English 100: English as a Second Language
Hayes
Designed for non-native speakers of English, this course emphasizes reading, writing, and speaking skills necessary for success in the American academic culture. Vocabulary and concepts specific to higher education in the United States will form part of the curriculum, and students’ needs and goals will direct much of the class’s activity. Students will write several brief papers and participate in debates, presentations, and surveys.
English 101: Expository Writing
Staff
English 101 introduces writing on the college level. Its purpose is to foster the skills necessary to produce coherent, persuasive prose: developing ideas thoroughly, using rhetorical strategies appropriate to subject and audience, focusing and supporting a thesis, structuring well developed paragraphs, generating mature and effective sentences, choosing precise and expressive language, and observing the conventions of written prose.
Individual sections employ a variety of techniques for inculcating standards of good prose; but all 101 classes require a variety of writing assignments including paragraphs and short essays written in and out of class (about 4000 words in total) and a short research paper designed to introduce techniques of library research and documentation (about 2000 words).
English 101: Expository Writing
Wilkerson
This course has been designed to aid in your development into a confident, responsible and persuasive writer. Specifically, it should help you to develop competency in all stages of the writing process, develop critical thinking and reading skills and develop a writing standard consistent with the MLA style guide. The course will revolve around a particular theme each semester. Students will be required to write four essays, participate in class discussion that focuses on the theme for the course, and read an assigned novel.
English 101: Expository Writing: Writing About Film
Inboden
Our primary goal in this course is, of course, to improve your skills as a writer of expository prose. To that end, we will do a lot of writing of various kinds, focusing on sentence structure, organizational skills, critical thinking, liveliness, and argumentation. Of course, all good writers need something to write about, so I’ve chosen to center the topics for writing around movies. I hope that’s something we can all feel free to think about and talk about, and that you have interesting opinions you can develop about films. We will be watching examples of the Classical Hollywood Cinema (American film 1930-1960) and also reading examples of various kinds of writing about film: review, personal essay, history, and critical argument, to name a few. After a series of assignments of growing length and complexity, we will ultimately complete a short researched argument. Success in the course will depend on active participation and serious work through the process of revision as well as on the quality of the papers. Writing Intensive.
English 101: Expository Writing
Hayes
All college students share a need for excellent writing skills. Whatever your eventual major may be, you will be required to produce well-focused and well-designed essays and papers. This course strives to help you do exactly that. Here, students will find an emphasis on development of topics, organization of material, and creation of mature writing style. We will emphasize the need to write to a well-defined and appropriate audience, and the importance of a sharpened thesis to a successful paper. Readings will be used to focus class discussion and (occasionally) provide writing topics; other topics will grow from students’ interest and needs. Course work will include several brief in-class writings, multiple drafts of four complete essays, and a research essay of 7-10 pages.
101: Expository Writing
M. Dixon
In this course, students will work through the writing process, from planning to revising and editing essays. Our text for the course will be Seeing & Writing, which provides visual images and readings that will invite us to think critically about popular culture, everything from images of beauty in advertising, to ethnic stereotypes in film, gender roles on TV and music videos, to cultural icons and heroes. Writing in the course will move from more personal essays to researched arguments. The course will also provide an introduction to using Wittenberg’s research resources in the library and on the Internet.
English 101: Expository Writing
Incorvati
This course aims to sharpen your writing by developing your skills in argumentation, the assumption being that the qualities often valued in a variety of writing tasks–qualities like clarity, strong critical thinking, logical organization, and unity–are salient features of successful argumentative writing. In the process of practicing this style of composition, you will have opportunities to hone your research, public speaking, and writing skills, and you will read essays by some influential writers who have used their argumentative techniques to persuade readers on topics such as environmental policy, civil rights, and freedom of speech issues. The writing component of this class involves multiple drafts and the sharing of critical feedback among classmates.
English 101: Expository Writing
Jusova
This section of English 101 is divided into four sequences and organized around four main projects. For the first sequence, you will be asked to write a reflective narrative essay that makes an argument through narration or story telling. The theme of sequence #2 is popular culture, and its main writing project is an essay that examines ideological agendas and assumptions encoded in a cultural text. The main writing assignment in sequence #3, the core of this course, will ask you to write an analytical argument that relies on textual evidence and positions you in an important intellectual debate. Finally, the goal of project #4, a text of your own design, is to teach you how to approach open-ended topics. It will build on your earlier work in this class and will require of you to propose and research an intellectually stimulating, meaningful, and sufficiently complex topic within a given theme (globalization) and to write a critically engaged paper exploring this topic.
