English 100 – English for Non-Native Speakers
4 semester hours
Hayes, Karen
English for Non-Native Speakers is an introductory course in reading, writing, and speaking skills for students whose first language is something other than English. Course work will include essays, presentations, and a research project, but will be adjusted to meet the needs of the current group of students. The class emphasizes an introduction to American culture and college life as well as language skills. Departmental permission required.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
“Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?” asks Henry David Thoreau early in our book, Seeing & Writing 3 (S&W). This course asks you to become more observant of visual and written “texts”---to become both a better reader and a better student. This heightened ability to observe has the potential to bring a new kind of joy, a complex kind of pleasure. But it also asks you to become more disciplined, which is a word most of us do not like. It often “hurts”---emotionally or physically or both---to become disciplined. We get antsy. We get distracted. We get lazy. We get lonely. Still, the kind of discipline we are going to forge for ourselves in this course can give us deeper resources for succeeding in academic pursuits and for facing real challenges in life. If we push ourselves hard enough, we may, sometime, experience a flash of insight that will feel “prophetic.” We may not get there in this course, alone, but let’s set our sights high. Be a seer.
Course objectives:
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
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 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
This course has been designed to aid in your development into a confident, responsible and persuasive writer. By the end of this course, students will
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Jones, Mary Ellen
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” 116 years ago. Yet it has remained a central element of American culture.
We’ll use the 19 th 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 18 th 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 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Thompson, Kim
“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster
As Forster’s quote suggests, there is an elemental and symbiotic relationship between writing and thinking. We need to both develop critical thinking skills in order to produce better writing and write often in order to better understand what it is we are thinking. Given this premise, our section of 101 will focus on the development of both critical thinking and writing skills. In order to build critical thinking skills, we will read a variety of academic and non-academic texts, including essays, fiction, and film, focusing on building strong and analytic skills. In order to develop our writing skills, we will turn our developing investigative skills to writing, producing both short and long essays, which seek to move our analyses from discussion to the page as we explore how to develop convincing arguments in essay form.
We will write several short response papers, three longer essays, and a research paper.
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Hayes, Karen
Preparation of the academic essay is the focus of this writing intensive course. Students read essays from several different academic disciplines in order to prompt their own writing on issues from these fields. Emphasizing writing as a process, the course asks students to prepare several drafts of their work. We will work together to improve style and grow as college-level writers and thinkers. Four revised essays, two exams, and twelve informal pieces of writing will be evaluated during the term.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
“Art is not meant to be polite, secret, coded, or timid. Art is the sphere in which the impulse to hide and lie is the most dangerous.” Dorothy Allison, “This is Our World”
Taking intellectual and emotional risks lies at the heart of writing. Testing your limits, stretching your intellectual and creative abilities, expanding the boundaries of your intellectual and emotional lives—this is the writer’s project. You will only realize your full potential as a thinker and writer by doing more and better work than you ever thought possible, and above all, by learning to take risks. This course provides you the opportunities and the environment in which to take the risks necessary for writing well.
English 101 is 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 and purposeful, well-focused writing which addresses a well-defined audience. English 101 will call on your analytical and organizational skills, as well as provide opportunities for you to enhance your ability to design and structure writing and to improve your technical expertise. The course will focus on the conventions of academic discourse and selecting, integrating, and documenting sources. This course is also designed to teach you how to read and write effectively in the University. Also, it will help you to discover that reading and writing are not separate activities, but closely related ones. The course is founded on a belief that learning to read, and see, critically is essential to becoming a proficient accomplished writer. English 101 requires a series of shorter essays, 4 longer, 5-7 page essays, and an 8-10 page researched essay. There will be a midterm and a final.
English 101E – Expository Writing: Memory, Memorial, and Restitution
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
All writing is to a large extent an act of memorial. When we write, we record what has happened, give shape and meaning to the past, and name what often feels elusive in the immediacy of the present. This course will use this natural connection between the act of writing and the act of remembering as a broad thematic rubric for developing the skills in writing you will need to succeed in college, and even more importantly, begin to make meaning out of the experience of one’s life. The course will include a personal essay, an interpretative/analytical essay, a research paper, and finally the construction of a web site. We will read works by Tim O’Brien and Maxine Hong Kingston, essays by Edward Said and Patricia Hampl, and articles that explore the nature of memory and the act of memorializing. We will also debate issues surrounding the theme of restitution; how do we make right the past, particularly when some injustice has occurred?
In the process of exploring these themes, you will be asked to reflect on your own process of writing, expected to work through several drafts of each paper, and reminded of the value of careful editing in all writing projects. We will meet in conference, work together in small groups, participate in class discussions, and write frequent informal responses.
English 101E - Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
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 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy
“You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true.” –William Zinsser.
