Winter 2001 Undergraduate Courses
Return to the archived courses or to the current course search page.
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: Freshman Composition: Writing and Rhetoric
Instructor: Linda Rice
Description:
Self reflection and reflexivity (in essence, trying on the perspective of an "other" for long enough to look back critically at ourselves, our ideas, our assumptions, and our values) are the cornerstones of this course. By reading and discussing essays by authors such as Annie Neeposh Iserfhoff, bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, and Victor Villanueva, students will analyze language as it is constructed in a context, affected by audience and situation. Students will apply rhetorical strategies to their own writing, realizing its power to establish, disrupt, and transform the social order. As a community of writers, students will engage in writing as a recursive and collaborative process and work toward mastering the conventions of grammar, usage, mechanics, organization, and MLA style.
Eng 152: Freshman Composition: Writing & Reading
Instructor: Linda Beckman
Description:
The chief purpose of this course is to improve your writing ability: you will learn to write essays correctly and with style. We will read and discuss fiction, poetry, essays, and probably a play, and your writing will be on the ideas (themes) raised in the readings as well as on how you respond to the literature.
Readings:
A reader with essays and stories.
Exams/Papers:
Five papers (written out of class) and several short in-class papers.
Eng 153: Freshman Composition: Special Topics—Intercultural Writing
Instructor: Barry Thatcher
Description:
This course teaches English composition in the context of intercultural communication. Drawing on intercultural readings, it explores how different perceptions of the self, thinking patterns, and social behaviors affect the way cultures communicate through writing. This exploration helps students understand the cultural values that correspond to U.S.-American writing and how these values and their rhetorical manifestations might work in other cultural and rhetorical systems. The course assumes interest in other cultures, languages, and writing styles. This course is also specially designed for students majoring in international studies.
Course Goals:
Develop effective strategies for planning, composing, critiquing, and revising writing. Use writing as a means of self and social inquiry. Improve focus, organization, development, and style in writing. Enhance the ability to give and receive peer feedback on written communication. Improve sensitivity to grammar and usage. Understand how basic U.S. cultural patterns of thinking, forms of activity, social relationships, and perceptions of the world are related to predominant communication patterns. Situate one's own patterns of thinking, forms of activity, social relationships, and perceptions of the world with other predominant patterns. Develop writing skills that are sensitive to various communication and cultural patterns.
Readings:
Stewart, E. C. & Bennett, M. J. (1991). American cultural patterns: A cross-cultural perspective. Revised Edition. Intercultural Press. Lunsford, A. & Connors, R. (1999). The New St. Martin's Handbook. Bedford/St Martin's.
Exams/Papers:
1st Paper-Personal reflection (10%); 2nd Paper-Argumentative essay (10%); 3rd Paper-Cultural critique (15%); 4th Paper-Research paper and oral report on one country (25%); Midterm exam (15%); Final exam (15%); Quizzes and class participation (10%).
Eng 153: Freshman Composition: Special Topics
Instructor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
The special topic of this course will be social justice issues in Young Adult Literature. Students will read novels on the issue of their choice selected from the class book list. The class project will be to write a multi-genre paper on a particular social issue.
Readings:
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and Blending Genre, Altering Style by Tom Romano.
Eng 201: Critical Approaches to Fiction
Instructor: David Heaton
Description:
Reading, with careful, twice a week discussion, of short stories and novellas. Mastery of the formal terminology necessary to speak intelligently about fiction: plot, setting, characterization, point of view, etc.
Readings:
Fiction 100, ed. James Pickering
Exams/Papers:
Three essay exams; one paper.
Eng 201: Critical Approaches to Fiction
Instructor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
We will read, write about and discuss American short fiction of the 20th century and screen two films based on two of the stories. We will discuss and apply a number of critical approaches to interpreting fiction, including formalist, reader-response, feminist, and marxist criticism. At times, you will bring some written responses to assigned questions to class for small group work, and many classes will be whole-class discussions.
