Academic Bulletin English - Course Descriptions - 2009-10

Ten sections will be offered in the fall semester. Each section is limited to 15 students. While instructors may use different approaches, all are concerned with developing every student’s use of clear and appropriate English prose in course papers and on examinations. All instructors have the common goal of encouraging the student to write with accuracy of expression, as well as with logical and coherent organization. Students will be responsible for writing at least one in-class essay and a series of longer, out-of-class essays. In both full-course and half-course versions, students must develop an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses in their writing and must acquire the necessary skill to revise and rewrite what they thought were final drafts of essays. They must, in other words, become editors of their own writing. Past experience has shown the Department and the College that writing well in high school does not necessarily assure the same in college. On the basis of the SAT English Writing Exam, the Department will require some first-year students to register for this course. (Four of the fall semester half-courses begin mid-semester. Students who have experienced difficulty in writing during the first several weeks may wish to consider late registration in these sections.) English 101 is NOT a remedial writing course. Special tutorial help within the department and at the Writing Center is available for students with more fundamental problems in writing. This course is offered in the fall semester. 

This is an introductory course in Creative Writing. English 190 will offer students an opportunity to read and write in several genres: fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The course will focus on writing through the practice of various methods of generation used by established writers, designed to introduce students to issues of language, form, image, character, and structure. Students will also learn critical tools for assessing good writing and be introduced to the workshop model for discussing creative work. Students will acquire these tools through peer review, through close reading of contemporary texts, and through revision. The course is especially suited to students who would like to learn a variety of creative genres before committing themselves to genre-specific creative writing courses. This course is offered in the fall semester, 2009.

This class addresses one of the most important questions of higher education, and, indeed, of life: how to express yourself clearly and gracefully. The premise of this class is that writing well is a potent form of power and beauty. To achieve that goal, we’ll study the major principles of grammar, style, and clarity. Although all are welcome, this class will be of particular interest to Freshmen and Sophomores who either did not take the Composition or would like further practice in writing.

The course will introduce students to the history, methodology and major problems in black studies. This survey will explore the interdisciplinary nature of black studies scholarship and the challenges it presents to traditional academic models. The issue of the politicization of the academy and the relationship between black scholarship production and service to the black community will also be covered. The course will draw from a number of literary sources (Toni Morrison, Houston Barker, Henry Louis Gates), cultural theorist (Bell Hooks, Mark Anthony Neal, Cornel West) and historical works (Nell Painter, John H. Franklin, Alberto Raboteau.) This course will serve students interested in the study of the black experience. All majors are welcomed. Students interested in black studies Area of Concentration are encouraged to enroll

This is an introduction to the study of language and psychological behavior. We will consider current issues in language and the mind, including the structure and processing of language, language acquisition in children, and how humans store and retrieve linguistic information. No previous experience in linguistics is necessary, although it would be helpful if the student has taken Introduction to Psychology. There will be weekly quizzes, a short paper, and a comprehensive final examination. This course is offered in the second half of the spring semester.

This course will examine the themes of migration and immigration in African-American literature from the captivity narrative of early America to the 21st century. We will examine the African-American relationship with Africa from the early stages of separation to the movements of reclamation. We will also look at contemporary works that detail immigration from the continent of Africa, the Global South, and Canada. The writers we will read are preoccupied with defining their identities as people, and not as captive. We will move from slavery to freedom, through Reconstruction, post-WWII, through the Civil Rights era and into contemporary society by reading the works of authors like: Olaudah Equiano, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Dorothy West, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Dione Brand, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticatt, Shay Youngblood, and Chris Abani. The texts reflect African-American migration from the rural South to the urban North, immigration from the Global South to the United States, expatriations to France and even “back” to Africa. The readings are compiled to allow us to explore the question: What is an “African-American?”

Course Descriptions—Language Studies

Language Studies courses in English include both writing (English 101, 201, 212, 213, 410, 411, 412, 413) and language (English 121, 122, 150, 221). Students with an interest in Creative Writing might wish to speak with Professors Hudson about appropriate course selections.

Readings in the history and culture of English through historical texts in Anglo-Saxon, Middle and Early Modern English, and American English, with particular attention to the diversity of our language. First half of the fall semester.

An introduction to the basic principles and methods of linguistic analysis, with emphasis on Modern English grammar. This course is offered in the first half, fall semester.

