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
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
Incorvati
This course will use writing as a means of clarifying some of your ideas and opinions, and it will also prepare you to express those convictions in a way that will make them more persuasive to a critical audience. To develop your proficiency in meeting this public challenge, you will have opportunities to hone your research and writing skills, and you will learn some techniques that persuasive arguers often use. In addition to practicing these techniques in your own writing, you will also read some examples of how influential writers of our day 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, and the course is writing intensive.
English 101 - Introduction to Expository Writing
Hayes
Emphasizing two approaches to writing, this course is divided into two sections. Before midterm, we will concentrate on the writing process, writing several drafts and studying methods of improving organization, development, style, and mechanics. Readings, including essays, poems, and short stories, will provide material for discussion and inspiration for student papers. From the drafts written, during this half-term, students will choose several to revise for a midterm portfolio, which will determine the midterm grade. During the second half of the semester, student panels will present and lead class discussion on various topics connected to current American culture before writing argument and research essays on those topics.
English 101 - Expository Writing: Writing and the Environment
Savola
This section of English 101 focuses on writing and the environment. The course explores the ways in which people have used writing as a means of understanding the rights, duties, and obligations we have in relation to the natural environment. This course will offer students the opportunity to learn to write effective statements and arguments, to support arguments with evidence, to write in clear prose, and to consider their reader as they write. It will also help students to approach writing as a process, from initial planning through drafting and revision, and to conduct college-level research. Course work will include reading the work of numerous environmentally-concerned writers, keeping a journal of informal responses to course readings, writing multiple drafts of four papers, writing a research paper of 6 to 8 pages, and a final essay exam. Instruction in the MLA system of documentation is included. Writing intensive.
English 101 - Expository Writing
Proll
Writing at the college level requires a huge shift for most students, one that asks them to move away from report-style essays and toward more thesis-driven, analytical writing. This class will focus on that shift and on ways in which you can hone your analytical skills. We will read a variety of essays that represent many of the disciplines you will encounter in your college work, such as sociology, anthropology, and history. In your writing for the course, you will contribute your own ideas to the on-going conversations that the people in those fields are conducting. As you do so, you will be acquiring the kinds of writing and thinking tools you will need to succeed in college, including summary, citation, and analysis skills, and, above all, practice with thesis, argument, and evidence. We will devote a great deal of time to the process of revising drafts. Students will produce a number of shorter essays, in which you will practice the skills that we discuss in class, as well as four longer papers. The final paper will be an extended research paper.
English 101 - Expository Writing
Shiveley
This is a composition course designed to give students intensive practice in the art of expository writing. The purpose of this course is to aid students’ development into confident, responsible and persuasive writers. Specifically, it should help writers do the following successfully: develop competency in all stages of the writing process; develop critical thinking and reading skills; develop a writing standard consistent with the MLA Style Guide. Students will be responsible to produce both short-writing responses and long-writing projects that encourage academic research and writing. Additionally, students will be required to participate in peer reviewing, as well as visit the writing center during the revision process. The course evaluation will be based on the successful completion of writing assignments, homework, in-class group work, quizzes, and class participation.
English 180 - War in Literature and Film
Jones
There will be wars and rumors of wars....From the Biblical assaults on the walls of Jericho to yesterday’s bombing missions against Afghanistan, 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 supplemented by occasional films. Writing will include several short papers and one long one. Active class participation is a must.
English 180 - Demons, Devils, and Hellfire
Incorvati
One way of grappling with the problems of irrational malice, unwarranted suffering, and general wrong-doing is to imagine a force of evil at work in the universe, and in the Western tradition, there’s no more vivid way of conjuring up such a notion than with images of hell and its resident demons. Once we’ve labeled and put a devilish face on these energies, though, a peculiar thing sometimes happens: despite their associations with all things abhorrent (or perhaps because of them), some of us find ourselves, truth be told, more than a little fascinated with these diabolical ideas, and this preoccupation with things devilish has consequently been responsible for unleashing some conspicuously exuberant works of literary imagination. This class brings together a number of texts preoccupied with demons, devils and hellfire including works from the medieval world (Dante’s Inferno), the early modern age (John Milton’s Paradise Lost), the Romantic period (William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), and the 20th century (C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce); we will also consider the substantial inroads that diabolical forces have made in some contemporary films. Throughout this course, we’ll use these various depictions of devils and the underworld to see how writers have attempted to account for some thorny aspects of human experience, and we’ll also devote part of our semester to learning the conventions associated with a variety of literary forms(poetry, novels, plays, film) and to sharpening our skills as readers of these types of expression. There will be three exams, including a comprehensive final, as well as several papers in this Writing Intensive course.