English 101: Expository Writing
Askeland
“To develop the whole person,” reads Wittenberg’s mission statement; this course takes up that challenge. The first half of the course teaches academic strategies through the reading of difficult but academically valued writing by professionals and through the writing of personal narratives in response. These narratives allow each student to draw on her own lifestory as a body of evidence. That evidence can then be drawn into service as the student analyzes it using basic academic strategies, complicating stereotypes, etc., to create the kinds of arguments that will ultimately be most valuable to professors. The first half of the course uses portfolio grading to allow for the kind of risk-taking that is scary, but essential, to successful college-level writing. The second half on the course builds on that foundation. First, we analyze and explore powerful academic writing, read during the first half of the semester, in line with the way this analysis is practiced within the discipline of English. Then we analyze and explore the way popular magazines identify and target audiences. Finally, all students conduct a research project into an academic discipline in which they are interested, and, specifically, the kind(s) of writing and research that is practiced in the scholarly journals of that field. This course is writing intensive.
English 101: Expository Writing
Jones
The American frontier–home to Native American prophets, drought-and-grasshopper-dueling farmers, black cavalrymen, women earning more in the gold fields from their pie baking than their customers did in the mines, Irish and Chinese railroad construction workers, bank robbers and cattle rustlers and social reformers–was declared “closed” 112 years ago. Yet it has remained a central element of American culture.
We’ll use the 19th century American frontier as the focal point for the term’s writing and research. Students will write a series of short papers culminating in a research paper. The course goals are to develop writing skills which will be useful in subsequent college courses and to explore a fascinating period of America’s past and its influence on contemporary American life. Occasional out of class assignments, probably including a visit to an 18th century trade fair on Labor Day weekend, will be required; do not plan visits home that weekend until the first paper assignment is discussed.
English 101: Expository Writing
Hinson
English 101 is first and foremost a composition course designed to give you intensive practice in the art of expository writing. The course emphasizes the writing process and the development of clear, purposeful, well-focused writing that addresses a well-defined audience. The course will focus on the conventions of academic writing and selecting, integrating, and documenting sources. Also, it will help you to discover that reading and writing are not separate activities, but assignments, and a research project.
English 101: Expository Writing
Davis
This course is an introduction to composition. We will cover many of the foundational skills of expository writing in class, and we’ll work with style and revision exercises from writing handbooks. But ultimately better writing comes from practice, practice, and more practice. Writing is not a matter of chance or good luck. It’s not a matter of first-draft inspiration. Successful prose in all disciplines is based on specific techniques any writer can master. We discover these techniques, in part, by analyzing prose we admire and by applying what we learn in that analysis to our own developing style. For this reason, I’ll urge you to become an active reader as well as an active writer and to study the essays and narratives in the course as a source for techniques you can use yourself.
English 180: Literature of the ‘60s
McClelland
So you say you want a revolution? The counter-culture of the 1960s and early 1970s inspired a creative explosion in many artistic fields, including fiction, poetry, drama and film. In this course we will read some of the most important writing from a tumultuous period in American history, including works by Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Richard Farina. We’ll examine how the events of the time influenced those writers and how those writers influenced their time.
Course requirements include a mid-term, a final and a term paper. You will be expected to come prepared to discuss the assigned reading and take part in what should be lively and often controversial discussions.
English 180: American Women’s Fiction
Askeland
Whenever anyone writes a story, that writer reimagines the world for us. This course will explore short stories and novels written by North American women of various backgrounds and ethnicities, from the 19th and 20th centuries. We’ll look at the various and changing roles of women in the U.S. during this broad period and how their fictional works responded to those changes. The enslavement of African Americans, the attempts at genocide on Native American women, the largely Euro-American movement for women’s rights to vote and hold property, the exclusion of east Asian women from immigrating to this country (and their roles once such restrictions were dropped), the ambiguous status of Latina/chicana women who have lived “en la frontera/in the borderlands” of this country from its inception, and the perspective of Canadian writers, provide a matrix of viewpoints to consider the meaning of the term “American woman.” This variety of perspectives will help us to re-think the terms “American woman.” This variety of perspectives will help us to re-think the terms “American” and “woman,” and, in turn, perhaps better help us to understand ourselves, and maybe even “reimagine” our own world. Reading and writing intensive. Two papers, a midterm, and a final project.