An undergraduate introduction to the print and electronic media (communication theory, advertising, newsgathering, media effects, and investigative journalism) in which students analyze the special languages of the media, examine the economics of the communications industry, and evaluate the media as a reflection of the ideas and preoccupations of society. The goal of the course is to develop students into informed and discriminating listeners, readers, and viewers. This course is offered in the spring semester.

This course is an extension and development of English 201, “The Essay.” As the title indicated, “Creative Non-Fiction” attempts to get at the truth of a situation, an idea, an incident through the personal presence of the writer. It employs the tools of creative writing–plot, character, metaphor, symbol–but it does so in a rigorous pursuit of the truth. Consequently, we will practice such forms as the personal essay, memoir, nature essay, and literary or critical commentary with an emphasis upon creative, personal style. Short reading of and about Creative Non-Fiction will be assigned. Writing will be presented and critiqued in a workshop atmosphere.

This course includes composition, presentation, and considered discussion of original poems in a workshop atmosphere. Experimentation with various poetic forms will be encouraged and craftsmanship emphasized. A strong commitment to poetry will be expected, not only in writing and rewriting throughout the semester, but also in careful criticism of fellow students’ work. Supplementary readings in contemporary poetry will be used as models for writing and as impetus for discussion. This course is offered in the fall semester.

Students will write about 12,000 words of short fiction, which will be read and discussed in workshop sessions. The course pre-supposes a serious interest in creative writing. It requires strict self discipline, devotion to craftsmanship, and active critical analysis. Supplementary readings in short fiction, past and contemporary, are assigned. This course is offered in the fall semester.

This course will trace the development of postmodern fiction, from formally postmodern texts to later texts that define postmodernism more as an engagement with issues of gender, ethnicity, media, cultural hierarchy and politics. To understand these texts we will read some theory and heaps of add and astounding works of postmodern fiction by such writers as Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Douglas Copeland, and Toni Morrison, as well as watch some movies by postmodern filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and Charlie Kaufmann.

Any student in good standing academically and interested in pursuing a topic in language studies in English not normally available through departmental course offerings is encouraged to apply to the Department for permission to do independent work in English language studies. Such study usually involves not more than one course credit a semester, and entails a significant academic project submitted to a department member for a letter grade. Students must receive written approval of their project proposal from a department member before registering for the course.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor and approval of the Department chair.

The goal of this course is for the student to gain greater awareness and control over his writing for a variety of academic and professional purposes. Students who wish to improve their college writing and those who plan to attend law or graduate school, teach, or write professionally would be well served by the course. We will focus in particular on clarity in writing, argumentative techniques, the demands of different genres, and developing a personal voice. Limited enrollment. This course is offered in the spring semester.

Prerequisite: Junior or senior standing or permission of the instructor.

The emphasis in this course will be on technical, business, and other forms of career-oriented writing. Topics include audience analysis, style analysis, grammar, punctuation, and research. Assignments adapted to fit the background and interests of each student include business correspondence, mechanism description, process description, formal proposal, magazine article, and formal report. Limited enrollment. This course is offered in the spring semester.

Prerequisite: Junior or senior standing or permission of the instructor. Students may take either English 410 or 411, but not both.

This course will be conducted as a workshop. Besides writing steadily and much, the student will be expected to read carefully and criticize his peers’ work. This course is offered in the spring semester.

This course will be conducted as a workshop. Besides writing steadily and much, the student will be expected to read carefully and criticize his peers’ work. This course is offered in the spring semester.

Course Descriptions—Literature

Introductory Courses

These courses, numbered 105-160, introduce students to English, American, and World literature in translation. Two half-semester courses, English 105 and 106, introduce students to the ways of reading poetry and short stories. English 107 and 108 emphasize history as a subject matter in literature. English 109 and 160, as well as English 107 and 108, focus on world and multicultural literature.

English 215-220, offered yearly, are designated “Core” courses because they are central to our conception of an English major. They introduce the student to basic literary and cultural history, to significant writers, works, and themes, and to useful critical modes. Students will be expected to participate in classroom discussion and write several short papers. These courses also serve as the foundation for more advanced literary study.

This class will introduce you to the study of poetry through intensive reading and intensive written analysis. We will focus on close reading of a wide range of poems from a variety of historical periods, genres, and cultures. Through a study of image, symbol, diction, syntax, meter, rhythm, and sound, we will analyze the ways in which a poem creates meaning. Your written analyses will emphasize the marriage of formal and thematic elements in particular poems. This class is offered in the second half of the fall semester.

