English 101 - General Description
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 - M Dixon; (4 credits)
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: “Writing with Imagination” - Faber; (4 credits)
This course in writing the personal and researched essay stresses the need for writers to exercise intelligent choice at every stage of the writing process and to visualize a successful finished product. The full-sized American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed is also required.
English 101 - Expository Writing - Incorvati; (4 credits)
In this class we will approach writing as having both a private and a public function. First, we will use writing as a means of personal reflection and as a way of examining and sharpening your own ideas. Then, we will focus on writing as an avenue for informing and influencing others, and we will practice using some techniques that can make your ideas more persuasive to a critical audience. In the process of preparing your writing for this public function, you will have opportunities to hone your research and writing skills, and you will read essays by some influential writers who have attempted to win over their readers on such topics as environmental policy, civil rights, and freedom of speech. The writing component of this class involves multiple drafts and critical feedback from classmates.
English 101 - Expository Writing - Jusova; (4 credits)
This course introduces students to writing on the college level. Focusing on three writing techniques (reflective narrative, cultural critique, and argument), the class helps students become persuasive, confident, but also reflective writers.
English 101 - Expository Writing - Hinson; (4 credits)
English 101 is first and foremost a compositions 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 - Shiveley
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 - Proll; (4 credits)
Writing at the college level involves a huge shift for students, one that asks them to move away from report - style essays and toward a more thesis-driven, analytical writing. This class will focus on honing those analytical skills. We will read a variety of essays on topics that are representative of many of the disciplines you will likely study at the university: anthropology, sociology, and history, among others. The essays will cover issues as far-reaching as Chinese gender relations, Irish village life, assimilation in America, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Holocaust. In your written work, you will be making arguments about these essays and the ways in which they suggest cross-cultural similarities and differences. As you do so, you will acquire the kinds of writing skills you will need to succeed in college, including summary, analysis, compare/ contrast, and, above all, thesis. We will devote a great deal of time to the process of revising the drafts you write of each paper, and students will participate in peer critique workshops for every paper. You will be asked to produce a number of shorter essays, in which you will practice the skills that we discuss in class, as well as three longer papers. The final paper will be an extended research project.
English 101 - Expository Writing - Wilkerson; (4 credits)
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 the question: “What is an American?” Students will be required to write four essays, keep a reading journal and participate in class discussion that focuses on the question for the course and an additional assigned novel. There will probably be quizzes on the reading throughout the semester and a final exam.
English 101 - Expository Writing - Youngkin; (4 credits)
As promised in the academic catalogue, English 101 introduces writing on the college level. Its purpose is to foster the skills necessary to produce coherent, persuasive prose. In order to achieve this goal, we will focus on writing as a drafting and revising process, in which multiple drafts are essential to the development of good prose. Using “The American Experience” as the theme for this course, we will engage in a number of different assignments designed to improve your writing. You will write a series of short (3-4 pages) papers, as well as a longer (7-10 page) research paper. You will also be required to write informal responses to the readings, participate in class activities, and do a short oral presentation. There will be no exams. In reading about the American experience, we will consider its various aspects, including but not limited to: “Children in America,” “Thoughts on Freedom, Democracy, and Justice,” “The Nation and the Arts,” and “American Political Scandal: Chappaquiddick.”
English 180 - War Literature - Jones; (4 credits)
There will be wars and rumors of wars…. From the Biblical assaults on the walls of Jericho to yesterday’s bombing missions against Afghanistan to a proposed attack on Iraq, war seems always with us.
Apparently, war is an archetypal experience. Combat changes soldiers forever and, as it becomes more total, affects civilians as well.
The course readings will range from the American Civil War through World Wars I and II to Vietnam and the Gulf War and perhaps, given published materials, even to the present “war on terrorism.” Readings will be supplanted by occasional films.
Writing will include several short papers and one long one. Active class participation is a must.
English 180 - The Slave Narrative Tradition in African American Literature - Askeland; (4 credits)
In this course we will examine some classic 18th and 19th century slave narratives, by such authors as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, and the development of this genre in African American literature, particularly fiction and autobiography, of the later 19th century and on into the 20th century. We will read works by such authors as Harriet Wilson, Frances E. W. Harper, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, and John Edgar Wideman. Course requirements will likely include regular quizzes and short responses to the readings, three interpretative papers, and a final project. Active participation is a must.