English 180: Gender Trouble
Incorvati
In reading Shakespeare’s As You Like It, we come across the famous lines “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” It’s an observation worthy of reflection, and it’s one that can get complicated when we take into consideration the way that men and women don’t always stick to the roles that their gender prescribes for them. In fact, in the same play where we find these lines, we also watch the heroine, Rosalind, conceal her true identity under the dress of a man, a masking that becomes all the more complicated when she finds herself/himself in the company of Orlando, the man she loves. Plays, novels, poems, and films frequently revel in the dramatic potential of such gender play, and in this course we will undertake a survey of such works. In addition to the role swapping found in As You Like It and in films like Boy’s Don’t Cry, we will consider stories in which characters actually shift from one sex to another, as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and stories in which characters deviate significantly from conventional gender roles, as in tales of same-sex desire like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The course will also consider what some influential theorists, from Plato on up to contemporary critics, have had to say about gender and sexuality. This writing intensive course will involve several interpretive papers and several exams.
English 180: Mythology, The Hero’s Adventure
K. Dixon
This course will begin in readings of ancient epics (Homer and before), with special focus on the figure of the hero. It will swing through Greek mythology in pursuit of “the hero,” taking a week’s layover in depth psychology (Freud and Jung), which will give us some methods for exploring the hero figure even as we explore modern mythologies such as Freudianism; and then will continue on toward the present, watching 19th and 20th century transformations of the hero, which will include Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, and Erica Lopez, among others, as well as some movies and possibly some travel narratives.
The course is Writing Intensive and will have 4-5 short papers, two exams, and one or two collective projects. It’s about a third mythology, a third mythography (how to understand and write about myths: Joseph Campbell, Jung, Bruno Betttelheim), and a third 19th and 20th century literature, mostly starring the “antihero.”
English 180: Reflections on the Holocaust: Literature and Ethics
Proll
The near destruction of European Jewry under the Nazi regime stands as one of the greatest human tragedies of all time. As such, the Holocaust has engendered some of the most difficult and lingering philosophical questions of the twentieth century and beyond. What does this event suggest about humanity? What does it suggest about the modern world? About God? About the presence of evil in the world? How ought we to live in a post-Holocaust era? What are our responsibilities–to ourselves, our country, and to others, especially “the Other”? And how can we write about a catastrophe of this magnitude? In what ways should it be represented? Who has the right to do the representing? This class will confront these difficult and significant questions. The class will consider a variety of memoirs, poems, historical documents, and ethical/theological studies. We will also view a number of films and, at the course’s end, consider various works of art (such as sculpture and paintings). Please be forewarned: this material will at times be emotionally upsetting and philosophically challenging. Students will keep journals throughout the semester as well as write several short papers and a longer research paper. A midterm, final, and group presentations will also be required. This course is offered as a learning community together with Religion 100W and is writing intensive.
English 200: Introduction to Literary Studies
Incorvati
This introduction to literary studies has two goals: to sharpen your current reading skills and to expand the range of reading skills at your disposal. To accomplish the first goal, we will start from the assumption that reading critically involves knowing the kinds of questions to ask of a text. With that assumption in mind, we will read works in a variety of genres (poems, fiction, drama), and we will identify the kinds of questions that lead us to the most meaningful and satisfying results. We will also take into account how considerations of genre as well as the features of each specific work help guide us in forming these questions. The second goal of the course, expanding your interpretive skills, will be addressed by covering a range of critical approaches that can be used to elucidate (and complicate) literary texts. These approaches can be broadly categorized in three groups: contextual criticism (including biographical, historical, new historical, Marxist, and cultural studies approaches), language criticism (including dialogic, structuralism, and reconstructive approaches), and gender criticism (including feminist and queer approaches). There will also be frequent writing assignments that will give you an opportunity to practice these critical perspectives as well as to sharpen your writing skills.
