ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
SPRING SEMESTER 2006

English 101 - 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. Five revised essays, two exams, and informal journals and quizzes will be evaluated during the term.

English 101 - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Savola, David

This section of ENGL 101 focuses on writing and the environment. The course explores the ways in which people have used writing as a means on 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 thesis statements and arguments, to support arguments with evidence, to write in clear prose, and to consider their audience. It will also help students to approach writing as a process, from initial planing 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 - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert

There’s no mystery about what it takes to improve as a college writer: practice, practice, and more practice--in as many genres as possible: analytic essays, stories, autobiographical narratives, response papers, journal writing. Students will develop their abilities to analyze texts, construct arguments, tell stories, and produce writing that is lively, elegant, and precise. One of the assumptions of this course is that successful prose in all disciplines is based on specific techniques any writer can learn and master. We discover these techniques, in part, by analyzing prose we admire and applying what we learn to our own developing style. For this reason, I’ll urge students to become active readers as well as active writers and to study the assigned texts in the course as a source for writing techniques they can use themselves.

English 101 - 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 just 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 wide 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 101 - Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi

In this course, students will work through the writing process, from planning to revising and editing their essays. Our text for the course will be Seeing & Writing 2, 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, or 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
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitzpatrick

This course is designed to illustrate the potential of the written word-the potential to present well-wrought ideas carefully and persuasively. At once intensely personal and inevitably public, writing allows one to not simply describe but also create a world. This course, then, will strengthen the mastery of the elements of style as it will assist in reconceiving our relationship to the world around us. Focusing on both analytical and nonfiction essays, our readings will provide materials and models for our discussions and essays. In addition to several short essays, the course’s requirements also include a commitment to discussion; this is not a lecture course, so the student is strongly encouraged to bring ideas, questions, insights and observations to each class meeting. Ultimately, this course prepares the student to meet the expectations that you will encounter in your academic career and beyond: you will be expected to read critically and thoughtfully, to organize your ideas into a coherent argument, and to present your thoughts with confidence and grace.

English 180 - War in Literature and Film
4 semester hours
Jones, Mary Ellen

Prerequisite: English 101
There will be wars and rumors of wars....From the Biblical assaults on the walls of Jericho to yesterday’s car bombs in Bagdad, 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 - Words and Worlds: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
4 semester hours
Hayes, Karen

Prerequisite: English 101
Recently hailed as “the writer of the 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 to discuss the works they studied and taught as well as their own creations–and both have recently emerged as sources for major films. In this class, we’ll study some of Lewis and Tolkien’s works, paying particular attention to the way in which the worlds they created reflect the 20th century world in which they lived. Be prepared for lots of reading; these authors are neither simple nor brief, but they are fascinating. Students will write one longer essay and three brief papers, respond to several quizzes and exams, and be part of presentation teams in this writing intensive course.

English 180 - Literature and the Natural World
4 semester hours
Savola, David

Prerequisite: English 101
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 19th 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, and a final essay exam. Writing intensive.

English 180 - Shakespeare on Film
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi

Prerequisite: English 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 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 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 treatments of each, write several short papers, quizzes and a final exam. You will be required to see a film outside class on Wednesday nights almost every week.

English 180 - Knights and Ladies and Monks, Oh my!: Medieval Literature and Society
4 semester hours
Thompson, Kim

Prerequisite: English 101
In this course, we will do a survey of medieval European literature, focusing on the various groups or orders of which medieval society was composed, such as religious, the knighthood, and the peasant. While much of the course will be devoted to investigating the structure of medieval society, we will also explore wider social and historical topics, such as courtly love, the Black Death, and the Rising of 1381, with attention to cross-cultural comparisons, Along the way, you will read about an impoverished knight who meets a magical fairy, a mother of 14 who longs to be a virgin martyr, a wily peasant girl who cuckolds her much older husband, and many other fascinating characters as we journey together through medieval literature and society.

English 180 - The Structure of the Monstrous: Monster as Hero in American Culture
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia

Prerequisite: English 101
The standard monster in Anglo culture is a loner, exiled from the community and deeply threatening to the social well being of the whole. Grendel, the monster in the Old English epic Beowulf, is the classic archetype of this figure; the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are further manifestations of this predatory and deeply isolated figure.
Yet in American culture, the loner–the individualist who challenges the communal order is more often the hero–and the classic monster of these British texts can become a counter-cultural hero in American literature and film. Sometimes the shift is subtle: the monster in the classic Hollywood version of Frankenstein remains a monster, but is deepened by the pathos of his tragic and on-screen death. Often times, it is overt: John Gardner writes his novel Grendel from the point of view of the Old English monster, even giving this mute figure the best poetry in the text.
This course will examine the monster in American literature against the backdrop of these classic British prototypes. It will also look at the nature of the American Gothic as practiced by such canonical writers as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and by such female re-visionaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Flannery O’Connor. Finally, it will look at the crime story, in particular Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the Oscar-winning film, The Silence of the Lambs, and how select “geniuses” in crime act as American doppelgangers, reflecting back a distorted image of our best cultural features.
Requirements include three formal papers, frequent response papers, and a comprehensive final exam.

English 180 - The Lost Generation
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitzpatrick

Prerequisite: English 101
In conversation with a young Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein claimed that the new crop of writers and artists were “a lost generation.” Between the world wars, a generation of writers descended upon Paris in search of intellectual , artistic, and emotional freedom. This course will explore Stein’s idea of a “lost generation” by reading the works of this generation’s greatest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Ann Porter, and Archibald MacLeish, to name only a few. While focused primarily on the literature of the age, our conversations will not neglect the other arts flourishing in the twenties, particularly in light of the fascinating explorations in photography and painting of Picasso and Man Ray. The course requirements--a reading journal, several short essays, and a group presentation--will work to uncover the implications of Steins’s designation; indeed, the questions that might best give shape to our semester is simple: Was the Lost Generation ever Found?

