Eng 151 - Writing & Rhetoric I
Professor: David Sharpe
Description:
Movies are not only a treasured part of our culture, but they are also a native language that has a special appeal to our ideas and emotions. As we uncover the ways in which film affects us, we will discover that they are often the same methods that writing uses to move and influence a reader. As a result, we can use this familiar art to illuminate and improve our writing skills. At the same time, movies give us a colorful, energetic source of ideas and content to work with as we practice and experiment with clarity, structure, fluency, and rhetorical control. By looking carefully at style, you will improve your writing in ways that will help the rest of your university career. At all times, the discussion and treatment of movies will be a means to a greater end -- the ability to express yourself well in writing as your ideas become deeper and richer.
Readings:
The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford; Film Art by David Bordwell; Seven films on DVD, available through the Alden Library viewed outside of class time. They may also be viewed by other arrangements including personal ownership of the DVD. Titles have includedCitizen Kane, American Beauty, Stand By Me, and Mystic River, though these may change.
Assignments:
During the quarter, you will produce twenty pages of strong, clear, polished writing in four formal projects. Rewriting of each project is expected, though formal grading of those rewrites won't take place until the end of the quarter. In addition, you'll be writing short memos, and adding suggestions to papers by other students in the class. A final rewrite takes the place of a final exam.
Eng 200: Introduction to Literature
Professor: John Bullock
Description:
This class will explore literature through the medium of the novel. We will read 5 or 6 novels, all of which depict a specific culture -- English, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, and Mexican -- and a specific place. Students should be prepared to read a lot and talk a lot. Class participation is key.
Eng 200: Introduction to Literature
Professor: Robert Kinsley
Description:
This course is designed to help students better understand, discuss, analyze, and then write about fiction, poetry and drama..
Readings:
The Norton Introduction to Literature, the Portable Edition: In Our Time by Hemingway; High Fidelity by Hornby; Assorted hand-outs in poetry.
Exams/Papers:
Two in-class exams, one short paper, and assigned class participation..
Eng 201 - Critical Approach To Fiction
Professor: Johnnie Wilcox
Description:
Students will learn the fundamentals of analyzing and interpreting literary fiction using a variety of approaches, most notably New Critical, materialist (Marxist), psychoanalytic, feminist, and critical race theory. By studying the major movements of literary theory in the Twentieth Century, students will gain an understanding also of the relationship between literary production and cultural history.
Readings:
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, 4th ed. ISBN: 0-131-53448-3; DeLillo, Don. White Noise ISBN 0-14-007702-2; Leitch, Vincent B., et. al. eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ISBN 0-393-97429-4; Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. ISBN 0-452-27305-6
Exams/Papers:
Two papers and a final exam.
Eng 201 - Critical Approach To Fiction
Professor: Kevin Haworth
Description:
This class uses contemporary international literature to develop a variety of critical reading skills, with a focus on close reading. Selections range from short-short stories (less than 1 page) to novels. Representative authors include Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, Luisa Valenzuela, Natalia Ginzburg, Amos Oz, John Edgar Wideman and Joyce Carol Oates. Written work includes two critical papers and a midterm.
Eng 201 - Critical Approach To Fiction
Professor: Jaime Cleland
Description:
In this class you will gain strategies for reading, discussing, and writing about short stories and novels. The course will include an introduction to major critical approaches including new criticism, structuralism and deconstruction, reader response, psychoanalytic theory, new historicism, gender criticism, and postcolonialism. Expect to do both informal and formal writing, including a research-based essay.
Eng 250 - Textual Analysis
Professor: Amritjit Singh
Description:
The course examines the principles that define form and meaning in a literary text through representative readings chosen from a variety of historical periods and genres (short story, poetry, novel, drama). We will include samples of writing not only from canonical British and American writers, but also from the emergent literatures in English around the globe. However, the course will focus primarily on the development of analytical skills through close reading and frequent writing, as well as the adoption of a critical vocabulary and methodology. Designed as a gateway for the new English major, English 250 serves as an introduction to the aims and methods of literary study: the why, what, and how of approaching a literary text.
Eng 250 - Textual Analysis
Professor: Zakes Mda
Description:
In this discussion based course we examine key concepts, practices and terminologies in the study of texts. Although our definition of "text" is a broad one - anything from which meaning can be read - our focus will be on prose fiction, drama and film (both the script and the moving image). At the end of the quarter you should be able to critically examine a text, to understand the effects it has upon you, and to write about it meaningfully.
