Fall 2010 Course Descriptions
Gateway 100
100 1: SWAT (Sass, Wit & Text)
Michael Theune
100 5: How Do We Know What We Know?
Bobbie Silk
Humanities 102: World of Ideas: 4th-16th Centuries: The Art of Seeing: The World in Perspective(s)
Daniel Terkla
English 101: Intro to Creative Writing
101 1: Zarina Mullan Plath
101 2: Lynn DeVore
101 3: Brandi Reissenweber
Study of both the theory and practice of writing creatively. Reading and understanding of literary forms is combined with practice in the basic processes of and strategies for writing fiction, poetry, or drama. General Education credit in Fine Arts.
English 170 1, 2: The Short Story
Pamela Muirhead
Kathleen O’Gorman
We will examine the notion that story is the essence of all literature, even as we question what is essential for a text to be a story. In examining such ideas, we will study short stories from a variety of places to see what they suggest about the genre. We’ll distinguish story (with beginning, middle, and end) from plot (which admits the uncertainty of beginnings and endings and everything in between), and we’ll examine different styles of literary imagination as they engage us. In considering the traditional elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, point of view, thematic concerns—we will look at how those elements can propose and/or subvert meaning. We will consider, too, the limits of the short story: what it can and cannot accomplish. We will consider the kinds of fictions we offer ourselves and one another and try to discover what that says about us all.
English 170 3: Travellers & Travel Liars
Daniel Terkla
In this course we explore narratives of discovery, ranging from Homer's Odyssey to Thomas More's Utopia, from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit to Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Our purpose will be to discover what the purposes of travel—personal, political, social, imaginative—have been and how they change over time and from culture to culture. Other possible readings: Wanderlust, The Birthday Boys, Invisible Cities, Inferno, A River Sutra, and Gulliver's Travels, along with selections from the work of Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne.
English 170 4: Calypso!
Robert Bray
A course intended for the general student who seeks an overview of the literature, music and folk life of the mélange of Caribbean cultures, especially Anglo- and Franco-. We will read classics of Caribbean literature (in English), listen to various styles of music (such as reggae, calypso and zouk), and do a little basic history and anthropology of the folk life of the region.
English 170 5: The Politics of Comedy
Bobbie Silk
Comedy isn’t all laughs. Nor is laughter merely a matter of having fun. Laughter can be used to mock, challenge, or even humiliate others. Laughter is power, and comedy—like politics—is the organized use of power to accomplish some purpose. In this course we will examine the politics of comedy, the ways in which stage, film, and print comedy restore or subvert social norms or structures. We will explore the power of comedy to correct as well as to uplift and give us pleasure.
English 170 6: Science Fiction
Wes Chapman
Science fiction has long suffered from a reputation as escapist fare unworthy of consideration as serious literature. One reason for this may be that, by definition, science fiction represents that which does not (or does not yet) exist. In this course, we will consider how science fiction uses “that which does not exist”—imagined futures, alternate histories, alien cultures, utopias and dystopias, etc.—to grapple with genuine historical, social and philosophical concerns.
English 170 7: Third World Women Speak
Alison Sainsbury
Recent and contemporary women’s writing from the Muslim world will be our focus this term. Readings will include a range of genres, including a blog about the Iraq war, “chick lit” from Saudi Arabia, feminist poetry from Bangladesh, and a graphic memoir about coming of age during the Iranian Revolution. Work for the course will include essay exams and short response papers.
English 201: Writing Fiction
Lynn DeVore
Workshop in reading and writing fiction. The course will focus on the principles and techniques used by accomplished writers in their stories as well as on key elements of the story form. Students will complete stories and develop a portfolio. Prerequisites: Gateway.
English 202: Writing Poetry
Michael Theune
In this course, we will focus on the questions that any poet must address: how do we transform complex emotional and intellectual experiences into poems? What are the formal and rhetorical demands of poetry? How do music and metaphor work together to make a poem? We will also consider the crucial importance of revision in the creative process, and how satisfying that process can be on the journey toward finding your own voice and style.
English 211: Newswriting & Reporting
James Plath
The fundamentals of newswriting, with emphasis on style, structure, and methods of news reporting.
English 220 1: Thinking Like a Mountain: Literature and Environmental Consciousness
Alison Sainsbury
From Aldo Leopold's attempt to think "like a mountain" to Gary Snyder's challenge to bring "the wild" into our lives no matter where we live, writers and poets have played an important part in the forging of a contemporary environmental consciousness. Readings will include the classic and the contemporary, the pragmatic and the visionary. The course is writing based and writing intensive, and although the work includes traditional analytical papers, assignments will also take you outside of the classroom to engage more directly the natural world.
English 220 2: Contemporary Irish Literature: The Nightmare of History
Kathleen O’Gorman
Arguably one of the most important utterances in James Joyce’s Ulysses is Stephen Dedalus’s pronouncement, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Whether we regard that history as individual, familial, linguistic, religious, political, social, or any of the other myriad possibilities, the fact is that for the Irish, history matters. We’ll be reading Irish literature after Joyce to see what happens as writers come to terms with their literary history and as the characters they create come to terms with the other histories that engage and resist them. Texts by Roddy Doyle, Edna O’Brien, Bernard MacLaverty, Frances Molloy, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Brian Friel, Ann Devlin, and others.