English 180 - What’s “Home” Got to Do with It? : Fiction and the Woman Author - Shiveley
The general focus for the course will be to examine the construction of a number of locations of identity formation,, such as “home,” “community,” “citizenship,” etc. We will pay critical attention to the ways “identity” is interrogated, contested, and mediated by the various intersections of difference besides gender. Through the various texts we’ll be reading, we will examine how the authors reveal, often in disparate voices, the ways in which individual representation is usually perceived as meaningful only when it articulates a repertoire of memories, events, histories, etc., recognizable to and reflective of a “national culture.” Texts for the course include Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison; Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena Maria Viramontes; Sula, by Toni Morrison; Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson; Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, and others. In addition to contributing toward class discussions, students will be asked to submit at least three 4-5-page essays, as well as read, research and present one additional text approved by the instructor.
This class counts towards the Women’s Studies minor.
English 180 - Women in Captivity/Exile - Askeland; (4 credits)
In the 1970s, historian Nancy Croft noted that women in Western society have traditionally been defined, and often have also defined themselves, in terms of their relationships, as mothers, daughter, wives, sisters, rather than focusing on their accomplishments (or failures) as discrete individuals; we are all, she argued, held “captive” by these roles, by the dependency of these relationships. Meanwhile, a college-aged daughter of a multimillionaire, Patty Hearst, was kidnapped and held captive by a “terrorist” organization as the nation watched in horror . . . and deep fascination. This course will examine women writers and characters, from various racial, ethnic, economic, and social backgrounds, in various genres of literature who experience some form of captivity. Besides examining the experiences of those forced into captivity, we will also look at women who have consciously chosen some sort of self-imposed captivity or exile from “normal” society, their families, etc. This course is centered, thus, on this question, among others (some of which I likely have not even considered yet): What happens - in terms of identity, self-esteem, self-awareness, individualization, etc. - when women of wide backgrounds experience some form of captivity or exile from the “normal” way of life that the social structure has defined for them? We’ll read writers like Mary Rowlandson, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Harriet Jacobs, Alice Sebold, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nancy Mairs, and others. Two four-page papers, two tests, several response papers, and a final 6-8 page project with a presentation. This course is reading- and writing - intensive.
English 180 - Film Noir - Hinson; (4 credits)
Film noir, or “black film” has been labeled as a period in film history, a style of film, and a separate film genre with its own themes and conventions. No matter how you define it, films labeled as noir are “deeply unromantic” films that “take a sneaking delight in their displays of passion gone wrong and of murderous calculation confounded.” This course will examine the distinctive “noir” visual style and the characteristic “noir” thematics of lives ruled by an unkind fate. We will also trace the history of film noir from its origins in German expressionism and postwar nihilism, to its golden period in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and to it’s persistence through the rest of the 20th century in neo-war, neo-B-noir, and Technicolor noir. We will also look at the debt that these films owe to what the French call “serie noir,” the searing crime and detective fiction of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. The course requires frequent quizzes, a midterm and final exam, an oral presentation, a series of shorter papers and a longer term paper. Writing intensive. The course also requires attendance at weekly film screenings outside of class.
Students who register for this course are required to attend film screenings on Wednesdays from 3:00PM to 6:00PM
English 180- Shakespeare on Film - M. Dixon
Movies are the popular entertainment of our era, as Shakespeare's stage was in his. And the London stage, like Hollywood today, took the blame for every sort of social evil -- the corruption of youth, "bawdrie," godlessness, civil chaos, and the destruction of traditional values. What happens when Shakespeare is reinterpreted for the contemporary public, when the old is made new, Renaissance meets post-modern, when script becomes performance becomes celluloid? This course explores the scripts of Shakespeare through their twentieth-century revision by artists like Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, Peter Brooks, and Kenneth Branagh. We will look at a wide range of performances, from 1930's Hollywood to Leonardo diCaprio’s Romeo, to your own dramatic readings in class. We will read about seven plays (probably Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Othello, and Twelfth Night), see one or two film treatments of most of them, write several short papers, quizzes, and a final exam. You will be required to see a film outside class almost every week, probably on a Wednesday night.
English 180 - Mythology, the Hero, Then and Now - 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 Bettelheim), and a third 19th and 20th century literature, mostly starring the “antihero.”
English 180 - “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lessons of Middle Earth” - Faber; (4 credits)
The focus of this course will be on reading The Hobbit, the three-volume Lord of the Rings, and selections from The Tolkien Reader.