Exams and Assignments:
Weekly Reading/Viewing Quizzes, Midterm Paper, Final Paper, Final Exam
Eng 250 - Textual Analysis
Professor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
This is a gateway course for English majors; as such, the class will focus on analysis of literary texts. We will read closely and formally and develop a critical vocabulary that we can apply to our reading of various genre, such as poetry, fiction, drama. In his introduction to New Readings of the American Novel, Peter Messent explains that his goal is "demystify" the critical reading process; he hopes to provide readertools. That is the goal of this section of English 250.
Eng 250 - Textual Analysis
Professor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
We’ll be using the word, “text,” in a broad, contemporary sense, as anything that can be “read” or interpreted. In that sense, I could “read” your shoes, shirt or haircut and if I did, we could consider them a text. While much of the texts we’ll read are “literary,” some will be less obviously so. We’ll examine and analyze songs, photos, ads, multi-media works, and art as well as short fiction, poems, an essay, and a few one act plays.
What of the analysis part of the title? One term often used to mean analysis is “close reading.” When you perform an analysis you typically break something down into its constituent parts in order to understand how the parts and whole work together. You might try to articulate the central meaning of the work, while linking its elements to that meaning. Then again, you might try to show how the text defies one meaning by focusing on its contradictions.
Another way of reading is to apply certain concepts to texts, to analyze, for example, the gender relations apparent in the text and what attitudes toward gender the text assumes of the reader. Finally, analysis works best when we apply specific questions to a text. Some questions might help us break it down into constituent parts to see how they function together to create the whole. Some questions might introduce more external factors, such as how the context of a work (original and contemporary) might (or should?) affect how we read it.
Readings:
30/30: Thirty American Stories from the Last Thirty Years by Porter Shreve and B. Minh Nguyen, Eds. New York: Penguin, 2006; Seagull Reader: Poems, 2nd Edition. Joseph Kelley, Ed. New York: Norton, 2007. Other texts will be posted/linked to in Blackboard.
Exams and Assignments:
Two exams ( one scheduled prior to mid-term and the other at the final exam time). Frequent reading quizzes one 5 page essay taken through drafting, responding and revision, with process writing and reflective statement weekly reading blog posts and comments, portfolio of a selection of your blog posts and comments, and a reflective essay.
Eng 251 - English Lit Before 1688
Professor: Jill Ingram
Description:
English language and literature is a form of social behavior, made by people coming into contact with one another. In looking at English literature from Beowulf to Milton, we'll be looking at how our own speaking English got "made," so to speak. We'll focus on the topics of fame, glory, repentance, women and property rights, and satire of social types, among other things, as we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selections from The Canterbury Tales, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Sonnets by Wyatt and Shakespeare, country-house poems by Ben Jonson and Aemilia Lanyer, and ParadiseQuizzes, Reading Responses, Midterm and Final exam.
Eng 252 - English Lit 1689-present
Professor: Matthew VanWinkle
Description:
Course Description: This course offers a survey of British literature from the Restoration (1688) to the present moment. It encompasses a variety of changes in literature and culture: new ways of imagining the individual’s relationship to society, the fluctuating fortunes of Britain on the global stage, and the constant renegotiation of the present relationship to a variety of imagined pasts. As a thread through these changes, this course will dwell on the attitude to change itself. How possible, how desirable is change? How quickly or slowly, how dependently or independently of human activity, does change occur? We will read the poetry and prose of the last three hundred years that both responds to and helps to shape a variety of answers to these questions.
Eng 253 - American Lit Survey
Professor: Elizabeth Thompson
Description:
The goals of this class are to expose students to a broad range of literature from settlement to the contemporary era, to encourage them to pose questions and problems about the influence of historical events and cultural shifts on the development of literature, and to help them gain an understanding of important literary aesthetic movements. In this class, we will pay special attention to American exceptionalism, the notion that the American colonies, and later the United States, were unique and embarked upon a divinely-sanctioned mission, and its influence on the production of literature.
Readings (tentative):
An American Lit anthology (Norton or Heath) which contains a wide range of poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction of the past four centuries
Assignments (tentative):
Quizzes, short response papers, a mid-term essay and final exam.
Eng 254 - Research and Writing in English Studies
Professor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
We will work on your ability to interpret texts and include research and research-based writing as an additional important and enriching tool. Our computer classroom enables us to easily access databases to find sources. We will practice a critical approach to the sources we find. How reliable is a source? What is useful, compelling, and enriching in the source? What is good academic writing? How might you approach difficult texts?
We will look at published work in English Studies as made up of various discourses—interactive debates, exchanges, and conversations. To do this, we need to see texts of various kinds, including what critics and analysts write, as intertextual, as referring to one another, and as having been written and being read in a rhetorical context.