This class has two goals: to introduce you to the study of short fiction through intensive reading, and to familiarize you with strategies and methodologies for writing about literature. In our readings, we will explore formal issues such as tone, structure, and symbolism as well as social issues such as sexuality, race and gender. Moreover, this class focuses on ways of grappling with these big questions in writing, as literary scholars do. This class is offered in the first half of the fall semester.

An introduction to the novel itself in which we try to sustain the joy of first readings and attempt to understand how authors invite us to co-create this “other world,” and how historical events and individuals are a part of this creative process. Our texts may range in length from Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in subject from politics in Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Garcia Marquez’ The General in His Labyrinth to debates about historical sources like Yourcenar’s The Memoirs of Hadrian and Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. Selections from Latin American novelists like Garcia Marques, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa may help us understand why the historical novel has been such a prominent literary mode in Central and South America. This course is offered in the spring semester.

The course will focus on literature in translation from Europe, Japan, India, and Mexico from the 7th through the 17th centuries. Thematically, the course will address conquest, spirituality, and love with the aim of cultivating the student’s ability to consider critically class, gender, religion, and the idea of the “other” in medieval Europe and beyond. Texts will include Beowulf, The Tale of the Genji, Dante’s Inferno and the poetry of Rumi. This course is offered in the spring semester.

The richness of American culture is a result of the contributions made by individuals from a variety of groups, each expanding our definition of what it means to be American. In this course we will study the writing and cultures of a number of groups, among them Native American, Hispanic, Gay, African American, European American, and Asian American. We will try to hear individual voices through a variety of literary forms (including film), while exploring commonalities. This course is offered in the spring semester.

This course will introduce students to the major writers and literary trends of the British Isles after 1900. We will begin with the dawn of Modernism, after which we will trace important political, cultural, and aesthetic changes reflected in 20th and 21st century texts. How did the disintegration of the British Empire and two world wars affect British cultural identity? How was the clash between the rural and the urban reflected in the past century? We will focus on a variety of genres-fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama - and examine the experimentations with language and form in Modernism and Postmodernism, as well as representations of gender roles and race in selected texts by Joseph Conrad, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Eavan Boland, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, and others. This course is offered in the spring semester. 

The study of English literature from its beginnings to the end of the Renaissance. Readings will include Beowulf; selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Elizabethan poetry, drama and prose; and Milton’s Paradise Lost. This course is offered in the fall semester.

A study of the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. Analyzing Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic techniques, we will examine some of the comedies, histories, and tragedies of the greatest dramatist in English. We will also look at the plays' major themes, styles, and sources. This course is offered in the spring semester.

This course examines works by some of the best-known poets, essayists, and novelists from the Restoration and 18th Century in Great Britain, including Dryden, Swift, Pope, Fielding, and Johnson. The responses of different authors to ongoing cultural conflicts will help structure our survey. Rhetorical techniques and the development of genres will be ongoing concerns. There will be special emphasis on the comedies of the time by Wycherly, Etherege, Behn, Congreve, Gay, Steele, and Sheridan, not only as texts for performance and reading, but also as objects the authors’ contemporaries reviewed with vigor and used to construct theories about comedy and satire. This course is offered in the spring semester.

A study of the life and literature of the early and middle 19th century as reflected in the poetry, fiction, and essays of this period. Texts will vary from year to year but will be drawn from the works of major poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Hardy), novelists (Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Hardy) and essayists (Wordsworth, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley, and Pater).

A survey of major writers and literary trends from the period of exploration to the Naturalists. We will study the forging of the American literary and social consciousness in the writings of the early explorers, through the Native American oral tradition, and in works by Bradstreet, Edwards, Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, Crane, and Chopin. Guiding our study will be questions like “What is ‘American’ about American literature?” and “In what ways do myths generated by our formative literature continue to shape our personal and national identities?” This course is offered in the fall semester.

This survey introduces the writers and trends of our century, from realism and naturalism through modernism to the rich, fragmented energy of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Writers covered vary from year to year but may include Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Margery Latimer, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, John Barth, Raymond Carver, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. This course is offered in the spring semester.

What was the medieval chivalric code? How did it define the knight’s relationship to his lord or his lady? How closely does Arthurian literature reflect actual medieval behavior? We will explore these kinds of questions by examining texts such as The Art of Courtly Love, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Finally, this class will consider idealized codes for living embedded in contemporary culture to see how (and if) chivalry operates in the world today.