English 200: Introduction to Literary Studies
Poll
English 200 is designed to introduce you to the kinds of reading and writing assignments you will be doing as English majors and minors, and, to this end, the course will focus on three areas. Our first goal will be to acquaint you with a broad array of literary works from the four genres of short story, poetry, drama, and the novel, and we will devote much of our attention to the various historical, formal and critical concerns raised by each of these. In addition, the course will provide you with many opportunities to write interpretative essays in order to gain experience producing sophisticated, college-level English papers. Finally, in both your reading and writing work, we will concentrate on the overarching question of interpretation: What does that word mean? How do we conduct literary interpretation? What is a valid interpretation? How can you develop your ability to analyze and interpret literary texts? In answering these questions, we will concentrate on some contemporary trends in literary theory and interpretation, and particularly on feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and cultural approaches.
English 240: Beginning Creative Writing
McClelland
“Writing is easy,” the writer Gene Fowler once said. “All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” Fowler may well have been right, but in this class we’ll try to make it a little easier than that. The course will provide students an introduction to four genres of creative writing–poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and playwriting. Students will hear what some writers have to say about writing, read and discuss some of what is being written today, keep a journal of their own progress as writers, and workshop the writing of their classmates. Most of all, students will write. You will be expected to produce pieces in all four genres, and do a major revision of a work of your choice.
English 240: Beginning Creative Writing
K. Dixon
This is a beginning creative writing course. It assumes nothing about the student’s previous reading or writing experience. We will take ourselves seriously as writers, however, and build from the rudiments individually, each at his or her own pace, and we’ll do this in four major genres–fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. By the end of the semester, students will have narrowed the field down to one or two genres, turning in their best work, in each genre, for a final portfolio evaluation. The balance of the grade is based on a journal/writer’s notebook, which requires daily work, and on class participation. The mix is about a third each: works, journal, and participation.
Class format is “workshop,” essentially group critique in student work as well as published work–classic and current. All students will have at least two of their works edited and critiqued by the rest of the class. There may be an occasional quiz, and there are exams only rarely. However, there is a list of “expectations,” terminology and techniques, that must be met to get the best credit for the course.
English 240 is WI. It does not meet the Gen Ed Arts requirement. It is pre-requisite for all advanced English 322 course. Pre-requisite for Engl 240 is English 101, and Engl 180 (or 170 or 190) is strongly recommended. It’s not a good first or even second semester Freshman course, though experienced writers have by-passed these pre-requisites on occasion by permission of the instructor, based on a review of the student’s previous work. Accordingly, it is not recommended for high school onors students, though exceptions may be made: see instructor, as per above for Freshmen.
English 241: Beginning Journalism
McClelland
This course will provide a basic introduction to the practice and principles of journalism, with an emphasis on newspaper production. We will discuss news, features, opinion and sports writing; journalistic ethics, copy-editing, layout and other related topics. Students will write regularly, and will be encouraged to contribute to the Torch. Prerequisite: English 101.
English 243: Business and Professional Writing
Wilkerson
Most people in the business field will admit that writing is very important to their jobs and that writing well is important to advancement in their careers. The purpose of ENGL 243, Business and Professional Writing, is to teach the writing skills needed in order to write successfully in the business world. The course will take an audience-centered approach to writing using the conventional formats for letters, memos and formal reports. Students will also learn to write bibliographies for business documents and how to review and recommend improvements in writing by others.
Through the four projects assigned in the class, students will learn an audience centered writing process that teaches them to define their objectives, plan their writing, draft their writing and to evaluate and revise their own writing. Corporate teamwork and attention to detail will be emphasized with each project assigned.
English 245: Writing for Teachers
Davis
This is an intermediate course in composition designed for prospective teachers. Students will develop their abilities to analyze texts, construct arguments, tell stories and produce writing that is lively, elegant, and precise. The course will study key issues in composition and assessment and review the history of the teaching of writing in American schools. But it will also give students hands-on experience in the day-to-day work of a writing class: from designing assignments to teaching the writing process, from understanding grammar to managing the paper load, from using computers to responding to student drafts.
