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May Term 2010 Course Descriptions
English 101: Intro to Creative Writing
101 1: Zarina Mullan Plath
101 2: Brandi Reissenweber
Counts toward general education in The Arts
Counts for English major or minor
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.
English 170: Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Bobbie Silk
Counts toward general education in Literature
Counts toward major or minor
Possibly the most famous stage direction in literary history is in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, when the script requires a character to “exit, pursued by a bear.” This simple stage direction accomplishes quite a lot: it disposes of a character who knows more than the plot later requires, marks an important moment of narrative transition, and effectively clears the stage for a change in setting and mood-from court to countryside, from dark irrationality to purity and love. On its own, “exit, pursued by a bear” does not appear to have the stuff of great literature, yet such nuts and bolts are important in combining the practical issues of performance with the literary necessity of an audience’s experience of meaningfulness.
English 220: The Web of American Poetry
Wes Chapman
General Education credit in Literature
Counts toward major or minor
The Web of American Poetry is founded on a central working assumption: that poems take much of their meaning from the many contexts into which they can be placed. Poems allude to or borrow from previous works; they rebel against earlier poetic traditions; they aspire to emulate other arts, such as painting or music; they converse with history, politics and religion. Learning to interpret American poetry, therefore, is in large part a matter of recognizing the strands of meaning which connect particular poems in a web of meanings, and of seeing a particular poem against the backdrop of American poetry as a whole and its social and historical contexts. In this course, we will try to trace some of these strands of meaning over as broad a range of American poetry as possible, from the Puritan era to the second half of the 20th C.
English 101: Intro to Creative Writing
101 1: Zarina Mullan Plath
101 2: Brandi Reissenweber
Counts toward general education in The Arts
Counts for English major or minor
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.
English 170: Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Bobbie Silk
Counts toward general education in Literature
Counts toward major or minor
Possibly the most famous stage direction in literary history is in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, when the script requires a character to “exit, pursued by a bear.” This simple stage direction accomplishes quite a lot: it disposes of a character who knows more than the plot later requires, marks an important moment of narrative transition, and effectively clears the stage for a change in setting and mood-from court to countryside, from dark irrationality to purity and love. On its own, “exit, pursued by a bear” does not appear to have the stuff of great literature, yet such nuts and bolts are important in combining the practical issues of performance with the literary necessity of an audience’s experience of meaningfulness.
English 220: The Web of American Poetry
Wes Chapman
General Education credit in Literature
Counts toward major or minor
The Web of American Poetry is founded on a central working assumption: that poems take much of their meaning from the many contexts into which they can be placed. Poems allude to or borrow from previous works; they rebel against earlier poetic traditions; they aspire to emulate other arts, such as painting or music; they converse with history, politics and religion. Learning to interpret American poetry, therefore, is in large part a matter of recognizing the strands of meaning which connect particular poems in a web of meanings, and of seeing a particular poem against the backdrop of American poetry as a whole and its social and historical contexts. In this course, we will try to trace some of these strands of meaning over as broad a range of American poetry as possible, from the Puritan era to the second half of the 20th C.