In this course you will be exposed to unfamiliar textual and cultural terrain to make clear the need for research. The major texts are written by contemporary American Indian writers whose work rests on historical and cultural contexts perhaps unfamiliar to most mainstream readers. Therefore, the research you will do is necessary for your understanding and appreciation of the work. For instance, research will need to be done on Pueblo culture in order to more deeply understand and appreciate Silko’s Ceremony. Additionally, it could be difficult to understand Alexie’s allusions to smallpox, Custer, the Ghost Dance or assimilation without knowing some of the history of American Indians’ relationships to Whites.
Texts:
Ceremony a novel by Leslie Marmon Silko; Essays by Silko; Films: Hopi, excerpts from Smoke Signals, interviews with Alexie; Selected poems and other literary readings; Critical essays on Ceremony; Readings and issues related to Ceremony; The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (TLRATFIH), a collection of short fiction by Sherman Alexie; Critical Essays on TLRATFIH; Readings and issues related to TLRATFIH.
Assignments:
Two summary/application analyses that summarize the arguments of an critical article and apply these arguments to Ceremony and TLRATFIH, one each. Two annotated bibliographies of five good sources on the texts and topics related to the texts (Ceremony and TLRATFIH). There will be some assigned readings to summarize for use in class workshops on summary, using sources etc. A researched essay that applies sources to a focused aspect of Ceremony or Alexie’s TLRATFIH and develops and supports a point about that aspect. (2000-2500 words). Group web site projects focused on the works, drawing on reading the primary texts, researching secondary texts, and using visual as well as alphabetic texts to inform, persuade and entertain readers. (in Blogger or Googledocs) Blog Writing: You will maintain a weblog (blog) throughout the course. Some posts will be required; some will be formal, others less so. You will also be required to post a number of comments on others’ posts and to compose a reflection essay on your blog work.
Eng 254 - Research and Writing in English Studies
Professor: Matthew VanWinkle
Description:
This course offers an introduction to the resources and methods for pursuing research of literary texts. It develops ways to discover and join critical conversations on primary texts; it also investigates the relationship between text and historical contexts, and how to trace and articulate effectively this relationship. In addition this course will provide practice in the integration of primary and secondary sources into interpretive essays. Texts will include the poems of Keats, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and Rita Dove’s poetry collection Thomas and Beulah.
Eng 299T-English Tutorial
Professor: Nicole Reynolds
Description:
This course will explore eighteenth-century Britain’s fascination with the manifestations and implications—religious, philosophical, medical, and political—of individual feeling. We'll study popular novels and poetry in order to trace a shift in public discourse about feeling from a mid-century cult of sensibility—as linked, for example, to consumerism and domesticity—to a later aesthetic and political program (loosely conceived) that came to be called Romanticism, with its emphasis, in a revolutionary age, on individual rights and happiness. We’ll attend to the forms and effects of feeling upon the period’s fluid and shifting constructions of gender, sex, class, and race.
Likely Texts:
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; William Cowper, The Task; Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney; Olaudah Equano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling; Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Charlotte Smith, Elegaic Sonnets; Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads.
Assignments:
Weekly seminar and group meetings; Weekly tutorials and tutorial essays (five pages, eight total); Midterm and final essays (ten pages).
Eng 302 - Shakespeare’s Comedies
Professor: Loreen Giese
Title:
Sex and Bondage in Shakespeare's Comedies.
Description:
This course is a study of four Shakespearean comedies: Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure. We will analyze these plays in terms of their structure, characterization, language, action, and the like, paying special attention to the issue of sex and bondage: namely, the social containments than control and bind sexuality, such as the political and social structures that inform gender roles in early modern London and in the plays.
Exams/Papers:
Two papers and an in-class examination.
Eng 303 - Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Professor: Loreen Giese
Title:
"Speak so I may see thee."
Description:
This course will examine four Shakespearean tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, and Coriolanus. We will analyze these plays in terms of their structure, characterization, language, action, and the like, paying special attention to the construction of identity in early modern London and in the plays.
Exams/Papers:
Two papers and an in-class examination.
Eng 306J - Women and Writing
Professor: Christine Freeman
Description:
This course is, first and foremost, a writing course. It is designed to help students practice and improve their writing skills by learning to develop content, to write clearly and concisely, to make conscious decisions about revising content and style, and to become their own best editors by the end of the quarter. Stories and poems written by women and about women will serve as the basis for class discussions and paper topics.
Readings:
Short stories and poems by women writers, including Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Eavan Boland, and Louise Gluck.
Exams/Papers:
Four papers, reading quizzes and writing exercises.