Readings:
American Short Story Masterpieces. Eds. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks. New York: Dell, 1989. Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Exams/Papers:
There will be two short exams (some short-answer and some paragraph-length answers) at the fourth and seventh weeks. A paper on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is due during the final exam period.
Eng 201: Critical Approaches to Fiction
Instructor: Mara Holt
Description:
We will read, write about and discuss American short fiction of the 20th century and screen two films based on two of the stories. We will discuss and apply a number of critical approaches to interpreting fiction, including formalist, reader-response, feminist, and marxist criticism. At times, you will bring some written responses to assigned questions to class for small group work, and many classes will be whole-class discussions.
Readings:
American Short Story Masterpieces. Eds. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks. New York: Dell, 1989. Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Exams/Papers:
There will be two short exams (some short-answer and some paragraph-length answers) at the fourth and seventh weeks. A paper on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is due during the final exam period.
Eng 202: Critical Approaches to Poetry
Instructor: Jack Matthews
Description:
Since this course is designed to focus upon poetry as an act of language, a theory of language will be developed—utilizing the general semantics principles of "dating" and "indexing," along with the fuzzy logic principles of crisp sets (language) and fuzzy sets (reality). Also, in line with the axiom that to fully possess a poem, one must memorize it, students will be required to memorize 200 lines of poetry.
Readings:
The Art of Possessing Poems, edited by Jack Matthews, possibly along with other texts, not yet chosen.
Exams/Papers:
To be decided upon.
Eng 278T: English Tutorial
Instructor: Loreen Giese
Description:
A survey of selected poetry, prose, and drama of early modern England.
Readings:
Lawson and Smith, The Golden Hind (Norton). Hugh Maclean, ed. Edmund Spencer's Poetry (Norton). Elizabeth Cary's, Tragedy of Miriam. John Ford's Tis a Pity She's a Whore. Shakespeare's King Lear and Twelfth Night. John Webster's, The Duchess of Malfi
Exams/Papers:
One surprise rich and provocative assignment, short papers, and a final paper.
Eng 301: Shakespeare's Histories
Instructor: Barry Roth
Description:
We will be reading and discussing 6 or 7 of William Shakespeare's history plays.
Exams/Papers:
Papers and quizzes. Discussion. Joie de Vivre.
Eng 302: Shakespeare's Comedies
Instructor: Barry Roth
Description:
We will begin at the beginning, with The Comedy of Errors, and see how far we get. A chronological and developmental approach.
Readings:
Lots (required text = The Complete Works, ed. Bevington).
Exams/Papers:
A quiz a week; a couple of writing assignments; much intense class discussion. Pretty good stuff.
Eng 303: Shakespeare's Tragedies
Instructor: Andrew Escobedo
Description:
Many readers have felt that Shakespeare's late tragedies represent the first "rebirth" of tragic drama since its demise in fifth-century Athens. We will read Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth very closely, giving attention to the language, historical context, literary theme, and performance possibilities. We will give special consideration to Shakespeare's peculiar propensity to place the most insightful comments about human behavior in the mouths of his most villainous characters.
Readings:
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
Exams/Papers:
Quizzes, a class presentation, two papers, and a final exam.
Eng 304: English Bible
Instructor: Beth Quitslund
Description:
This course will look at the King James Bible through a triple lens—first, as a translation of ancient texts, second, as a record of 17th-century thought and scholarship, and third, as the most influential book on all English Literature. We will thus concentrate on sections of the Bible that exemplify the genres and kinds of writing that it contains, compare some to other (earlier and later) translations, and, in the final paper, explore the uses of Biblical material in classic English texts. These perspectives are all literary and historically specific, and the working assumption that makes them possible is that the Bible and its translations are historically-specific literature, crafted by human authors; the class will respect any religious convictions to the contrary, but not privilege them.
Readings:
The King James Bible (original text); Alter and Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible; course packet. Books will be available at Little Professor Book Center.
Exams/Papers:
daily quizzes, two short response papers, a presentation, a long (7-10 pp) comparative essay, and a final exam.