English 280: British Survey I
Buckman
In this survey of English literature from its beginnings to the early eighteenth century, students will be introduced to the writing of a variety of authors working in a variety of genres: sonnet, dramatic comedy, epic poem, essay, novel, and others. In order to impose some structure on a rather diverse body of writings, we will trace several broad themes across these works while attending to, so far as is possible in a course of this type, this historical milieux in which these texts were written and read or performed.
English 280: British Survey I
M. Dixon
In this course, we will look at the development of English literature from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. We will read and discuss representative literary texts and ask a series of important questions: how do these texts grow out of their historical and cultural contexts? How do they build upon, speak to one another? How do they define and redefine the roles of writer and reader? What part does a growing literary canon have in constructing what it means to be a British subject, a self, a man, a woman? We will explore as well the way genres–epic and romance, tragedy and comedy, prose fiction–emerge, change, disappear, in response to a changing culture and readership. You should come out of this course with a foundational knowledge of important writers, dates, literary styles, genres, and critical terms that you can build on in more advanced courses. The course will include some periods and a comprehensive final; two or three formal papers and several informal responses to the reading.
Writing intensive.
Prerequisite: English 200.
English 290: Survey of American Literature I
Hinson
The ideas that give shape to American literature have become increasingly difficult to define. Is American literature a literature that defines itself against a European tradition? Or, is it a literature that constantly confronts and tests the limits of a language to give expression to an American experience? Can we compare American literature to the grid that underlies our American cities, vast and repeatable, or to the skyscraper that struggles to reach an unreachable height? Through a survey of American literature that includes writing about the myth of the American Eden by Europeans, the writing of the mythologizing Puritans, the symbolizing Transcendentalists, and finally the romanticizing “scribblers” of the nineteenth century, we will explore these and other questions that shape our understanding of early American literature. Midterm, final, response papers, and two five-page researched essays.
English 309: Studies in Victorian Lit. and Culture: Victorian Arts and Society
Inboden
The arts–literary, visual, performing, and architectural–were exceptionally intertwined in Victorian England, and the aesthetic principles underlying those art forms reflected and often reinforced the culture’s notions about morality, history, religion, and the balancing of the personal with the public, emotion with duty. Major Victorian “sages” such as Ruskin looked at painting and buildings and saw the dangers of industrialization; poets such as D.G. Rossetti were also painters; novelists such as Dickens and Hardy exposed social evils and inspired reforms with their novels; Tennyson contemplated scientific discoveries in geology and paleontology and tried to define a personal, loving God; the great novelist Marianne Evans (George Eliot) was celebrated as “the great moralist” for her books while being marginalized in private life for her “immorality.” While we will mainly study examples of literary art, we will also become familiar with Victorian painting, sculpture, and architecture and the ideologies behind the aesthetics, including the question of realism and the morality of art. We will also be touching on major themes in Victorian culture such as industrialization, class distinction, the woman question, and the questioning of spiritual beliefs. We will read texts by such authors as Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Morris, the Rossettis, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. The graded work for the course will consist of short quizzes, three shorter papers, a comprehensive final exam, and a longer researched critical paper. Writing intensive.
English 318: Women in Literature I
M. Dixon
“It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald; but save in these respects...we know little of them,” because, says Virginia Woolf, women have seldom told their own stories. “In all the libraries of the world the man is to be heard talking to himself and for the most part about himself.” In this course we will listen to women and what they say about women’s lives during a period when educational, legal, and cultural conditions made it almost impossible for women to write. The course will focus primarily on women writers–from medieval storytellers and visionaries to early novelists and Jane Austen–but we will also look at the ways women shaped literary tradition as patrons, readers, and audiences. We will set these readings in a context of social history and of images of women found in a few canonical male writers (Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Shakespeare’s Shrew, Milton’s Eve). We will focus on central cultural themes: women’s speech and silence, woman as subversive “other” (unruly women, shrews, witches, sinners), women as chaste, erotic, or maternal bodies, the relation of public and private power (goddesses, queens, amazons; mothers, daughters, mistresses). The course will raise critical questions about how the literary canon is formed, how literature shapes and is shaped by culture, how gender is constructed, how our own lives are rooted in the speech and silences of the past. This course complements British Survey I and provides a foundation for Women in Literature II, to be offered in alternate years.