Eng 306J - Women and Writing
Professor: Jaime Cleland
Description:
What does it mean to write and read women's lives? How are women's life stories affected by interpersonal relationships, sexuality, the female body, societal expectations? We will consider these questions along with issues such as the relationship between fiction and fact and the numerous different forms autobiography may take. During this course, you will become familiar with key issues in gender and autobiography theory, create 20-24 pages of formal writing in creative and critical forms, and participate as a member of a community of writers.
Readings:
Readings may include several of the following: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy; Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen; Jane, Maggie Nelson; The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston; Fun Home, Alison Bechdel.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: Thomas Mantey
Description:
Our 308J assignments will focus on creating documents with pertinent, interesting and accurate content, clear, properly emphatic and varied styles, and helpful organization and page format using appropriate guidelines. Many of the principles of effective, written communication are ones you are already in using in writing applications in your own subject areas in your majors, or fields. Our most important work will focus on writing skills needed to INFORM, to PERSUADE, to "ARGUE" and to INSTRUCT.
Because readers LOOK AT what we write, to read what we have to say, VISUAL aspects of the page are another part of what we will study.
Because professional documents, and academic research methods, are not always familiar ones to many students, work may sometimes be "practiced" in trial drafts, or revisable for improved drafts. Documents are assigned in a sequence to build from familiar to new, from simple to complex. As writing peers, students assist each other as editors, and sometimes collaborate on group projects.
The course emphasizes primary research, not "looking things up". Some work includes graphics, which we will learn to produce.
Exams:
There are no examinations.(reading quizzes may be needed.)
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: Valorie Worthy
Description:
As a junior/senior composition course this class will emphasize writing and meet in the computer lab. In addition to self expression and persuasion there will be a strong research component to this class and the lab provides us with the opportunity to pursue this.
Readings:
Women's Lives by Phyllis Rose (Norton) will be available from Little Professor book store in paperback or you may buy a used copy from Amazon or Alibris.
Assignments:
There will be group work and individual work, oral and written. Midterm response essay 25% ( This has a revision option.) Presentation and critical essay response, Progress report 25%. Resume and Cover letter 25% ( revisable). Final Portfolio with annotated bibliography and justification 25%. Final portfolio is due during finals' week. I hope you will enjoy this class and find yourself enriched by it.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: Jane Denbow
Description:
This course will focus on improving your writing skills and learning to apply those skills in different situations and for various types of audiences. Since all writing is persuasive to some extent, well study persuasive techniques throughout the quarter. You will begin by writing to a general audience on a topic of concern to you. Next, youll do some typical academic writing. Finally, youll apply your skills to examining and writing about workplace issues. The class will also analyze the relationship between writing and speaking. Oral presentations, both formal and informal, will be an integral part of the class.
Readings:
TBA
Assignments:
Three 4-5 page papers; A final paper, requiring research, due the day the final is scheduled; A journal, which focuses on techniques demonstrated in the readings a group oral presentation.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: David Bruce
Description:
ENG 308J is Advanced Rhetoric and Composition; therefore, it should not be merely a rehash of ENG 151 (although it can cover some of the same material), but should instead introduce new kinds and topics of writing. Of course, our emphases are on informing, persuading, and (sometimes) entertaining the reader. All students are expected to write their own papers. Plagiarism or other academic misconduct may result in a failing grade for the course plus referral to OU Judiciaries.
Readings:
The main textbook is my Student Study Guide to ENG 308J, which will be available at Copy Catz on West Union Street.
Exams/Papers:
No exams. You will do many kinds of writing, including a few kinds of practical writing (for example, you will write a problem-solving letter to a person with the power to accept a recommendation that you make) and personal writing (you will write an autobiographical essay). One long 10- to 20-page Final Project. Class Participation includes Peer Review Sessions and Short Homework Assignments.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: Mimi Hart
Description:
"Rhetoric is the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its subject and occasion, to the requirements of a reader or hearer." (John F. Genung, The Working Principles of Rhetoric; 1902.)
This course will focus on persuasive writing, using the New York Times as the primary text. We will supplement this reading with articles from your own fields' scholarly and trade journals as well, in an attempt to define the kinds of writing your profession requires. We will consider audience and purpose, looking for the difference between writing f or other professionals and writing for general readers. Peer review and research will be integral components. We will write in class daily; we will also compose a midterm and final, based on our New York Times readings, as well as a research project, a resume and a cover letter.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: David Sharpe
Description:
As with all English 308J courses, this one is primarily intended to improve your writing skills - but you will do so while developing strategies for using computers in the writing process. Language proficiency from basic grammar to stylistic polish will be emphasized as a platform for higher concerns of structure and insight. Computers will be used as both content and tool. Assignments will be drawn from a range of styles and forms: descriptive, personal essay, narrative, investigative, comparative, persuasive, analytical, and interpretive. Critiquing of papers will examine style, structure, and logic as in any composition course.