English 180 - Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings
Hayes
Recently hailed as “the writer of the 20th century,” Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was actually less a public figure during his own lifetime than his friend C.S. Lewis, best known today for his Chronicles of Narnia. Both were professors of literature who gathered regularly with other academic friends (the “Inklings”) to discuss the works they studied and taught as well as their own creations. In this class, we’ll study Lewis and Tolkien’s works as well as a few shorter pieces from the other Inklings, enjoying the stories for their own sake as well as examining their themes and historical context. Be prepared for lots of reading; these authors are neither simple nor brief, but they are fascinating. To be best prepared, review your high school notes on The Odyssey, Beowulf, and Paradise Lost before class begins.
English 180 - J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lessons of Middle Earth
Faber
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 - What’s “Home” Got to Do with It? Women in Fiction
Shiveley
The general focus for the course will be to examine the constructions 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 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 will include the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Sula, by Toni Morrison; Clay Walls, by Rounyoung Kim; Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison, and others. The course evaluation will be based on the successful completion of writing assignments, homework, in-class work, quizzes, class participation, and presentations on secondary resources. This course is cross-listed with Women’s Studies.
English 180 - Introduction to Fiction
Proll
This class will provide an introduction to the art form we call “fiction”-that is, to the literary genres of the short story and the novel. Because the short story and the modern novel are primarily 19th and 20th century inventions, the course will focus on fiction written in English during the last two centuries. We will read a wide array of authors, from Poe and Hawthorne to Joyce and Lawrence and beyond the experimental writers of the l960's. As we do so, we will talk about how to read literature and analyze its constituent parts: plot, character, conflict, theme, symbol, point of view, and setting. At the same time, students will learn to interpret literature in formal essays, a skill that will hone your abilities to write the kind of thesis-driven essays that will be required in most of your college classes. As the course is writing intensive , you will be asked to produce three formal essays, as well as a series of shorter response papers. There are no major exams in the course, but students will take frequent reading quizzes. We will be reading three complete novels in addition to the short stories. Please note that this is not a creative writing class.
English 180 - Film Noir
Hinson
Film noir, or “black film,” has been variously labeled as a period in film history, a style of film, and as a separate film genre with its own themes and conventions. No matter how you define it, films labeled as film 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 its persistence through the rest of the 20th century in neo-noir, neo-B-noir, and Technicolor noir. We will also look at the debt these films owe to what the French called “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 regular film screenings outside of class. Students who register for this course are required to attend film screenings on Wednesdays from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
English 180 - Literature and Nature
Savola
The natural world is affected by the language we use to describe it. Whether we call it “the howling wilderness,” “the fresh, green breast of the new world,” or “mother earth,” literary depictions of the natural world encode powerful cultural assumptions about the land, our relationship to it, and our rights and obligations concerning the creatures who inhabit it. In this course, we will examine the way literature has been used to understand our relationship to the natural world. Our readings will be primarily American essays, fiction, and poetry, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Writing assignments will involve literary analysis of assigned texts. Students will keep a journal of informal responses to assigned readings. There will be 3-4 major papers, a longer research paper of 7 to 10 pages, and a final essay exam. Writing intensive.
English 190 - The Modern World as Read
Faber
The kaleidoscope of world literature suggests that the impulse to tell stories, sing songs, and act out conflict is universal. This course deliberately focuses on the sweep of 20th century fiction, poetry, and drama outside the western tradition: from Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean. A multicultural approach is consistent with the goal of making students aware of the diversity of human experience. This semester, the course is not writing intensive.