English 180 - Heroes and Journeys - Hayes; (4 credits)
Heroes and Journeys: In this section of English 180, we will investigate the theme of the heroic journey. Using The Odyssey as a benchmark, we will study several novels and films that include similar patterns of travel and adventure. Our heroes may be unlikely ones: expect to find an English professor, escaped convicts, American farm boys, warrior mice and hobbits from the Shire among the stories we will discuss. Plan to read about a novel a week and view several films. Writing for the course will include four papers and a longer final paper; other elements of grading will include presentations, frequent quizzes, and two exams.
English 180 - Traditions in British and American Poetry - Incorvati
Percy Shelley once said that his primary ambition was to add a line to that one great poem that all poets have been writing through the ages. This image of the one great poem suggests that our understanding verses, or even the combined works of particular writers, can be enriched when we see them in relation to a vast network of other works, a network that represents the sheer variety of poetic possibilities. This class is built on the one poem idea. It provides a broad survey of British and American verse in the hopes that an awareness of various traditions can enhance our understanding of individual poems. In this writing intensive class, we will cover a variety of forms (from sonnets to villanelles to free verse) and movements (from the Metaphysical poets to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation). The course will also introduce you to a large number of writers (from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney and from Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich) and will help you become attuned variations in meter, rhythm, and other poetic devices.
English 180 - Themes and Traditions in Literature: Palestine in Fiction - Jusova
ENG 180 is a thematically centered introductory literature course directed to honing students’ reading skills as well as their critical thinking. This section of ENG 180 examines fictional (as well as non-fictional) representations of numerous historical and contemporary issues arising from the Arab/ Jewish co-habitation of Palestine (Israel).
The required readings include: Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Muhammad Asad’s The Road to Mecca, Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Liyana Badr’s A Balcony Over the Fakihani, and Sahar Khalifeh’s Wilde Thorns.
English 190 - Afro-Caribbean Studies: Migratory Subjects - Wilkerson; (4 credits)
Afro-Caribbean Studies: Migratory Subjects will examine major writers from contemporary Caribbean literature. The course will introduce students to the literary works and cultural history of English-speaking Caribbean authors who have migrated from their respective Islands to the U.S., Canada and Europe. In Caribbean Literature: Migratory Subjects, we will examine short stories, poetry, political essays and novels as an entry point into the migratory experience that aids in the formation of nationhood for Caribbean writers of the African Diaspora. Students will be introduced to writers such as George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Grace Nichols, Dionne Brand and Derek Walcott.
English 200 - Introduction to the Discipline of English - Proll
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 critical and formal concerns raised by each of these. In addition, the course will provide you with many opportunities to write critical, 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 also concentrate on some contemporary trends in literary theory and interpretation, and particularly on feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and cultural approaches.
English 240 - Beginning Creative Writing - K Dixon; (4 credits)
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 courses. Pre-requisite for Engl 240 is Engl 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 Honors students, though exceptions may be made: see instructor, as per above for Freshmen.
English 241 - Beginning Journalism - McClelland; (4 credits)
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 242 - Writing and Peer Editing - Fry; (4 credits)
This intermediate writing course will help students both write more fluently and become more effective critics of their own and others’ writing. Designed chiefly for prospective writing advisors in the Writing Center, it also attracts future teachers, those needing editing skills in a later profession, and those who simply wish to strengthen their writing. The course focuses on the personal essay, a genre which encourages individuality and creativity, and emphasizes collaborative learning; the main text is the students’ own writing. Through a combination of readings, writing exercises and projects, and peer editing sessions, students will explore a variety of rhetorical strategies, audiences, structures, and styles. Class organization features a workshop approach and practical experience. This course is limited to 15 students, and the instructor’s permission is required before enrolling. Prerequisite: English 101.
English 280 - Survey of British Literature I - Richards; (4 credits)
In the course, we will read, discuss, and write about representative texts from the Middle Ages to the beginnings of the British Novel in the eighteenth century. We will also see to locate these texts within the historical and ideological conditions which helped to determine their meaning for their contemporary readers. The course will focus on several themes, such as the construction of the self and the relationship of literature to the state. These themes will help us to organize and familiarize a diverse body of literature that can often feel quite foreign to the modern reader. Early British attitudes change over the centuries. In the process, you will acquire a basic knowledge of literary terms, styles, forms, critical concepts and significant dates. Finally, we will step back from these concerns to reflect on how English is made and why it is that we read these particular works as representative.