Though Ginsberg is dead and Snyder is 70, the Beat movement still has a charisma and a living energy. Its writers professed the ecstatic moment and the revolt of the imagination against the chafing strictures of Eisenhower's America. We'll read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but otherwise stay with the remarkable poetry of several key writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Greg Corso. Our focus will be the poetry itself—its techniques and themes of liberation and transcendence—and its relationship to American culture of the 50's. The course will include the class production of a performance of the famous Six Gallery Reading in which Ginsberg, Snyder, McClure, and others participated.

Intermediate Courses

COURSES NUMBERED 300-370 HAVE THE PREREQUISITE OF ANY ONE ENGLISH LITERATURE COURSE AT WABASH. They are designed to complement and develop historical and cultural awareness, and the knowledge of authors, themes, topics, genres, modes, and critical approaches encountered in Introductory and Core courses. Students in Intermediate courses take initiative in class discussion, write several analytical papers, and become familiar with the use of secondary critical sources. Topics for Intermediate courses are generally repeated every two or three years.

“Here was a generation,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in the aftermath of the Great War, “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in mankind shaken.” This course examines the literature and culture of the 1920’s in America and, in passing, the American civilization that produced an extraordinary number of talented writers. We will focus upon major writers and significant texts of this decade—the Roaring Twenties, the jazz age, the great age of sport, the age of leisure, the plastic age. The 20’s produced great literature and great literary figures. We will choose from among the best of the period. Writers may include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Robert Frost, William Faulkner (and perhaps others of lesser renown).

A survey of early English drama from the first plays in the English church through the medieval mystery, morality, and miracle dramas, to the early Renaissance entertainments and histories. In addition to reading the texts of plays, we will also look at the contexts in which they were presented and the sources of their success.

A survey of non-Shakespearean drama of the English Renaissance, through the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. We will read tragedies, histories, and comedies by several of Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Dekker, and John Webster. We will also consider the actual conditions of acting, producing, and audience reception for early English drama plays.

In this course we will consider the development and variety of science fiction literature, both in America and abroad. We will begin with early classics, such as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, but we will focus on modern American authors such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, and Dan Simmons; and some European and Japanese authors as well. I am particularly interested in the way this genre stretches our conceptions of literary form.

Even in the 21st century, Americans remain haunted by the power and beauty of their landscapes and by the idea of wilderness. Thoreau’s gnomic statement, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” still has some currency in our culture. While Americans are far from forging a common environmental ethic, the attempt continues, especially in the face of our growing awareness of the fragility of earth’s ecosystems, and the power of our technologies to subdue and destroy them. In this course, we will read a few essential classic texts – Thoreau’s Walking and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac to get our bearings, but the focus will be on texts of the late 20th century to the present. We will read such nonfiction works as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge; fictions such as Seth Kantner’s 2004 novel, Ordinary Wolves, and various stories by Rick Bass; and Gary Snyder’s poetry collection, Turtle Island. We will also read some poetry and fiction by Nicaraguan writers, Ernesto Cardenal and Gioconda Belli. The course will also introduce students to the practice of ecocriticism. We will read the texts as literary works of art, but also as explorations of the connections between humans and the natural world, of nature and spirit, of environmental ethics and justice, and of arguments for the preservation of the natural world.

In this course we will explore the production of British fiction from the turn of the 20th century to World War II. Our attention will focus on the relationship between the disintegration of traditional moral, social, and intellectual values and the development of new literary forms. We will read and discuss works that illustrate a variety of cultural concerns, paying particular attention to those texts which use experimental, audience challenging, and language-focused narrative strategies to foreground the relationship of individuals to economic, political, and cultural forces. We will explore various traditions and innovations in literature as they reflect and incorporate shifting attitudes toward love, marriage, family, social institutions, nature, technology, and war. The metaphor of voyage, of travel to the unknown—whether to a physical, a social, or a psychological wilderness—will provide a unifying point of reference for our discussions of the texts by Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, Rhys, and Woolf. This course is offered in the spring semester.