Readings:
Online readings TBA. The Everyday Writer, Andrea Lunsford. Writing With Style, John Trimble.
Assignments:
There will be four formal papers, each substantially reworked by the end of the quarter, adding up to twenty pages. The rewrites take the place of a final. You will be participating in frequent peer reviews, exercises, quizzesreaction memos, and most importantly -- class discussion.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: John Bullock
Description:
This class will explore the major cultural myths of American life from a rhetorical perspective. Students will refine their critical thinking skills through close examination of such topics as family, education, individual opportunity, gender and race. The aim of the class is for students to improve their writing and reading skills and to gain a deeper understanding of the shaping forces in American cultural life.
Readings:
Primary text: Rereading America. 7th edition, Documentaries, movie clips and newspaper/magazine articles will also be used to explore key issues.
Assignments:
Three main research papers; several reading responses; regular journal-keeping small-group presentations; group-led discussions.
Eng 308J - Writing & Rhetoric II
Professor: Lowell Ver Heul
Description:
This composition course emphasizes strategies and contexts in persuasive writing, with a special segment devoted to the workplace context. Readings, shorter and longer papers, and class discussion will all be evaluated.
Eng 309J - Writing in the Sciences
Professor: Christine Freeman
Description:
The primary purpose of this course is to provide students in the sciences with an opportunity to practice writing within their majors. Students are expected to have a knowledge base within the physical sciences since most examples used in class require more than a layperson's understanding of the field.
The course focuses on how to review prior research, how to propose research projects, how to incorporate research results into final reports - and how to write clearly and concisely.
Readings:
Readings from a course pack and several research articles about nanotechnology.
Exams/Assignments:
Two exams, reading quizzes. Writing projects: Abstracts, research proposal, literature review, poster presentation.
Eng 315 - English Lit 1900-present
Professor: David Bergdahl
Readings:
Auden, W. H., [selected poetry]; Byatt, A.S. Posession; Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier; Foster, E. M. , A Passage to India; Hughes, Ted [selected poetry]; Rushdie, Salman, The Enchantress of Florence; Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway
Eng 321 - Amer Lit to 1865
Professor: Elizabeth Thompson
Description:
In this class we'll read a captivity narrative, travel narrative, slave narrative, a number of novels, and a selection of poems written in colonial America and the United States between the years 1682 and 1851. Because this is a survey course, a course that surveys the history of American literature, we will read these texts with an awareness of how they exemplify historical periods, political trends, religious sentiments, or aesthetic movements. At the same time, we will look for ways these texts make it difficult to generalize about history, politics, religion, aesthetics, and other categories that often are used to organize literature. We will pay special attention to the ongoing attempts these texts make to build an American identity. Just as important, or maybe even more so, will be our study of how and why these texts sometimes fail to create the unambiguous national, religious, or cultural identity they idealize.
Readings:
Rowlandson, Sovereignty & Goodness of God; Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; Cooper, Last of the Mohicans; Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of The Seven Gables
Eng 323 - Amer Lit 1918-present
Professor: Johnnie Wilcox
Description:
This course is a survey of American Literature. As such, students will be given exposure to both the depth and scope of American Literature written between 1918 and the end of the Twentieth Century. Students will gain experience in interpreting works of literature in terms of their content and their significance within a particular author’s work (depth), while at the same time they will be encouraged to develop theories about the relationship of particular works to the literary, social, economic, and historical context in which those works were written (scope).
Texts:
1. Baym, Nina, Ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature. Norton Vol D; 2. Baym, Nina, Ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature. Norton Vol E; 3. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49.; 4. Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem.
Exams and Papers:
2 5-7 page papers; Midterm Exam; Final Exam
Eng 351--History of the English Language
Professor: Josie Bloomfield
Description:
This course is a linguistic, historical, and literary exploration of the roots and sources of modern day Englishes. After a linguistic grounding in the phonetic alphabet and the major Indo-European sound laws, the course moves through Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and American English, investigating both the external historical events that have affected the development and structure of the language (kings, conquests, invasions, family feuds, etc.) and internal events (such as the Great Vowel Shift) that have affected the way we speak the language.
Readings:
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, Fifth Edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993). Thomas Cable, A Companion to Baugh and Cable's History of the English Language, Second Edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001).
Exams/Papers:
Homework, quizzes, essay exams, and a term paper.