English 101 introduces students to academic reading and writing processes. You will develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills through class discussions as well as through the rhetorical analysis of various texts based on the readings in Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. The essays reflect diverse viewpoints and voices exploring the signs and symbols of popular culture, including those found in film and television, advertising, icons and idols, consumerism, etc. Keep in mind that the dictionary lists “essay” only secondarily, as a noun. It is first a verb—“to try out; attempt.” In response to the essays you’ll be reading, analyzing, and writing about, you’ll be developing your own voice and testing your own thoughts. And remember that the key to good writing is revision. As the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart once said, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
Writing assignments: Three argumentative or persuasive essays based on readings in the textbook using MLA-style documentation. The fourth assignment is a researched essay.
English 180A - Shakespeare on Film
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
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 Zefferelli, Peter Brooks, and Kenneth Branagh. We will look at a wide range of performances, from 1930’s Hollywood to Kenneth Branagh, 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 productions of each, write several short papers, quizzes and a final exam. You will be required to see a film outside class on Wednesday nights from 6:30 to 9:00 almost every week.
English 180A - A Literary Bawdy House: Poetry, Prose, and Performances from Brooklyn, 1939-1941
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitz
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
It was nicknamed February House, a Brooklyn mock-Tudor home that housed several of the most significant voices in 1930s artistic conversations. Leaving England in the face of a certain war, W. H. Auden settled in February House with his poetic fame already secured on both sides of the Atlantic; just in his late twenties, Auden displayed the twin weaknesses that characterized him for the rest of his life: a weakness for beautiful language and a weakness for bad puns. He moved into the rambling home with Benjamin Britten, an ambitious composer who followed Auden from England. Sharing the house was a young Carson McCullers, who dashed on the scene with her astonishing first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Haunting the house were the American life-long wanderers, Paul and Jane Bowles. The great Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, became a fixture in the house, but nobody secured February House’s popular renown more than the most recognizable name in American striptease, Gypsy Rose Lee.
This course will discuss how each of these personalities addressed the world of bohemia in a time of war. Each figure, in his or her own inimitable way, sought to find a place for art in a time of global conflict. Resting heavily on discussion, our course will work through these artists’ responses to the war. In addition to regular discussion, the course requirements will include a reading journal and several short critical responses to the readings, in addition to midterm and final examinations.
English 180A – Film Noir
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
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 life 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 20 th century in neo-noir (post classic noir or nouveau 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. We will also examine particularly closely the cultural work of these films and their representations. Our goals will include confronting and exploring film noir’s and neo-noir’s sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. The course requires weekly screenings of film outside of the class on Wednesdays from 4:00-6:30pm. In addition, we will have frequent quizzes, several short papers, a long paper, a midterm and final examination.
English 180A - A Survey of Satire: Human Nature and Other Abominations
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
From The Daily Show to Saturday Night Live to The Onion, our culture is awash in satire. But then this appetite for pointed humor is nothing new. For centuries writers and performers have attempted to shine a comical—and often merciless—light on those behaviors that warrant a healthy bit of ridicule, and in this class, we’ll consider some of the outstanding works of satire that have endured through the ages, works that not only entertain but also give us plenty to think about—especially when it seems the joke is on us. We’ll take in eighteenth-century works like Gulliver’s Travels, nineteenth-century masterpieces like The Importance of Being Earnest, and twentieth-century films like The Gods Must Be Crazy. And in the process of learning how to tell a lampoon from an invective, and a parody from a burlesque, we’ll also ask ourselves some fairly sobering questions about human nature’s pitfalls and potentialities. We will have three exams and three papers in this writing intensive course.
English 190A/C - Afro-Caribbean Studies: Migratory Subjects
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
This course will introduce students to the literary works and cultural history of English-speaking Caribbean authors. This semester, we will examine essays, poetry, and novels by several authors who were born in the Caribbean and migrated to the UK, Canada and the US. We will discover the beauty of works by selected authors as they lead us on the path of discovery into the world of nationhood, language and African Diasporic culture.
English 200 – Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180 or 190
English 200 is 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
4 semester hours
Rambo, Jody
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
Emily Dickinson once sent a note with four of her poems to a famously benighted editor, asking if the poems “breathed.” This course is designed for beginning writers who are interested in exploring their own creative processes and discovering what gives breath, or life, to a piece of writing. Students will have the opportunity to write in four literary genres-poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama—and to take part in informal peer critiques in a writer’s workshop. Course work includes frequent writing exercises, readings, and discussions, a journal that will serve as both creative process log and a place for informal, exploratory writing, and a portfolio of the students’ best writing compiled throughout the semester.