This course explores the literature and culture of the United States in the early part of the 20th century, with its overlapping milieu of high modernists, Harlem Renaissance writers, young bohemians, and political radicals. We will examine the profound redefinitions of the self catalyzed by the rise of psychology, rapid urbanization and mechanization, and the Great War, and we’ll discuss the public’s response to the varied artistic movements of the period, from Primitivism’s allure to the impersonal promise of Futurism. From painting to film, from Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives to Langston Hughes’s poetry and Meridel Le Sueur’s reportage, this course will examine a variety of texts that contributed to the literary experimentation and extraordinary achievement of the period. Other readings may include but are not limited to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Nella Larsen’s Passing, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and poetry by Williams, Taggard, Stevens, Frost, Cummings, Moore, and Millay. 

Romanticism in all of its aspects and manifestations roared across Europe and America in the latter years of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. This course examines the poetry and prose of the major English Romantic writers and the development and elaboration of the romantic movement in England roughly during the years 1790 to 1840. We will read widely in the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats with some attention to the shift from neo-classic to romantic poetic forms and critical premises and particular emphasis on the romantic imagination and its legacy, including its relevance to the contemporary world.

In this intermediate seminar, we will explore prize-winning plays, novels, and poetry about the Vietnam War written by journalists, soldiers, and concerned citizens, Perspectives of the war will include those of Americans, Vietnamese, British, men, women, and minorities. Readings will place characters within contexts that include Viet Nam in the early 1950s and 1960s, combat from 1965 to 1975, and the war’s aftermath for Americans and the Vietnamese. Some of our texts will include Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrows of War, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, David Rabe’s Sticks and Stones, Bobbie Anne Mason’s In Country, and the poetry of W.D. Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa.

330

A character in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam Novel, Going After Cacciato, comments that “things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new under­standings.” This course will examine the age-old theme of conflict in general and war in particular (WWI and Vietnam) as viewed from various angles and presented in different literary and media forms (poetry, fiction, non­fiction, and film). We will also study the biographical, literary, historical and cultural contexts in which the various works are written. Through research, panels, readings, critical papers, films, slides, and discussion, our principal goal will be an in-depth assessment of the literary treatment of this major theme across time and genres. Writers and texts studied in this class will be Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front; Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Graham Greene, The Quiet American; World War One British Poets; Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War; Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato; Pat Barker, Regeneration; and Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story.

James Joyce was born and raised in colonized Ireland. In English 340, we will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, and some of Joyce’s political writing. Our discussion of these texts will focus mainly on the writer’s commentary on imperialism, racial bias, anti-Semitism, and other forms of oppression present in late-colonial Ireland. We will try to determine why Joyce famously declared: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” In some texts, Joyce anticipates the postcolonial challenges the Irish people may face after their liberation from the British Empire. All of the books included in this course are deeply embedded in and inspired by Dublin—a city with which Joyce had a love-hate relationship, and which provided him with a wealth of characters and stories for his fiction. Ulysses is a challenging book, but its plot and structure become much clearer when one immerses oneself in the life of the city and mimics the path of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus.

Prerequisite: Junior or Senior standing

William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound were close friends for a time, living a portion of each year in Stone Cottage in the Sussex countryside (1913-1916): Yeats, the already distinguished Irish poet, and Pound, 20 years Yeats’ junior, the brash and brilliant American émigré. Together, they would become two of the principal architects of international Modernism. They shared a dream of poetry as a high and sacred calling and would produce some of the 20th century’s most memorable verse. Their years together at Stone Cottage proved to be a crucible for Modernism, and helped move Pound from his rather dreamy-eyed Victorianism to a tougher and often satiric mode of poetry. Both poets continued to develop, and both would engage the broken history of the twentieth century more and more deeply. Yeats’ poetry grew more vigorous and passionate as he aged, while Pound’s grew more fractured, but no less ambitious. Pound became the greatest translator of poetry into English and the author of a vast, difficult epic, The Cantos. Yeats simply became the greatest poet in English of the past century. In this course, conceived in honor of the centennial of Pound’s brief tenure at Wabash (1907-1908), we will trace the development of both poets’ work and the formal and thematic connections between them.

In this half-course, we will study six plays or more by Shaw (1857-1950), each of which provides a different answer to his recurring question: what is wrong with civilization? Shaw's wit and satire make his frequently disagreeable answers both provocative and entertaining. Texts will include three major works, Man and Superman (1903), Heartbreak House (1917), St. Joan (1923).

In this half-course, we will study several of the six novels completed by Austen (1775-1817), paying particular attention to their reception by her contemporaries. We will continue by researching the print and electronic information about her reputation over the next two hundred years, focusing finally on a few of the fifteen or so film adaptations (and how they were reviewed) during the last 30 years of the 20th century. Throughout the half-course, we will be interested in finding out what her novels tell us about the craft of fiction, as well as what is either appealing or off-putting (or both) about her work at the beginning of a new century.