Eng 352--Development American English
Professor: David Bergdahl
Readings:
McNeil and Cran, Do You Speak American? Wolfram and Ward, American Voices: How Dialects Differ Coast to Coast
Eng 355--World Lit
Professor: Ghirmai Negash
Description:
This course is designed to provide samples of world literature produced by diverse writers in differing social, cultural and political contexts and times. In this class we will first look with emphasis at how “strong” texts, wherever they are produced, reflect and, at once, problematize ‘deeper and subtler’ local issues and realities. We will then reconnect those texts that transcend themselves and their contexts intertextually, and examine how they intersect and negotiate with other--often crossing over genres-- cultures and periods. In taking the concept of intertextuality central for our purpose, we will use the notion at narrower grammatical levels of textuality, looking, for example, at how selected texts are linked through “a phrase, line or passage,” and, more important, also see its application at the larger levels of ‘thought, language, design, and metaphor’.
Requirements:
Participation & Presentation: 20%, Four quizzes: 40%, Final exam: 40%. Each student will make one presentation. Students will sign up for presentation in the first week(s) of class. Attendance is obligatory. Three points will be deducted foeach absence. Missed quizzes cannot be re-taken.
Eng 356--Young Adult Literature
Professor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
The purpose of this course is to explore the genres of young adult literature. We examine the characteristics of these various types of literature and give some attention to current issues of and trends in the field of young adult literature. A particular focus of the course will be social justice issues in young adult literature.
Readings:
Common reading: The text, Literature for Today's Young Adults. 8th ed., by Nilsen Printz award-winning books to read to meet course requirements.
Assignments:
Lead a Socratic Seminar, group presentation, chapter quizzes over the text, three reader response papers, and a book project
Eng 361--Creative Writing: Fiction
Professor: Joan Connor
Description:
This is a beginning fiction writing workshop. We will work on exercises developing aspects of the short story: dialogue, sensory description, point-of-view, characterization, setting, and beginnings. In assigned readings and student stories, we will focus on what makes a story effective, how to fine-tune a story, how to address revising a story. And we will laugh. Often.
Readings:
My Life in Heavy Metal, 30 Under 30 Fiction Writers Workshop.
Exams/Papers
Two stories, a short-short, exercises, final portfolio due last class.
Eng 361--Creative Writing: Fiction
Professor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
I've designed English 361, Creative Writing: Fiction, as a course that focuses on reading and writing short stories. First, we'll discuss and practice ways of generating stories. Second, we'll work through practical exercises in revision, emphasis on form, structure, conflict, plot, diction-above all, clarity. Third, in class we'll practice what I call Nuts and Bolts exercises in setting, characterization, immediacy, dialogue, etc.
Readings:
An anthology of short fiction, most likely The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
Exams/Papers
Two short stories, writing exercises.
Eng 361--Creative Writing: Fiction
Professor: Michael Brown
Description:
To me, English 361 is an introduction to the practice of fiction writing. However, to begin to write a successful short story you must read. Thus we will sharpen our reading skills while we jump into your own writing. We will discuss, as time allows, the fundamentals of the short story, including form and structure, characterization, plot, voice, conflict, point of view, etc. Then we will do our best to utilize these fundamentals in our writing.
Readings:
TBA
Exams/Papers
Two completed and revised short stories. Weekly fiction sketches in the form of directed exercises. Your verbal contribution to the workshop critiquing process.
Eng 362--Creative Writing: Poetry
Professor: Robert Kinsley
Description:
This course is designed in the traditional workshop format: students will bring original creative work based on a series of exercises to be discussed and critiques by everyone in the class. The first hour of each session will be devoted to a discussion of the assigned readings and poems in order to help better establish a critical set of guidelines for the discussion of contemporary poetics.
Readings:
The Poet's Companion by Addonizio and Laux, Ordinary Genius Addonizio; Good Poems for Hard Times, Keillor; Standing at Waters Edge Paris
Assignments:
Weekly poems for discussion, a final portfolio of six poems and their revisions with an introductory essay. Class participation and several conferences with the instructor.
Eng 362--Creative Writing: Poetry
Professor: Mark Halliday
Description:
Every creative writing workshop has the double purpose of developing your writing skills and your reading skills. The two are interdependent. In this introductory workshop, we'll go back and forth between poems by published poets and poems by workshop students. Constantly we'll be asking how a poem can do some of the things we want people to do: delight, instruct, reveal, question, confess, explore, honor, challenge, console, puzzle, amuse, tease, fascinate, help. During the first five or six weeks at least there will be weekly assignments asking you to write a poem on a given topic, or according to a "recipe," or using a certain stylistic maneuver or structure. Meanwhile you will have your own independent ideas for poems as well. Each student will be expected to offer at least five original poems in addition to the assignments.
Readings:
We will read two contemporary books of poetry: Lost And Found by Gwen Hart, and Uh Oh Time by Ken Hart. Also, Selected Poems by Robert Frost.