Eng 305J: Technical Writing (physical science majors only)
Instructor: 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:
Martha Davis, Scientific Papers and Presentations. The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, the National Academy of Sciences. On Being a Scientist. Several research articles within the student's field.
Exams/Papers:
Reading quizzes; Writing Projects: profile of the student's academic community, abstracts, research proposal, literature review, poster presentation.
Eng 306J: Women and Writing
Instructor: Mara Holt
Description:
We will focus on the chapters on gender and the body in the textbook Seeing and Writing. This course views reading as closely associated with learning how to improve writing. You will read, respond to, interpret, and analyze both written and visual texts, often placed side by side. These activities, along with considerations of rhetoric, feminist theory, and writing processes, will help you to become an astute and critical interpreter of visual and written language as well as an effective and creative producer of texts.
Readings:
Seeing and Writing, McQuade & McQuade.
Exams/Papers:
You will write the equivalent of four typed papers.
Eng 307J: Writing and Research in English Studies
Instructor: Betty Pytlik
Description:
To introduce you to several critical methods of interpreting literature. We will discuss and apply several theories to texts read by the entire class. We will depend on the Lynn book for those readings and discussions. To involve you in a range of research processes useful in reading and writing about literature. You will sharpen our writing skills through frequent brief writing assignments and three major writing projects. To provide practice in working with library sources and electronic databases. We will become more sophisticated in using sources, working with electronic resources and other library sources to discover paper topics and help with developing theses. As a class, we will meet twice in Alden with a reference librarian to practice finding sources on databases.
Readings:
Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory. 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 1998. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research papers. 4th ed. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. NY: MLA, 1995. Texts by Appalachian authors, perhaps James Still's River on Earth, Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Dollmaker, Lee Smith's Oral History, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven, Robert Morgan's Gap Creek, Sharon McCrumb's The Rosewood Casket, and selections from Gurney Norman's Kinfolks, Elaine Fowler Palencia's Brier Country, and Joyce Dwyer's Bloodroot. Coursepack
Exams/Papers:
- Class Participation and Engagement in Classwork. (5 Points)
- A Reading Notebook. We will be doing a great deal of reading. To help you review what you have read efficiently and thoroughly, you will find a Reading Summary and Analysis Sheet in your coursepack. Make a couple dozen copies to use for each reading you do. Keep them in your notebook for future reference. (15 points)
- Quizzes. Four quizzes on daily readings and discussions will be given. They will always be announced ahead of time and they will always be 30-minute in-class writing assignments. To allow room for "a bad day" or an absence (excused or unexcused), the lowest grade will be eliminated. Sample: Based on your reading of Lynn's "Gendering the Text," discuss Elaine Palancia's views on women, religion, and community in "Salvation on Calfkiller." (30 points)
- Mid-term, due in fourth week of class. Topic selections will be discussed in class and in conference with the instructor. Sample—Using New Critical strategies, provide your own original close readings of one of the short stories in your course pack. Compare/contrast your reading to at least two other interpretations published in scholarly journals or books (including collections of essays. (25 points)
- Final, due at time of Scheduled Final Exam. (25 points)
- Your attendance in class is essential to make meetings as productive and interesting as possible. Therefore, you will have three hours of absences—for any reasons. No questions asked, so long as you make up the work by contacting me or your classmates and are ready for class when you return. On the occasion of your fourth hour of absence, your grade—which will already reflect your absences due to your having missed valuable peer and instructor evaluations of your work—will be lowered one third of a letter grade for each subsequent hour of absences after three.
Eng307J: Writing and Research in English Studies
Instructor: Mark Rollins
Description:
This course introduces students to or enhances skills in writing, research, and editing related to the English major. Following an introduction to basic editing conventions, the course will utilize collaboration with the professor and peers for invention and revision related to writing and research projects, as well as for class presentations. We will examine traditional and emerging sources of information to address primary and secondary texts. Students should expect a writing-intensive course where they should be eager to work with others. Attendance is required.