This course is discussion based and writing intensive. There will be a midterm and final examination, two formal papers, and frequent response papers. Prerequisite: English 200.
English 290 - Survey of American Literature I - Davis; (4 credits)
This course is a history of ideas in American Literature. Although we will consider both individual writers and cultural contexts, we will focus on a specific body of themes shaping American literature since the 17th century: historic and imaginative encounters with the stranger, the experience of landscape, the meaning of violence, and the possibility of democratic writing and representation. Our study will cross several genres and include captivity narratives by Rowlandson and Douglass, spiritual autobiographies by Edwards and Thoreau, poetry by Whitman and Williams, and narrative romances by Hawthorne and O’Connor. We will proceed by a careful analysis and discussion of representative texts, and our goal will be to become acute, self-conscious readers of American literature. Students will write several one-page responses to the readings, two interpretive essays, and a final exam.
English 306 - 1590’s London - Buckman; (4 credits)
This course focuses on literature, art, and the material conditions of life in the last full decade of Elizabeth’s reign in England’s great capitol. We will read works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, and a host of less well known writers, study the role of the theater and other popular art forms in the period, explore life “on the ground” in London, and otherwise drink deeply from one of the richest literary decades of all time. A reading journal, three papers, a midterm and final. Writing intensive.
English 308 - Studies in Romantic Literature and Culture - Incorvati
In addition to providing a survey of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing, this course will consider the political context of this age of revolution with specific attention given to the rise of liberalism in public discourse. We will consider the ways in which particular writers saw literature as participating in the tumultuous events of the day. We will also pay particular attention to way gender politics figured into this period when a number of long-established social institutions were being rethought. This writing intensive course will consider these and other themes in the writing of William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, among others.
English 315 - The Modern American Novel - Hinson
The United States gave birth to modernism. The responses of American writers to the “modern” and modernism were powerful and influential. American writers embraced modernism, for it seemed to them emblematic of America and its sensibilities-it’s drive for change, its concern with the endlessly repeatable patterns of the sky-scrapers and the urban grid, and its romanticism. Ever new, dynamic, arresting, the modern American novel represents one of the greatest literary experiments of all time. To understand the transformative spirit of the experiment we must understand the many faces of modernism, as well as the rise and decline of postmodernism. And we must understand the multicultural nature of the nation, the diversity of experience, and the international flavor of out ideas and beliefs. In this course we will trace the origins of this great literary experiment in the history of the novel in America and in the trauma of modernism as we read texts by the likes of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Hoffman, Louse Erdrich among others. Reading and writing intensive, this course will require a series of short essays, a midterm, a research project, and an oral component.
English 321 - Advanced Journalism - McClelland; (4 credits)
This course will focus on honing the skills needed for a career in journalism, with a heavy focus on producing publication -quality work. Areas covered will include advanced news reporting techniques, magazine writing, editing, journalistic issues and ethics, and writing for radio and television. We will learn by doing - students will write and submit at least one full-length magazine story and a number of shorter articles. Each student will be expected to do an outside internship at Wittenberg’s Torch or a comparable journalistic organization.
The course is designed for students serious about pursuing a career in journalism or a related field. The course is, obviously enough, writing intensive. Prerequisite: English 241, Beginning Journalism.
English 322 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction - K Dixon
This is a WI, advanced creative writing course with pre-requisites of English 101 and English 240 (or permission of the instructor in special cases). It is strictly fiction writing - all kinds, many subgenres. Realistic dramatic fiction, minimalism, magical realism, revisionist fiction, metafiction, minifiction (“short shorts”), experimental fiction, dramatic monologues, and possible even narrative poetry and literary journalism (using the devices of fiction to report a true story). For twelve weeks students will read and write in each genre and then specialize in two or three genres. Grade will be based half on a final portfolio of work and half on class participation, peer editing, exercises, and a writer’s notebook. Class format is workshop style. No exams, but possibility of occasional pop quizzes, and there will be an “expectations sheet” of techniques and terminology that must be met in full. Last three to four weeks given to workshopping and rewriting work for final submission in portfolio. The mechanics of submitting work to literary journals, writing cover letters, and devising strategies will all be discussed and practiced. This year we may add the genre of the “collection of inter-related stories,” as we will be reading M. H. Kingston (who visits in February), and possibly Susan Minot and others.