Writing:
Besides writing poems, students will answer two or three sets of homework questions about our readings. These papers have a significant impact on the course grade. There is no final exam.
Eng 363--Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Professor: Kevin Haworth
Description:
A beginning workshop class for writers to explore the possibilities of creative nonfiction. Through weekly reading and writing we will develop a shared vocabulary in the major forms of literary nonfiction: the personal essay, memoir, the lyric essay, and more. Readings will include an anthology of essays as well as the full-length memoir The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson and the lyric essay collection An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger. Major requirements include two short essays and one longer essay which will be 'workshopped' by the entire class.
Eng 363--Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Professor: Dinty Moore
Description:
This class will explore various forms of literary nonfiction prose. We will undertake a close reading of contemporary essayists and creative nonfiction writers and also workshop/critique the writing of students in th e course.
Eng 365--Literary Editing
Professor: Dinty Moore
Description:
An introduction to the issues and practices of literary magazine editing and publishing, with an examination of both print journals and web-based magazines. Students will sample a wide variety of literary publications; become familiar with the vocabulary of literary editing and publishing; understand the varieties of editorial purposes and processes; distinguish and understand what editors consider publishable poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction; and experience the real world circumstances of literary, primarily not-for-profit, publishing and editing.
Eng 377--English Tutorial IC
Professor: Nicole Reynolds
Title
Sense, Sensibility, and Romanticism: The Cult of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Description:
This course will explore eighteenth-century Britain’s fascination with the manifestations and implications—religious, philosophical, medical, and political—of individual feeling. We’ll study popular novels and poetry in order to trace a shift in public discourse about feeling from a midcentury cult of sensibility—as linked, for example, to consumerism and domesticity—to a later aesthetic and political program (loosely conceived) that came to be called Romanticism, with its emphasis, in a revolutionary age, on individual rights and happiness. We’ll attend to the forms and effects of feeling upon the period’s fluid and shifting constructions of gender, sex, class, and race.
Likely Texts
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; William Cowper, The Task; Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling; Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets; Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
Assignments
Weekly seminar and group meetings. Weekly tutorials and tutorial essays (five pages, eight total). Midterm and final essays (ten pages).
English 399--Literary Theory
Professor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
The aim of this course will be to offer an introduction to contemporary literary and cultural theory. Specifically, we will review various, now “classical” theories such as structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis as well as a number of more recent critical approaches such as postcolonial and gay/lesbian theory. The task in this introductory course will be achieve a working understanding of the above theories by, in part, applying them to a specific work of literature and a number of exemplary films.
Readings:
Texts will include one secondary overview of literary-cultural theory (or excerpts from one), a critical readings (on electronic reserve), and an illustrative work of fiction (i.e., Ian Fleming’s Doctor No).
Quizzes, Exams, Etc.:
There will be regular quizzes on the reading assignments. (If, for whatever reason, you do not like to read and/or do not intend to do the reading, please do not take the class.) With respect to written work, participants will be asked to write--in the course of the quarter--three short papers (3-4 pp.) on the assigned material. A final, formal paper (6-9 pp.) will be due at the end of the quarter. Papers that are grammatically incorrect or that are not sufficiently proofread will receive a half-grade deduction; papers that do not cite the criticism will receive a half-grade deduction. As this class will be taught as a seminar, attendance and participation are mandatory. After two "skips," your final grade will be reduced a third, two-thirds for the fourth skip, and a full grade for each additional skip. NB: Those people who choose not to participate may also have their grades reduced.
Eng 451 - Teaching Language & Composition
Professor: Eric Eye
Description:
This course is designed to acquaint students with various materials, teaching methods, and theories appropriate for teaching composition in middle schools and high schools based on the NCTE/IRA Standards and those adopted by the Ohio Department of Education. In addition to class meetings, students must enroll in 451L and spend 20 hours in a middle school or high school English/Language Arts classroom to gain Field Experience.
Readings:
Elbow, Peter, Everyone Can Write. Oxford University Press, 2000. Zinsser, William. On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Ed.). Harper Collins, 2006. Additional texts to be announced.
Exams and Assignments:
Major Requirements (tentative): 1. Routine Reading Quizzes (or comparable accountability assignments); 2. Literacy Autobiography or Archaeological Literacy Dig; 3. Teach a Writing Lesson Using Image Grammar; 4. Portfolio of Teaching Ideas; 5. Multigenre Research Paper or YA Book Project
Eng 451L--Field Experience in English/Language & Composition
Professor: Eric Eye
Description:
This course provides a pre-student teaching field experience with the methods course, English 451, Teaching Language and Composition. While studying theoretical and pedagogical issues related to teaching English/Language Arts (7-12), in English 451, students will spend 20 hours observing and/or participating in a classroom with an experienced middle or high school English/Language Arts teacher.