Readings:
TBA—but expect a basic text on theory, the MLA Handbook, a book on literary terms and a primary text (probably a novel).
Exams/Papers:
Expect occasional quizzes on basic material. Students will write and revise a number of short reports. Developing a substantial research project will serve as the focus of the later part of the course.
Eng 307J: Writing and Research in English Studies
Instructor: George Hartley
Description:
Prereq: jr. and two courses from 201, 202, 203. This course prepares English majors to produce the scholarly writing necessary for their English classes. We will focus primarily on research reports, intergration of primary and secondary texts, library resources, internet resources, and MLA documentation.
Readings:
The texts which will serve as the raw material for our work are Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Plato's Phaedrus, and Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard.
Exams/Papers:
There will be a number of short papers, an annotated bibliography, one longer paper, and composing for the Web site.
Eng 312: English Literature from 1500 - 1660
Instructor: Andrew Escobedo
Description:
This course surveys the major writers of the English Renaissance, from early Tudor Humanism to The Tragedy of Miriam. We read mostly poetry (much of which is rather difficult), since verse was the primary literary mode of the period. We will try to conceptualize the English Renaissance as both a cultural phenomenon and a collection of brilliant, immensely powerful literary works.
Readings:
More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Jonson, Cary.
Exams/Papers:
Quizzes, two papers, a class presentation, and a final exam.
Eng 313: English Literature: 1660-1800
Instructor: Linda Zionkowski
Description:
This course will introduce students to poetry, fiction, and drama of the "long" eighteenth century, with special emphasis on the cultural contexts of literary production.
Readings:
Coursepacket; selected novels and plays.
Exams/Papers:
Three papers and a final exam.
Eng 314: English Literature: 1800-1900
Instructor: Earl Knies
Description:
To be announced.
Eng 314: English Literature: 1800-1900
Instructor: Kenneth Daley
Description:
To be announced.
Eng 315: English Literature: 1900-Present
Instructor: David Bergdahl
Description:
We'll read Conrad, Hardy, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence, Auden, Thomas, Beckett, Kureishi, Drabble , and Larkin.
Readings:
Kevin Dettmar and Jennifer Wicke, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2C. (1999)
Exams/Papers:
In addition to the three papers, you must participate in our class's forum (which functions as the electronic equivalent of a hand-in-once-a-week journal): the three papers are each worth 25% and participation in our class's forum is worth 25%.
Eng 321: American Literature to 1865
Instructor: Marilyn Atlas
Description:
This class will introduce the literature of the "New World", Colonial America, the early Republic, and the American Renaissance. We will discuss major literary and cultural trends and changes in style and purpose as we examine the writing of some of the period's most fascinating writers.
Readings:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1, 5th Edition.
Exams/Papers:
Three essays (two single text essays 4-5 pages; one comparative essay 5-7 pages), oral reports, and random reading quizzes.
Eng 322: American Literature: 1865-1918
Instructor: Thomas Scanlan
Description:
In this class we will attempt to get a handle on the remarkable transition that takes place in American letters between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Frist World War. To achieve that goal, we will treat the six texts on our list as broadly representative of the literary, cultural, and social changes that mark our period of study.
Readings:
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham. Kate Chopin, The Awakening. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons. Willa Cather, My Antonia
Exams/Papers:
2 Short Response Papers (1 page each); 1 Short Essay (4 pages); 1 Medium Length Essay (6 pages); 4-5 Quizzes; 1 Final Exam.
Eng 323: American Literature: 1918-Present
Instructor: George Hartley
Description:
Prereq: two courses from 201, 202, 203. Our course will cover American literature from the end of World War I to the present. Emphasis will be on major poets and movements in twentieth-century American poetry, including Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Ron Silliman, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. We will also read two plays, including Baraka's Dutchman, and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony.
Exams/Papers:
There will be two exams and one long paper.