English 190 - Afro-Caribbean Studies: Migratory Subjects
Wilkerson
This course will examine women 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. This semester, Migratory Subjects, will examine short stories, poetry, political essays and novels written by women authors from Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, and Haiti. We will look at their work as an entry point into the migratory experience that aids in the formation of nationhood for Caribbean writers of the African Diaspora. Possible authors include, Dionne Brand, Grace Nichols, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat.
English 190 - Globalization and Women
Jusova
This course will explore literary representations of the phenomenon of globalization, ideally helping students achieve a better understanding of the various (whether positive or negative) effects the phenomenon has had on people, specifically women, around the world. I use the term “globalization” broadly, covering both the potentially beneficial trends of interactions across traditional cultural and national lines and at least equally real spectre of the Western dominant economic position turning globalization into a corporate colonization of the world as alternately new markets or sources of disenfranchise-able labor. While the syllabus will include critical essays and book excerpts (No Logo, Linguistic Imperialim, The Stolen Harvest) necessary to contextualize the creative pieces, fictional narratives and drama will form the bulk of the course readings. Students will read and discuss texts by such prominent and lauded authors as Michelle Cliff (Jamaica), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Arundhati Roy and Mangula Padmanabhan (India), Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon, Saudi Arabia), Etel Adnan (Lebanon, Palestine), Jessica Hagedorn (American Filipina), as well as Cherrie Moraga (Chicana). In that all of these authors’ work is firmly grounded in their respective culture’s literary traditions, reading their texts will provide students with a better “understanding of the diversity of non-Western cultures,” a major learning goal for General Education courses in Non-Western Cultural Traditions. And as the course will focus on the lives and the writings of women, it will also have relevance and prospective applicability for Women’s Studies.
English 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies
Buckman
English 200 is an ambitious course, one that sets out to raise the foundational questions of our discipline (what we read and why we read it), as well as to introduce students to some of the ways that we locate meaning in texts (how we read). This version of the course will address the two vexing prior questions in the midst of an extended consideration of the third. To this end, the course will begin with a unit devoted to the practice of “close reading” before proceeding to a survey of several influential theoretical approaches to reading and writing about literature. Throughout the course I will encourage students to take interpretive risks with the newly-acquired theoretical and analytical resources by offering their own readings of selected texts. Students will memorize and recite selected poetry, keep a journal of reading responses, write three mid-length papers, and take a midterm final and final exam. Writing intensive.
English 240 - Beginning Creative Writing
Shiveley
In this class, we will be exploring a variety of genres, texts, and approaches to creative writing. We will focus primarily on fiction and poetry, with some attention given to creative non-fiction and drama. This course is designed for beginning writers who are interested in their own creative processes; however, the course is also for readers, so there will be required readings to which students will respond in writing and discussions. Along with producing original creative projects, students will be required to participate in evaluative workshops of classmates’ work, as well as attend at least one poetry for fiction reading or play.
English 242 - Writing and Peer Editing
Fry
This intermediate writing course will help students 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 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
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 seek 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 organize and familiarize a diverse body of literature that can often feel quite foreign to the modern reader. Early British attitudes toward the writer, the reader, and the text can also vary from our own and we will remain attentive to how these 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.