Requirements:
Participation, Punctuality, and Presence in 20 hours of Field Experience
Forms:
Availability, Compensation, Time Sheet, Dispositions Assessment and Teacher Evaluation
Eng. 452--Teaching HS English Literature
Professor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, developmental strategies for teaching literature in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
Glasgow’s Exploring African Life and Literature: Novel Guides to Promote Socially Responsive Learning/, International Reading Association, 2007
Assignments:
Multigenre or Zine Reseach Project. Portfolio of Teaching Ideas. All work must be submitted on LiveText. Students who enroll for English 452 must also enroll in English 452L.
Eng 452L--Field Experience in English/Literature
Professor: Arranged
Description:
Students will complete 20 hours of field experience in an English/Language Arts classroom in one of the area public schools.
Assignments:
A PowerPoint presentation detailing the school's context, learning environment, teaching strategies and participation is required.
Eng 460--Literary Topics
Professor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
"Classic and Contemporary Film Noir" will explore the cinematic world of noir, a critical term that refers to certain "black" or darkly-lit American films of the 1940s and 1950s. The class will examine classic, cinematic examples of the genre of film noir as well as more contemporary examples, so-called neo-noir. Although the emphasis will be on the aesthetic character of the texts under discussion (editing, lighting, mise-en-scène, cinematography, etc.), we will also investigate the films’ historical and sociocultural conditions of possibility as well as related issues of race and class, gender and sexuality.
Readings:
There will be a general, introductory text on film noir as well as on-line readings on the genre and individual films.
Class Work:
There will be regularly scheduled reading quizzes. (If you do not intend to access or read the criticism, please do not take class.) Participants will also be responsible in the course of the quarter for either three (3.5 pp.) or two short papers (4-5 pp.) on the films screened in the class. In these papers, students will be asked to synthesize that week’s film and reading. A final, formal paper (5-7 pp.) on either another (neo-) noir film or one of the themes of the course will be due at the end of the quarter. Given the interdisciplinary character of the course, final papers should draw on the critical reading and, equally or more importantly, should offer synthetic analyses that make connections between the formal and thematic aspects of the text(s) in question. Attendance in the class will be mandatory, participation imperative, and enthusiasm much appreciated and rewarded. Students will be allowed two “skips.” Nota Bene: This is a class in film analysis—which to say, we will be looking closely at film form or style and the way in which it generates meaning.
Eng 465--Authors: American
Professor: Marilyn Atlas
Description:
In this class we will follow David Reynolds’ lead by first reading parts of Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. We will discuss race, class, gender--and canon formation--as we examine some wonderful writings by and about Herman Melville.
Readings:
(Subject to Change): David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance; Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and His Work; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851; Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, 1857
Exams/Papers:
Three essays (two single text essay 3-4 pages; one comparative essay 5-7 pages). Oral reports. Random reading quizzes.
Hum 107 - Great Books: Ancient
Professor: David Bruce
Readings:
Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid
Assignments:
Three 5-10 page papers ( Two on Iliad, one on Aeneid). Many short reaction memos.
Hum 107 - Great Books: Ancient
Professor: Valorie Worthy
Description:
We will explore literature and ideas of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. This covers a vast period which sweeps from 850BC through the first century AD. We will study epic poetry, lyric poetry and tragic drama.
Readings:
Homer’s Odyssey, Sappho’s poems, Sophocles’ drama Antigone , poetry of Theocritus, Catallus, Ovid and Vergil including his Aeneid. There will be a few other supplementary texts and all will be available at the Little Professor book store.
Assignments:
Regular reading quizzes, essay midterm and final, and group presentation. Attendance is required. I hope you will enjoy this class and find yourself enriched by it.
UP 450H University Professor Course
Professor: Josie Bloomfield
Title:
"Light of Philosophy, Light of God, Light of Dreams"
Description:
This class investigates the surprising ways that classical and medieval theories of light and vision have influenced our current understandings of the universe, ranging from poetry to ideas of God. To track this back, we will look at light in relationship to mirrors, pearls, rays, reflections, knowledge, stars, the sun, the eyeball, angels, hierarchies, Jerusalem, labyrinths, precious stones, physics, and even the Eucharist. We will consider not only written texts—from Plato and Genesis to recent poetry—but also buildings, images, artifacts, human physiology, and the structure and role of dreams (literary and actual).
Texts:
Coursepack available at Grade A notes. Texts and images via class listserv.
Assignments:
short response papers, report, group presentations, final project