Eng 325: Women and Literature
Instructor: Beth Quitslund
Description:
This course surveys the history of women writing in England in the modern period (1660-1990). Our foundation text is Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and we will use it to organize and examine a chronological series of texts by English women: lyric poems by Margaret Cavendish, Oroonoko, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Top Girls. In reading these texts we will explore how women writers of different periods have treated (or ignored) their own gender as authors, as well as how gender concerns affect their work.
Readings:
Austin, Pride and Prejudice; Behn, Oroonoko; Bronte, Jane Eyre; Churchill, Top Girls; Woolf, A Room of One's Own; course packet; All editions TBA. Books will be available at Little Professor Book Center.
Exams/Papers:
three short response papers, a presentation, a midterm, a medium-length (6-8 pp) literary analysis paper, and a final exam.
Eng 326: Lesbian and Gay Literature
Instructor: Jeremy Webster
Description:
This course surveys gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered literature with particular emphasis on the ways in which GLBT identities and experiences have been represented in post-1900 literary discourse. We will begin by surveying the major issues at stake in contemporary gay and lesbian writing, including coming out, gender identification, AIDS, compulsory heterosexuality, ethnicity and sexuality, and homophobia. After briefly studying depictions of same-sex desire in literary works from the 17th- and 18th-centuries, we will focus primarily on literary works by gay and lesbian writers in 19th- and 20th-century America.
Readings:
Beyond Definition: New Writing from Lesbian and Gay San Francisco; Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present; a course packet and (probably) a novel
Exams/Papers:
2 papers (25% each) and reading quizzes (50%)
Eng 327: African American Fiction
Instructor: Stacy Morgan
Description:
From the eighteenth and nineteenth century autobiographies of former slaves to the recent work of such authors as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, African American prose writing has dealt extensively with struggles for individual and collective self-definition. This course will consist of a detailed examination of six novels which offer markedly divergent explorations of this theme.
Readings:
William Wells Brown, Clotel or The President's Daughter; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; William Attaway, Blood on the Forge; Alice Walker, Meridian; Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills; Toni Morrison, Paradise
Exams/Papers:
Requirements for this course most likely will include a group presentation, three 4-5 page papers, and regular participation in class discussion.
Eng 329: African-American Literature: Drama
Instructor: Stacy Morgan
Description:
Where does African American drama fit into the larger body of American theater? To what extent can we speak of a unified tradition of African American drama? If there is such a tradition, what are its defining characteristics? How do we make sense of drama crafted by African American writers which falls outside of such parameters? What can an awareness of the original staging context contribute to our understanding of African American drama? What sorts of social, cultural, and political work have African American writers called upon drama to perform? We will attend to these and other questions by examining material which ranges chronologically from such mid-19th century forerunners as William Wells Brown to the work of contemporary playwrights such as George C. Wolfe and Anna Deavere Smith.
Readings:
James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre USA, volumes I and II.
Exams/Papers:
Requirements for this course most likely will include regular journal entries, a final paper, a group presentation, and regular participation in class discussion.
Eng 351: History of the English Language
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
This course surveys the growth of English from its Indo-European beginnings into twentieth-century American English, with special attention to regional American dialects and African American English. We will be constantly confronting the reality that language changes over time and varies over space, studying linguistic concepts and terminology that allow us to recognize and describe that change and variation.
Readings:
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language.
Exams/Papers:
3 papers (18-20 pages), an observation journal, frequent short quizzes, a final exam.
Eng 361: Creative Writing: Fiction
Instructor: Joan Connor
Description:
In exercises we will develop aspects of the short story: dialogue, sensory description, setting, characterization, beginnings, and point of view. In assigned readings and student stories, we will focus on what makes a story tick.
Readings:
Course Packet, The Passionate Accurate Story and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
Exams/Papers:
Two stories, a short-short, exercises, final portfolio.
Eng 363: Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Instructor: David Lazar
Description:
An introduction to the writing of personal essays, or Return of the First Person. We will read widely in the form to start off, followed by presentations of three essays by each student in workshop over the course of the quarter. This class is a prerequisite for 395, the advanced nonfiction workshop, offered in the spring.