Short papers, one involving interdisciplinary research (social, legal, or medical history, art history, feminist theory); a take-home exam. Discussion format with occasional background lectures and slides.
English 322: Advanced Creative Writing: Creative Non-fiction
K. Dixon
This is a WI writing course with pre-requisites of English 101 and English 240. It counts as an upper level writing course in both the Writing Minor and the English Major with a Writing Concentration.
The rubic, “Creative Non-Fiction” covers just about everything that isn’t poetry or fiction, but this course will focus on just three subgenres: the personal essay, literary journalism, and travel narrative. It may include memoir. We may experiment with a new monstrous hybrid form: fiction-as-essay/essay-as-fiction. We will read up on each genre, study examples thereof, and write samples of our own for each. Then the student will specialize in one or two of the genres, writing a longer piece or several shorter ones, to include in a portfolio for final evaluation. We’ll read at least three anthologies (essay, travel, new journalism), a wide selection of how-to-articles, and each other’s work in the context of class workshopping. Grade will be based at least one half on the portfolio, the remaining half on participation and other related aspects (notebook, class presentation, etc.). There will be individual conferences with the instructor. Tests and exams are always a possibility, but are kept at bay by good preparation and active class participation. As a student so aptly put it on course evaluation: “Don’t take this course if you don’t want to write a lot.” That goes for reading, too.
English 322: Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry
Rambo
If poems are, as Jorie Graham writes, “records of true risks taken by the soul of the speaker” then the intent of this advanced writing course in poetry is to create the conditions for taking such risks. The course will be composed of equal parts reading and writing poetry to introduce students to developments in contemporary poetry and to help them develop further their own craft. Students will also explore different forms of poetry such as the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, along with free verse and prose poems. Regular writing workshops, a poet’s notebook, diverse reading assignments, and a final manuscript. Prerequisite: English 240 or instructor’s permission.
English 325: Advanced Argumentative Writing
Poll
English 325 is intended for students who hope to master argumentation and critical thinking at an advanced level. This is an ideal course for anyone hoping to proceed to law or graduate school; in fact, the new GRE now requires an argumentative writing sample, and the course will offer strong preparation for that exam and for the kinds of analysis required in upper-division undergraduate and in graduate-level courses. We will rely primarily on the work of philosopher Stephen Toulmin, who developed a model for dissecting and analyzing argument. The class will be concerned with mastering the constituent parts of formal argument and the honing the analytical skills required to identify them. Students will read provocative, contemporary arguments on a variety of important and pressing social themes, and we will spend a great deal of time debating the strengths and weaknesses of the readings. As the course is writing-intensive, students will also be writing arguments of their own frequently throughout the semester and will produce a lengthy, researched argument at the semester’s end.
English 330: Major Authors: Hemingway
Jones
Ernest Hemingway was a football player, a poet, an ambulance driver, a father, a lover, a serial husband; a reporter, a bullfight aficionado, a suicide. Seemingly larger than life pre-mortem, he has, since death, become something of an industry, exploited by literary critics, publishers of posthumous novels, the tourist industry, and even the Gap. One of the most versatile of American writers, Hemingway became something of a 20th century icon. We will examine a good cross-section of his writings: poetry, plays, personal memoirs, short stories, novels and journalism. And we, too, will write.
The course grade will emerge from a variety of elements: daily class discussion, two or three short papers, a longer, more substantial paper, and a presentation/discussion of the findings of that paper to the class.
English 401: Senior Seminar: Mapping Paradise Lost
Buckman
Although in the first part of this course students will examine in considerable detail Paradise Lost and some of the best literary criticism it has inspired, the focus of the seminar will remain on the writing of a twenty-five page senior thesis on an author or work or theme of the student’s choice. Students will prepare for this task by extensive reading in primary and secondary materials relevant to their topics, compiling annotated bibliographies, drafting tentative outlines, and completing other assigned stages in the writing process. Throughout the semester students will assist each other by participating in writing groups and group conferences with the instructor; of course, the composition of a successful thesis will ultimately depend upon the pluck and hard work of each thesis writer. Additional course requirements include a formal oral presentation based on the thesis to select English department faculty and a thesis defense in class at the end of the semester.