English 241 – Beginning Journalism
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
This course provides a basic introduction to the practice and principles of journalism, with an emphasis on newspaper production. We will discuss news, features, entertainment stories, opinion and sports writing, as well as interviewing skills, ethics, copy-editing, headline writing, and other related topics. Students will be expected to meet deadlines, do frequent in-class writing exercises, and to thoughtfully and constructively respond to their classmates’ stories. Grade will be based on stories produced, occasional quizzes, and class participation. Students will be encouraged to contribute to The Torch, Wittenberg’s weekly student newspaper.
English 243 - Business Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
The purpose of this course is to teach the writing skills you’ll need to know in order to write successfully in your career. We will focus on conventional formats for letters, memos and formal reports. We will also learn to use the conventional structural patterns (superstructures) for resumes, brochures, reports and proposals.
Accordingly, in this course you’ll study how to:
English 280A – Survey of British Literature II
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
Prerequiste: ENGL 170, 180, or 190
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 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 290A - American Literature, Themes and Traditions: The Myth of the Savage in U.S. Literature and Culture
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H or 180A or 190 A/C
Words like “American,” “freedom,” “civilization, “savagery” have the power to lead us into war or urge us towards peacemaking. It all depends on how these words are used. I am interested in the way certain words become deeply ingrained cultural symbols, or “tropes,” which teach us to value certain stories, and—often at the same time—cause us simply not to see other, potentially more helpful (and sometimes just really weird!) ways of understanding the world. For example, in the 1960s, a well-respected Harvard literary critic and historian could state confidently that the “main” American story was, for him, “the massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America.” Most scholars have come to realize in the 40 years since then that it’s not just a desire to be “PC” that makes that scholar’s claim problematic. Obviously, it’s flatly inaccurate: describing the land as “vacant” erases the millions people who were, in fact, already living in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. But it also blinds us to the richness (and violence) of the cultural mixing and borrowing that has occurred across many cultural lines during the years that have passed since 1492, when you-know-who sailed the ocean blue. (Think of the way the blues, rock, and jazz music blend African and European instruments and rhythms. Or the way the foods we eat everyday come from Native crops—corn, potatoes, etc.—and then blend with Asian and European delicacies. To cross and paraphrase Sojourner Truth and John Mellencamp: “Ain’t that American?”). This course will focus on the symbol of “the savage” as one such powerful trope in U.S. literature and political discourse. We’ll analyse the European ideas of both “noble” savages as well as the more fierce incarnations of this trope. We’ll look at how it was used to deprecate certain groups within Europe in addition to justifying slavery and the genocide of Native American groups. Finally, we’ll listen to lots of voices “talking back” to this trope—rejecting it, reworking it, and even turning it against their oppressors. We’ll consider the ethics of all these storytelling choices, as well as have good fun reading some of the finest literature ever written, from the beginnings of these cultural contacts to our own modern times. This course is both reading and writing intensive: two major papers (one research), a midterm, a final, and lots of short writings. We will likely read: Thomas Jefferson’s The Declaration of Independence and Notes on the State of Virginia, David Walker’s Appeal, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks, Mary Rowlandson’s Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Zitkala Sa’s essays, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the film Smoke Signals.
English 305 - The Medieval Carnival: Comedy, Parody, and Subversion in Medieval Literature and Culture
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 280A or 290A
This course will explore the carnival impulse in medieval literature: the comedy and farce, parody, satire, and ritual inversions that create a “world-upside down” in mockery of sacred seriousness and social hierarchy. Central readings will include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, dramatic miracles, farce and fabliau, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Dante’s Inferno, the bawdy lyrics of the wandering scholars, the erotic romance Tristan and Isolde, and end with selections from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. To get into the spirit, the class will participate in a variety of activities: produce a page of illuminated manuscript, elect a Lord of Misrule, enjoy a Feast of Fools, produce a farce, write a song, and dance a jig. In addition to the creative explorations, there will be some short papers and quizzes, plus a longer research paper. Writing Intensive.
English 308: Anarchy for the U.K. - Revolutionary Ideas and Romantic Literature
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 280
While the French Revolution may have had its most immediate effects within France’s borders, that tumultuous event also sent shock waves across the English Channel, shock waves that led some very dynamic people to believe that the world was in for dramatic changes. Perhaps now was the time, they thought, to re-imagine the entire social order. Maybe property could be conceived in a new way. And perhaps marriage was an oppressive arrangement that could be dispensed with. And what if government itself could eventually become unnecessary? These and other radical ideas were advanced in the 1790s by William Godwin. We’ll read his fiction as well as works by the amazing thinkers and writers whose lives intersected with his. These include his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (known as a founding figure in modern feminism), his daughter Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein and other interesting works), and his son-in-law Percy Shelley. We’ll also read writers who hung around Godwin’s dinner table to talk philosophy and politics, writers like William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and we’ll use their essays, stories, and poems to help us see the world both as they thought it was and as they thought it could be. This course will require three exams and three papers, including a 15-page final project.