English 259: Black Women Writers
Pamela Muirhead
This course examines writing mainly by African American women. It explores the literary answers to several questions about the effect of history and culture on how texts acquire meaning, including: What happens to stories of love and marriage from one era to the next? How did early Black writers liberate and subvert literary structures? How have concerns of race, class, and gender shaped narratives by Black women? Why were 19th and early 20th century Black writers so concerned with the image of the mixed-race woman? What’s new in fiction, and poetry, and drama by Black women. A fiction list might include: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Zora Neale Hurston, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and contemporary romance narratives.
English 280: Practical Criticism
280 1: Wes Chapman
280 2: Robert Bray
English 301 1: Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry: Stand Up Poetry
Michael Theune
What is the difference between a great poem and a great joke? It turns out: very little. We will use the resources and techniques of comedy to make poems that are outrageous and deep, funny and honest, and—always!—ambitious and moving. The line that links the page and the stage will be our playground.
English 301 2: Seminar in Creative Writing: Prose: The Lyric Essay
Alison Sainsbury
The lyric essay is the essay at its most poetic. It’s inventive in form—exploding linear narrative in favor of juxtaposition and fragmentation—and meditative in quality, emphasizing image, metaphor, rhythm, and sound. In the first few weeks of term, we’ll read examples and explorations of the form; you’ll even try your hand at assembling a shadowbox in the tradition of the artist Joseph Cornell, whose intricate creations are often cited as the visual analog of the lyric essay. You’ll then turn to writing your own lyric essays, refining your work in tutorial sessions and workshops. Because the lyric essay appeals to poets as well as prose writers, the pre-requisite for this section of 301 is any 200-level writing course.
English 352: American Literature after 1865: The Black Jazz Age
Pamela Muirhead
This course examines a period in American culture (1915 to 1940) often called the Harlem Renaissance. This Black Jazz Age, framed by World Wars I and II, and fueled by the Great Migration of Blacks from the South, saw New York City become the spiritual capital of Black culture, politics, literature, music, and the visual arts. Using literature for our primary texts, we will study some of the era's concerns: aesthetics, Afro-American identity, history and folk tradition, the visual arts' celebration of Blackness, Christianity, alienation, radicalism, urban life, the many-layered consciousness of Black women, blues and jazz.
English 356: Modernism
Wes Chapman
In this course, we will explore the modernist era in British and American literature, from the early years of the 20th C through the beginning of WWII. The course is intended not only to develop your understanding of modernism (what it was, how and why it came about, who its main practitioners were, and so on), but also to encourage you to take on (albeit temporarily) the challenges of modernist writing: to question how we know the world or if the world can be known; to create new ways of writing about the world which better reflect its complexities, contradictions and dark undercurrents; to question the nature of identity and the self; and to consider what values can and should survive the destructiveness, tawdriness, and fragmentation of modern civilization.
English 366: Romance: Mostly Medieval
Daniel Terkla
In this course we examine tales that have been categorized as romances, along with theoretical musings on the nature of genre and of romance in particular. Our goal will be to test the validity and interpretive usefulness of pigeonholing texts based upon their generic and modal conventions. Working inductively, we’ll make our way through tales ancient, not-so-ancient and modern, with an extended stay in the Middle Ages. Readings are likely to include The Golden Ass, The Romance of Tristan, Cligés, Perceval, The Non-Existent Knight, A Sicilian Romance, and Small World: An Academic Romance.
English 370: Caribbean Voices
Robert Bray
A course intended mainly (though not exclusively) for upper-division English, History, International Studies, and Anthropology majors who seek a serious understanding of some of the greatest Caribbean literary figures of the 20th century. Centering around the poetry and drama of Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize winner in literature from the island of St. Lucia, the course will also look backward from Walcott’s mid-to-late century work to that of founding figures like Aimé Césaire and C. L. R. James, and ahead to a younger generation of writers like Jamaica Kincaid.
English 393: Shakespeare’s Comedies and Histories
Mary Ann Bushman
This course investigates the ways our culture is informed by Shakespeare’s works and the ways in which we construct meaning from them. While focusing on the dramatic form we may occasionally include the sonnets and verse romances.
English 401: Senior Writing Project
Lynn DeVore
Capstone experience for English-Writing majors requires thoughtful study of portfolio work and completion of an extensive, ambitious individual project that’s both a logical extension of the student’s work and a new challenge. The course will be multi-genre, with an emphasis on feedback and support. Prerequisite: Senior standing. Offered annually.
English 480: Senior Seminar: Images of the Self
Kathleen O’Gorman
This seminar will examine the representation of identity in contemporary literature—that is, literature written in the last several decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. We will consider how writers have represented, and theorists theorized, the tensions between self and other, the negotiations of power and powerlessness, difference, agency, voice, alienation, etc. Texts will include David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Alan Bennett’s The Complete Talking Heads, among others. One short paper that will form the basis for the major paper; response papers and class presentations, annotated bibliography.