Eng 393: Creative Writing Workshop: Short Story
Instructor: Jack Matthews
Description:
The advanced undergraduate workshop will be conducted in essentially the same way as its prerequisite, English 361, although the pace is intensified, with greater demands upon the quality of student work.
Readings:
The Worker's Writebook, by Jack Matthews, along with a short story collection to be decided upon.
Exams/Papers:
Mid-terms on the WWBk and the short story collection will be given. At the end of the quarter, you will hand in a portfolio consisting of three parts: 20 pages of original, completed and polished fiction, a journal consisting of daily entries (every day) from journals, diaries and notebooks of established writers, along with your response to each of the entries in the form of a brief notation; and all the notes, false starts, etc. that have accumulated during your quarter's work.
Eng 394: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
Instructor: Mark Halliday
Description:
We will ride deep and far in the twisting valleys of poetry, trying over and over to intensify and vivify and intelligencify our ways of reading it and writing it. We read poems by workshop members alongside poems by the great dead and the not-yet-great not-yet-dead. During the first half of the quarter (at least) students will be asked to write some exercise poems and imitations.
Readings:
Poems by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), and poems by contemporary poet Frank Bidart, and other poems in photocopies.
Exams/Papers:
At least one poem is to be turned in each week. There will probably be one or two "take-home quizzes" on the readings.
Eng 399: Literary Theory
Instructor: Kenneth Daley
Description:
To be announced
Eng 399: Literary Theory
Instructor: Kasia Marciniak
Description:
This course is an introduction to the work of writers, philosophers, and theorists whose voices have been influential in contemporary literary and cultural theory. The course is framed primarily in terms of the question of language and a human subject. Some of the questions that will guide our discussions are: What is the process of meaning-making? How is meaning produced? What does meaning have to do with the way the human self exists in the world? What is the connection between language and specific gendered identity? What is the correlation between discourse and a subject? What is the link between meaning-making and politics? Is meaning political at all? How is the production of meaning influenced by such factors as gender, race, class, and ethnicity? Can meaning be further influenced by a specific cultural location, that is the place one is speaking from? Is the process of meaning-making specific or universal? We will explore the ways in which the study of critical theory helps us not only read specific literary texts, but also interpret the world and culture around us. Our goal is to become familiar with major critical concepts, specific arguments, and cultural-historical contexts within which these theoretical arguments are made. Also, rather than seeing "literature" and "theory" as two separate realms, we will examine how texts and theory are reciprocal and interconnected.
Readings:
A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader ( Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan); A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (Jeremy Hawthorn)
Exams/Papers:
Several Explication Papers, Final Exam
Eng 452: Teaching Literature
Instructor: Jacqueline Glasgow
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, developmental strategies for teaching literature in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
You Gotta Be the Book and Bridging English
Exams/Papers:
"I Search" paper Thematic Unit
Eng 452: Teaching Literature
Instructor: Linda Rice
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, developmental strategies for teaching literature in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
You Gotta Be the Book and Bridging English
Exams/Papers:
"I Search" paper Thematic Unit
Eng 453: World Literature: Debating Hybridity/Visions of a Nation
Instructor: Kasia Marciniak
Description:
This course explores the notion of a hybrid identity in relation to a traditional understanding of the idea of a self, nation, citizenhood, and cultural belonging. Studying literary texts that self-consciously seem to cross many established boundaries, we will investigate how hybridity calls into question the notion of a stable national identity. The key terms that we will focus on are: hybridity, nationalism, strangerhood, exile, politics of representation, transnationalism. Since this is a Women's Studies cross-listed course, our analyses will highlight feminist investigations. In addition to literary works, we will study several theoretical texts which will create a critical apparatus for our literary discussions. These texts will provide us with historical and cultural contexts and terms that will allow us to place the discussed narratives within larger literary traditions. Since this is an upper-level class, students who enter this course should expect to grapple with complex and often very challenging literary and theoretical texts. Both class discussions and written assignments will ask the students to engage theoretical materials. Students who are not interested in theoretical explorations should not take this course.