Although a major writer in the American literary canon, Melville seems almost non-canonical in his constant experimentation with literary form and questioning of societal conventions of race, gender, and class. In this course we will study a number of Melville's major works—Typee, Redburn, Moby Dick, Billy Budd—and several lesser known texts, particularly the poetry. In addition to enjoying the variety of stories Melville tells, meeting his distinctive characters, and exploring his unconventional ideas, we will consider Melville's life and times as well as the history of his literary reputation.

Is the novel always better than its film adaptation? After an introduction to the art of film and a theoretical consideration of the similarities and differences between fiction and film, we will compare four or five novels with their film adaptations. This course is offered in the spring semester.

The contributions of Jewish American writers and filmmakers have been pervasive and significant. We will read selected fiction, poetry and plays, and see films that focus on the Jewish American experience. Authors and filmmakers may include Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, David Mamet, Allen Ginsberg, and Woody Allen.

African Americans have employed the novel form in a variety of ways. In this course we will sample this rich tradition in works by F.E.W. Harper, Charles Chessnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neal Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Charles Johnson. We will consider how each work reflects its particular historical/cultural moment as well as how it participates in the American literary tradition. This course is offered in the fall semester.

This course takes a literary approach to the study of the civil rights movement. Students will examine the autobiographies, plays, novels, and other various artistic expressions of the mid-1950s through 1980. The aim of the course is to explore the use of literature and art as means of political, cultural, and religious expression. Students are introduced to critical theory as well as black studies. This course is offered in the fall semester.

This course explores various genres of African American Literature. Emphasis is placed on works that reflect the socio-historical development of African American life. Poetry, Slave narratives, autobiographies, novels, plays, musical lyrics, and spoken word form the subject of study in the course. Special attention is given to works of fiction that become motion pictures and the emerging area of audio books. The aim of the course is to provide students with a sense of the historical and contemporary developments within African American literature. Students are introduced to African American critical theory as will as African American history.

Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, arguably the greatest Modernists of 20th century literature in English, drew deep inspiration from the Middle Ages. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, a literary group known as the Inklings, drew even more directly on the Middle Ages in their rich fantasies. In this course, we’ll read and study some medieval texts—Beowulf, Chretien’s romance, Yvain, some troubadour poetry—and consider their refractions in one major 20th century text, Personae (Pound), as well as in more popular works, such as Tolkien’s The Hobbit and John Gardner’s Grendel. In the process, we will examine the literary relations between the medieval world and modernism and the diverse medieval worlds “invented” by several interesting 20th century writers.

Any student who has completed at least one literature course, is in good standing academically, and is interested in pursuing a topic in English not normally available through departmental course offerings, is encouraged to apply to the department for permission to do independent study in literature. Such study usually involves not more than one course credit a semester, and entails a significant academic project submitted to a department member for a letter grade. Students must receive written approval of their project proposal from a department member before registering for the course.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor and approval of the department chair.

This course introduces English majors and minors to a number of literary genres, makes available to them systematic critical approaches, and gives them practice in scholarly and critical disciplines. Frequent written exercises. All members of the English Department will occasionally assist in classroom work. This course is offered in the fall and spring semester. Please Note: in future years this course will only be offered in the spring semester.

Advanced (Seminar) Courses

Two sections of English 497 are the two Advanced Courses offered every fall. These are seminars designed primarily for English majors (although occasionally English minors enroll in them). The topics vary depending upon the research and teaching interests of the faculty. They demand a high level of student involvement in research and discussion. Several short papers and a long critical essay are required. Please Note: the two seminars are only offered in the fall semester.

This is a senior-level seminar in one of the most prolific of modern literacy genres. As befitting its topic, the seminar will require not only traditional textual analysis, but will also explore futuristic technological structures. In the first part of the course, we will read several novels by two important S-F authors, Phillip K. Dick, and William Gibson, as well as a number of critical approaches to their work. In the second part of the course, each student will select a well-known science fiction author as the subject of an intensive critical study, taking the form of an article modeled after publications in Science Fiction Studies—the premier academic journal in this field. In the final part of the course, students will develop a more technological form of their critical study, such as a video, web site, or PowerPoint. This will be presented during our regularly-scheduled final exam.