English 325 - Professional Writing - Wilkerson; (4 credits)
This is an upper level course in writing about technical, scientific and professional communication. Students will be required to do a lot of writing, learn to be better critics of other people’s writing, improve presentation and communication skills, and learn to plan, research, and write with efficiency and effectiveness. The goals of the course are as follows:
English 330 - “Chaucer and the Middle Ages” - Faber
The narrative genius of Geoffrey Chaucer will be studied primarily in The Canterbury Tales. Students will write a shorter essay on one of the pilgrims, a longer essay on one of the tales, and a researched essay on an approved topic in keeping with personal interests. One question on the final examination will ask students to choose a winner in this famous literary contest.
English 380 - The West in American Culture - Jones
The American West…A place? A myth? A concept? A subject for conjecture, for dreaming, for action? We’ll take a cross-discplinary approach to examining the American West, utilizing film, art, history, travelers’ journals and, of course, literature. Among the works we’ll read are Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, James Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. There will be several short papers and one long one. In addition to the reading, you’ll be responsible for viewing several feature films and writing short papers and one long one. Class participation is a must.
English 401 - Senior Research Seminar - Richards; (4 credits)
Obviously, the primary focus of this course will be your research. This capstone experience offers you the opportunity to choose for yourself the text(s) that you find most worth exploring and to frame that discussion in such a way that others will recognize its value as well. This is the pleasure of the course; it is also its greatest challenge.
Up to this course, your professors have been providing this framing structure for you. “Write about this book,” we say. “Explore this issue. Apply this theoretical framework. Filter your understanding of its themes through this historical perspective.” Now, you make the call, answer the “so what” question. Why is it important to examine/ write about this work, and what framing structure will help your readers understand that significance.
So, given this new challenge, the course will spend some time modeling this process for you. We will read together Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Mary Shelley’s Matilda. Neither of these works have an obvious answer to the “so what” question. Both occupy a marginal position in the literary canon, and neither is unquestionably a great piece of literature. But this novel by an eighteenth-century feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, and this work of her now more famous daughter, Mary Shelley (know for having penned the culturally iconic Frankenstein) raise interesting questions. Our task in the first half of the course will be to identify the various framing structures that bring to light precisely what makes them interesting, and even significant. At the same time as we contextualize these works, you will also be “trying out” framing structures for your chosen text(s), and exploring what context(s) best bring to light its significance.
Hence, our coursework will consist of in-class discussion, frequent responses papers, regular tutorials with the professor both individually and in small group, and formal in-class presentations. The final product (one I hope you will feel pride of) will be a 20-25 page research paper, finely polished, thoroughly researched, thoughtfully contextualized, and persuasively argued. That paper will also be presented orally to a committee that will include the professor of the course, another English professor, and a professor from outside the department. If all goes as planned, this will be the paper you will keep, the one you will never throw away, the one that will remind you years from now just how much you really learned as an undergraduate at Wittenberg University, and how much literature really means to you.
English 402 - Senior Writing Seminar - McClelland; (4 credits)
English 402 is the capstone writing seminar for the English Major with a Writing Concentration. Students will produce a creative portfolio of at least 20 pages and a critical thesis of at least 10 pages. Creative work will be either fiction or creative nonfiction. The thesis will focus on some aspect of the literary world that relates to your own writing - an influential writer or writers, a school of literary theory, etc. Students will workshop one another’s writing regularly, and will conference with the professor on their own work several times during the semester. At semester’s end, each student will give a public reading from his or her creative work. Each student will also present and defend the critical paper to a faculty panel as the oral part of the senior comprehensive exercises.
English 402 - Senior Writing Seminar - Rambo; (4 credits)
An intensive, workshop-style course, English 402 is the capstone writing seminar for the English Major with a Writing Concentration. This section will emphasize poetry writing and the writer’s craft more generally. The thesis for the course will include a portfolio of new and revised creative work; and introductory essay describing the genesis, aims, and composition of this work; and a substantial critical paper on an author whose work reflects the student’s own concerns as a writer. Students will write extensively over the semester, but they will also read and discuss the writing of their peers as well as contemporary works by established writers. Each student will present his or her thesis in shortened form to a committee of English Department faculty near the end of the term and will give a final public reading.
American Studies 100 - John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the Dust Bowl, and the Depression - Jones
We’ll use an interdisciplinary approach to examining Steinbeck’s novel and its environmental and economic contents. Film, history, geography, motel architecture, agriculture, Route 66, and country music may all provide insights to the cultural phenomena of the 1930’s. There will be several short papers and one long one. Class participation is essential.