Readings:
Tentative Literary Texts: Loida Martiza Perez Geographies of Home; Salman Rushdie East/West; Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions; Nawal El Saadawi Woman at Point Zero; Theoretical Readings: Zygmunt Bauman "The Making and Unmaking of Strangers"; Stuart Hall Representation and the Media; Julia Kristeva Nations without Nationalism (excerpts); George Moss Nationalism and Sexuality (excerpts); Edward Said "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile"
Exams/Papers:
Explication Papers, Final Exam
Eng 460: Literary Topics
Instructor: Joseph McLaughlin
Description:
Realism and Its Discontents: This course will explore the rise of literary realism out of Victorian scientific movements and challenges posed to it at the end of the century. We will begin by reading excerpts from central "scientific" thinkers: Wordsworth, Marx, Engels, Darwin, and Sir Charles Lyell. Then, we will read two classic examples of Victorian realism: George Eliot's Adam Bede and Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago. Finally, we will look at challenges posed to literary realism by late-Victorian aestheticism and the revival of romance writing. Along the way, we will be especially concerned to study how these issues of literary representation influenced, and were influenced by, cultural debates about class, gender, empire, and truth.
Readings:
George Eliot Adam Bede; Arthur Morrison A Child of the Jago; Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray; Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness; A coursepack containing writings by Wordsworth, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Lyell, Wilde, Whistler, and others.
Exams/Papers:
Two Essays (7-10pp) and a Final Exam.
Eng 464: Major English Authors
Instructor: David Heaton
Description:
Our province is modern poetry; on this occassion we'll very carefully read and analyze the major poems of W. B. Yeats, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Readings:
Selected Poems of W. B. Yeats; New and Selected Poems, Hughes; Selected Poems: 1966 - 1987, Heaney.
Exams/Papers:
There will be a long paper on one of the poets (you'll choose). There will be two exams, of the essay type—one hour each. There will be two very short papers (2-3 pages) to be presented in class and then submitted.
Eng 465: Authors: American
Instructor: David Bergdahl
Description:
The premier poet and literary critic of the 20th century—and in later years, a playwright—T.S. Eliot's reputation has suffered in the years since his 1965 death. Many young people know him today only as the author of the poetry the musical Cats is adapted from. Eliot's reputation has suffered because he epitomizes the modernist movement in a post-modernist age, his political conservatism is insufficiently antifascist, his Christian belief is liturgical and the most popular faiths are evangelical or pentecostal, not to mention "new age". Moreover the suspicions of anti-Semitism and misogyny remove him from popular sympathy. Why, then, study the poetry of such a one? Simply because it is impossible to understand the last century without considering him. Moreover, for two years I ran sessions at the Midwest MLA in which panelists presented papers on Eliot from post-structuralist critical positions, so I know that there is material there for the enterprising scholar.
Readings:
T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950.
Exams/Papers:
In addition to the large (20+ pp.) paper, you must participate in our class's forum (which functions as the electronic equivalent of a hand-in-once-a-week journal): paper = 50%, assignments preparatory to writing (literature search, annotated bibliography, short summaries of theory) = 25%, forum = 25%.
Eng 482: Form and Theory: Poetry
Instructor: Jill Rosser
Description:
If, as Yeats has said, we are all "dancers and [our] tread/Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong," who or what is beating on that gong; and when, if ever, do we get a chance to bang on it ourselves? In this course we will study the work of three monumentally influential poets: W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. We will examine their views of the world as at once maddeningly and consolingly mutable, and question their relation to the notions of permanence and eternity, as well as their vacillating preferences for reality and invention. Another focus will be on the ways in which their uses of formal poetic devices help to demonstrate these attitudes. Some of our reading will include critical articles representing various approaches to these richly challenging oeuvres.
Readings:
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens; Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats; Coursepack (critical material and Ashbery selections).