English 290 - Survey of American Literature I
Davis
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 290 - American Survey I
Askeland
In 1782, Hector de Crevecoeur published the first text to explicitly ask the question, “What is an American?” This course will take that question as its starting point, allowing us to explore texts from a wide range of authors who would answer that question in a variety of ways. Indeed , since most Americans inevitably discuss the importance of “freedom” in attempting to define what the United States are or ought to be about, we will also use Toni Morrison’s discussion in her book Playing in the Dark as one critical counterpoint to that perspective. She, in fact, emphasizes that the particularly “American” and Enlightenment notions of freedom did not coincidentally emerge along with the European practice of the mass enslavement of African Americans: “Nothing highlighted freedom - if it did not in fact create it - like slavery.” Within the context of that debate we will explore the tensions between forms of captivity and freedom, between the desire to explore the frontier and to settle it, between men and women, between native peoples and European colonizers, and between various, contested notions of spirituality and rationality. We will read captivity narratives; autobiography and history; poetry; journalistic columns; fiction; and cultural manifestoes. Students will write several short papers, participate in a listserve discussion group, and write a midterm, two interpretive essays, and a final exam. Books: Lauter,ed., The Heath Analogy of American Literature, Vol. 1, and Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
English 302 - British Survey II
Incorvati
The advantage of survey courses like this one, courses that brashly attempt to take in centuries of writing in a one-semester pass, is that they offer us a useful vantage point from which to gain a sense of history, a sense of how ideas and expressions reflect a particular age and how some of those ideas get appropriated, reshaped, or replaced insubsequent eras. This course aims to profit from that vantage point and provide a sense of changing cultures and changing writing as we read the works of British authors from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. Our scope will encompass emerging notions of identity, developing conceptions of class and gender, and changing ideas concerning the social function of art and literature. Additionally, we will use our reading of such authors as William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Tom Stoppard as an opportunity to both reinforce and strengthen your skills at interpreting and writing about various forms of literature. We will have three exams, including a comprehensive final, and three papers in this writing intensive course.
English 307 - The Theater of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century: Performing the Self
Richards
On one hand, the theatre of the Restoration and eighteenth century is absurdly trivial, replete with domestic dramas in which lovers make hasty entrances and exits, and where little is accomplished beyond the delivery of a witty, and usually downright bawdy, comment. On the other hand, Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre is remarkably significant: for the first time, women are on the stage, stars are in the making, and even the spectator becomes the object of furious speculation. Even more significantly, the politics of race become visible and slavery is openly denounced. In this course, we will read the significant playwrights of the period, a list that includes both male and female authors (i.e., Aphra Behn, William Congreve, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Susanna Centlivre, and Robert Sheridan, to name just a few). But we will also look at the drama behind the stage (and by that, I mean more than the gossip of the period, although we will look at some of that as well.) We will examine how the trope of theatricality helps to shape our very notion of self, how this period’s pervasive anxiety over performance begins to fashion our own inner terrain. Hence we will read selections from several autobiographies of the period (those of Fanny Burney, James Boswell and Olaudah Equiano) and, in serial installments, the novel of Clarissa.
Cultural and historical context will be key to our understanding of the theater of the period, but at the core of this course will be our own staging of our selves. We will be collaborating with a first-year theatre class at the University of Exeter, UK for the middle section of the course. You will be conducting e-mail exchanges, jointly preparing research projects and designing a web page, and finally performing a scene via the web from one of the several plays that explicitly address issues of colonization in the late seventeenth century and its impact on British and “American” identity. In other words, you will be performing “Americanness” for us, and doing so, in scenes that make that encounter highly charged. Our shared viewing of these scenes through video conferencing should make it all very interesting.
Other assignments will include response papers, two formal papers, and a longer researched project. Writing intensive.
English 313 - Harlem Renaissance
Wilkerson
Scholar David Levering describes the Harlem Renaissance as “a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor...” A period of social, artistic and political advancement for African Americans during the pre-World War era of 1908-1938, the Harlem Renaissance is extremely important to the study of twentieth century African American literature. This course will focus on short fiction, poems, political essays, manifestoes and speeches by several prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly W.E.B. DuBois, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Nelle Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Students will be expected to write two critical research papers, a few reading response papers during the term and be responsible for any quizzes or exams as well as preliminary research documents and oral presentations for the two assigned papers.
English 321 - Advanced Journalism
McClelland
This course will focus on honing skills needed for a career in journalism, with a heavy focus on producing publication-quality work. Areas covered will include advanced news reporting and writing techniques, magazine writing, editing, layout, magazine writing, journalistic issues and ethics, and writing for radio and television. We will learn by doing - in addition to regularly assigned stories, the class will produce and publish its own magazine, covering everything from opening ideas to finished product. In addition, each student will be expected to do an outside internship at Wittenberg’s Torch or a comparable journalistic organization. This course is designed for students serious about pursuing a career in journalism or a related field. The course is, obviously writing intensive.
Prerequisite: English 241, Beginning Journalism.