English 315 - Contemporary American Novel
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 290
Contemporary American Novel will introduce students to the latest fiction being produced in North America. One critical objective for the course will be to explore the diversity of contemporary fiction. To this end we will read in a variety of genres, including magical realism, fantasy, detective fiction, “postmodern” novels, and science fiction. We’ll also explore the range of ethnic literatures in North America, including African American, Native American, Chicano, and Afro-Caribbean. Finally, we will look at how these writers give expression to and wrestle with the intensity, anxiety, despair, and promise of a post-9/11 America. The course will include writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Chabon, Scott Bradfield, William Gibson, Jhumpa Lihiri, Zadie Smith, and others. Reading and writing intensive, this course requires reading journals, short essays, a comprehensive final examination, a 15-page researched essay.
English 318 - Seduction and the Early Modern Woman (Women in Literature I)
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 280 or junior status
This course will provide a survey of literature by women from the early medieval period through the late eighteenth century. It will take as its particular focus the seduction narrative and examine how women writers both worked within this familiar plot and worked to complicate it. We will look at Marie de France’s romances, Christine de Pizan’s revisionary narratives, and the visionary ones of medieval mystics. We will look at the poetry of the 16 th and 17 th century and even an early female-authored play. The majority of our class, however, will focus on the late 17 th century and 18 th century and a period in literature in which the seduction plot became central not only to the rise of the woman writer, but more unexpectedly to the rise of the British empire. Writers from this period will include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen. We will conclude by looking at a contemporary tale of seduction, detangling in the process its connection to this complex history of women writing. The seduction narrative speaks to the paradoxical poles of female empowerment: it writes woman as both victim and as aggressor and, in this course, we will attempt to understand what this narrative means for women and men writing today.
English 322 - Advanced Creative Nonfiction
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequisite: ENGL 240
Essayist Vivian Gornick once said, “Good writing has two characteristics. It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.” This course is designed to launch students on that voyage by studying and writing creative nonfiction, also known as literary nonfiction. It’s a branch of writing which can employ some of the same literary techniques that novelists use (dialogue, scene setting, tension, characterization, etc.) To describe actual persons, places, and events. Students will study and analyze the many shapes of literary nonfiction, from the personal essay to literary journalism, memoir, travel writing, the lyric essay, and flash nonfiction (prose under 500 words). This is a writing intensive course centered around the workshop approach, where stories are discussed and critiqued in class by peers. In addition to reading excerpts from some of the best literary nonfiction writers, students will have multiple opportunities to write and revise their own literary nonfiction. They will also produce one critical paper—an argumentative or exploratory paper—on some writer or some critical issue in the nonfiction genre. Grades will be based on the critical paper, as well as a portfolio of revised work. Prerequisite: English 240.
English 322- Screenwriting
4 semester hours
Dixon , Kent
Prerequisite: English 240
This is an advanced creative writing course: it is WI and its prerequisite is English 240, or in rare cases, by permission of Instructor. THDN 240 (Playwriting) is strongly recommended, but not required. All students will develop their own scripts, and have a completed screenplay of some standard length by the end of the course. In addition, to learn dramatic form, students will write several shorter dramatic works in the first two weeks.
Some attention will be given to adaptations, and any number of films will be dissected, especially in relation to their scripts. All students are expected to buy at least one screenplay ($15) of their own preference—see Scriptcity.com—to study for form and to share with the class at large. In addition, there are several small how-to books recommended, including Syd Field's classic Screenwriting and Gary Garrison’s Perfect 10, and Tom Lazarus’ The Secrets of Filmwriting. The one required text is the current screen writer’s Bible, Robert McKee’s STORY: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. “McKee won a Fulbright, Charles. Have you won a Fulbright?” ~Donald Kaufman, in Charles Kaufmann’s Adaptation.
English 327 - Advanced Rhetoric and Grammar
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: Departmental permission required
This course is designed for students in Education seeking their secondary education certificate (licensure 4 – 9). It is not Writing Intensive, though there will be plenty of writing.
The course will look at English from three overlapping perspectives—grammar, history, and style. Grammar will dominate, 40 to 50% depending on students’ needs. The content is consistent with accreditation and state standards, and pedagogic focus will be not only on enhancing one’s own PSG (phrase structure grammar), but on how to develop same for secondary and middle school students while undoing their grammar anxiety. Alternative approaches to grammar will be considered (structural, transformational, et al.), and practical attention given to grammar-as-style. Historically, we will survey how our language has changed and continues to do so as a result of social, political, and cultural influences. There will be frequent quizzes and exercises, two exams and one unusual project.