Exams/Papers:
One brief oral presentation on assigned material; one brief (3-4 pp.) and one longer (8-10 pp.) paper; no final exam.
Eng 486: Advanced Workshop in Fiction
Instructor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
This course will focus on writing novels and novellas (you'll write the opening two or three chapters). It will, for the most part, be a workshop; that is, we will discuss fiction (novel and novella chapters) that you write. However, we will add context to our discussions by reading both critical material (writers talking about writing) and by reading novels and novellas. Our reading should enhance our discussions of your work; we will study how novels and novellas work, and we will focus on the art of fiction writing itself.
Readings:
Novels and novellas.
Exams/Papers:
Critiques of chapters, two or three chapters (depending on class size), final portfolio.
T308 407A: Darwin Among the Poets
Instructor: Joseph McLaughlin
Description:
The year 1859 saw the publication in England of an unusually large number of major works: Darwin's Origin of Species, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Eliot's and Meredith's first novels Adam Bede and The Ordeal of Richard Fevere, the first volume of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Mill's On Liberty, and Samuel Smiles's Self Help. Through this rich variety of texts, we will examine crucial Victorian issues, trying to see how they come together in 1859. The touchstone for our endeavor will be Darwin's monumental Origin, arguably the most important book published in the nineteenth century. The class will focus on three other works to explore ways that science, political economy, fiction, and poetry speak to some of the same ideas. We will attempt to synthesize the historical, social, religious, and artistic contexts of Darwin and think about ways his work arose in and from a common intellectual environment. Class discussion, team projects, and research will be an important part of the course because, ideally, our purpose is not to demonstrate relationships among diverse practices but to discover them.
Readings:
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species; Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; George Eliot, Adam Bede; William Morris, "The Defence of Guenevere"
Exams/Papers:
Two Papers (5-7pp); Reading Journal; In-Class Presentation; Team Project
T308 407P: Sin, Sex, Western Legal History
Instructor: Miriam Shadis
Description:
Using letters, legal documents, poetry, prose, rule books, art, music, and religious and philosophical texts from Plato to Chaucer, this class examines Western attitudes toward sex and sexuality and considers questions such as these: what do we mean by "masculine" and "feminine" and what do masculinity and femininity have to do with sin and sex? what are the connections between sin, sex, and politics? how did we get our notions of "proper" and "improper," "superior" and "inferior" sex and sexualities? This class will feature debates, discussions, group reports and presentations, slides, and films in addition to the usual readings, exams, and papers.
Readings:
James A. Brundage. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1987. Elaine Pagels. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage, 1988. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Kent and Constance Hieatt. New York: Bantam, 1964. Course Pack: Available on reserve at the Duplication Station, Union Street.
Exams/Papers:
Reports, quizzes, midterm, final, and two essays.
T308 407Q: Kiss Me Deadly
Instructor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
This course will explore the literary and cinematic world of noir, a critical term that refers to certain "black" or darkly-lit American films of the 1940's and 1950's and to American, "hard-boiled" detective fiction of the same period, so-called roman noir. The class will examine classic, cinematic examples of the genre of film noir, read a number of canonical "hard-boiled" detective novels, and investigate the historical context out of which the fiction and films emerged. Synthesis in the course will be twofold, one particular and one general. In particular, the class will explore how, in film noir, the literary conventions of the roman noir or "dark" detective novel are translated into the language of cinema and, in the process, transformed. In general, the course will endeavor to reconstruct the historical context out of which American detective fiction and film noir materialized.
Readings:
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity; Raymond Chandler, Lady in the Lake, etc. NB: Students will also be asked to duplicate a number of critical articles.
Exams/Papers:
There will be regularly scheduled reading quizzes. Five "reaction papers" (2-3 pp.) will be assigned; in these short papers, students will be asked to synthesize the previous weeks' reading and film viewing. A final, formal paper, (6-11 pp.), on one of the themes of the course will be due at the end of the quarter. Attendance in the class will be mandatory, participation imperative, and enthusiasm much appreciated and rewarded.