English 322 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
McClelland
There is really only one way to become a superior fiction writer: Write, then read, then go write some more. In this class, we will do plenty of both. Students will continue developing the skills and techniques introduced in the Beginning Creative Writing through readings, discussion, workshopping, journal-keeping and lots of writing. Each student will produce three short stories and will do a major revision of one of those pieces. Our goal will be for each student to write at least one story suitable for submission to a literary journal.
English 331 - Shakespeare
Faber
This course deals with representative works of Shakespeare that demonstrate his development as a poet and dramatist. Starting with selected sonnets, the course will focus on several histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. English and Theatre majors will be challenged to articulate their own critical approach; students in other majors will be actively encouraged to pursue the insights of their own discipline. The required text is the Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edition.
English 380 - the Beat Generation
Davis
I didn’t discover the beats until I was almost forty. I’d read Howl in high school, mainly because my English teacher had warned us it was an obscene book, and I’d heard Michael McClure read his poetry at something called “The Tribal Stomp” in Berkley in 1978. I didn’t think much of the beats as serious artists at that point, and I could never get the image of Maynard G. Krebs out of mind whenever someone mentioned Jack Kerouac. Five or six years ago, however, I stumbled on a collection of Buddhist writing by Diane di Prima and Gary Snyder and found something well-hidden behind the media images of bongo drums and black berets: a literature of spiritual exploration as courageous and complex as anything I’d ever read. This course grows out of that discovery. Rejecting the bland optimism of the 1950's, the beat movement expressed a spirituality of raw intensity, a rock-and-roll mix of existentialism, transcendentalism, and working-class Zen. The primary texts of the course–Kerouac’s Dharma Bugs, Diane di Prima’s Pieces of a Song, Gary Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and Bob Kaufman’s Cranial Guitar–grow out of those odd sources and seek to find, in the midst of despair and suffering, new ways of being alive in this world.
English 401 - Senior Research Seminar
Hinson
“Met-him-pike-hoses”:Incarnations of James Joyce’s Ulysses “Yes I said yes I will Yes.” This affirmation concludes one of the landmark texts of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this incarnation of the senior seminar we will begin with a study of Ulysses as a way of thinking about your research projects. Our study of this miraculously rich and funny novel will mirror the scholarly work that each of you will do for your own projects. Though we will devote time to Ulysses, the primary focus of the course is the 25-page senior thesis, a critical essay on a topic of your choice. We will focus on research methods, and on preparing a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a series of drafts of the thesis. The course also requires an oral presentation of the thesis and preparation for the English department’s oral examination.
English 401 - Senior Research Seminar: Of Bodies, Pleasures, and Texts
Askeland
To write significant works of literary criticism students must grapple with literary theory , which a) is often difficult and b) does not always give them pleasure, especially at first, because it is a discipline, and c) they therefore sometimes feel like all this thinking about thinking and reading and writing and etc. is pointless. That is the first premise of this course, whether you “like” it or not. Hence, although it may not seem like it at first, all activity in this course will be directed to the production of 20-30 page critical essays on a piece of literature that “pleases” you. But that very pleasure is precisely the question that this course will most closely examine: can we as reader “trust” the pleasure we feel in reading? Does that pleasure sometimes, or even perhaps always, signify a participation in having one’s sense of power and cultural status confirmed and often at the expense of others who are less powerful? Or can physical, visceral pleasure-particularly when it is felt as a nameless sort of hunger, a kind of “bliss,” perhaps-signify that we are in the presence of something worth paying attention to? (Emily Dickinson says, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”) Frequent group and individual conferences, often in lieu of class discussions will ensure the primacy of your work. In addition to the research paper, you will write responses to each reading assignment, an annotated bibliography and perform one informal oral presentation as well as one formal presentation. Books: selections from Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Dickinson, Open Me Carefully; Foucault, A History of Sexuality, Vol. 1; McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasure, and Ensler, The Vagina Monologues.
English 402 - Senior Writing Seminar
Rambo
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 reflect’s the students’s own concerns as a writer. Students will write extensively over the course of 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.
English 402 - Senior Writing Seminar
McClelland
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 non-fiction. 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.