English 180 - Literature of the 60's Counterculture
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael

Prerequisite: English 101
So you say you want a revolution? The counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired a creative explosion in many fields, including fiction, poetry and drama. In this course we will read some of the most important writing from a tumultuous period in American history, including works by Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Richard Farina. We’ll examine how the events of the time influenced those writers and how those writers influenced their time.
Course requirements include a mid-term, a final and a term paper. You will be expected to come prepared to discuss the assigned reading and take part in what should be lively and often controversial discussions.

English 180 - Demons, Devils, and Hellfire
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick

Prerequisite: English 101
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 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty

Prerequisite: English 170, 180 or 190. English Majors urged to take 200 before 280 or 290.
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
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy

Prerequisite: English 101
This course will introduce students to the essential elements of good writing, focusing on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Throughout the semester, students will read representative texts and study the fundamental elements of all the genres.
This course is centered around the “workshop,”–essentially informal peer critique of student work as well as close reading and class discussion of selected texts. We’ll read and analyze, discuss and critique, but most of all we’ll be a community of people who write. Students will produce pieces in all four genres. There are no exams, but there will be an occasional quiz. The grade is based on a writing portfolio of one’s best, revised work, which will be handed in at the end of the semester. The rest of the grade will be based on a journal/writer’s notebook and class participation.

English 240 - Beginning Creative Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent

Pre-requisites - English 101
This is a beginning 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 works. 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; there are no exams. There is a list of “expectations,” terminology and techniques, that must be met to get 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 prerequisites on occasion by permission of the instructor, based on a review of the student’s previous work.

English 241 - Beginning Journalism
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy

Prerequisite: English 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. Grades 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 242 - Writing and Peer Editing
4 semester hours
Fry, Maureen

Prerequisite: English 101 and permission of instructor
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, papers, 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 - British Survey I
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty

Prerequisite: English 170 or 180 or 190
In this survey of English literature from its beginnings to the early eighteenth century, students will be introduced to the writings of a variety of authors working in a variety of genres: sonnet, dramatic comedy, epic poem, essay, novel, and others. In order to impose some structure on a rather diverse body of writings, we will trace several broad themes across these works while attending to, so far as is possible in a course of this type, the historical milieux in which these texts were written and read or performed. A reading journal, three papers, a midterm and final.
Writing Intensive.

English 280 - Survey of British Literature I
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi

Prerequisite: English 200
In this course, we will look at the development of English literature from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. We will read and discuss representative literary texts and ask a series of important questions: how do these texts grow out of their historical and cultural contexts? How do they build upon, speak to one another? How do they define and redefine the roles of writer and reader? What does a growing literary canon have in constructing what it means to be a British subject, a self, a man, a woman? We will explore as well the way genre--epic and romance, tragedy and comedy, prose fiction-emerge, change, disappear, in response to a changing culture and readership. You should come out of this course with a foundational knowledge of important writers, dates, literary styles, genres, and critical terms that you can build on in more advanced courses. The course will include some periods and a comprehensive final; two or three formal papers and several informal responses to the reading. Writing Intensive. Prerequisite: English 200.

English 290 – The American Literary Tradition: The American Gothic
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot

Prerequisite: English 170 or 180 or 190
Through an examination of the American Gothic, its origins and its contemporary manifestations, we will explore the difficult, bloody, and painful birth of American literature as well as its continued fascination with terror of what Melville called the “power of blackness.” This course is driven in part by questions about America’s fascination with a volatile mixture of terror and beauty. What is it about the shadowy, the diseased, the grotesque, and the sublime that so attracts us? Why has the Gothic continued to be so central to American literature since its inception and what explains the current revival of the Gothic in our culture? The course is ultimately an exploration of what unsettles and terrifies us. As a result, this course in the American Gothic is definitely not for the squeamish. Requires reading quizzes, group research presentations, short essays, a longer researched essay, and midterm and final exams.

English 302 - British Survey II
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick

Prerequisite: English 280
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 in subsequent 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 eighteenth to the late twentieth 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 - Love and War in the Eighteenth Century
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia

Prerequisite: English 200 or 280 or 290
Out of the 1960s protests of the Vietnam War grew the slogan: “Make love not war,” and the title of this course is clearly intended to invoke that now familiar saying. But in the long eighteenth century, this slogan would have taken a different configuration. It might have read: “war makes love.”
The wars of this time period were largely domestic, internal affairs that threatened not just domestic peace, but also the very configuration of domestic peace. The Glorious Revolution, the Jacobite Rebellion, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution each challenged the very definition of patriarchal power and the structure of the family. These seismic changes in political space helped to usher in equally revolutionary shifts in domestic space as personal choice and personal virtue in the negotiation of love and marriage.
This course will examine this connection between love and war in the eighteenth century. We will read selections from the work of John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Olaudah Equiano, Laurence Stern, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, and Jane Austen.
There will be midterm and final exam, one shorter paper (4-5 pages) and a longer researched final paper (12 pages.)

English 310 - Revolutionaries and Bohemians: Readings in Twentieth-Century Literature
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitzpatrick

Prerequisite: English 280
In his hilarious play “Travesties,” Tom Stoppard imagines the interactions between three of the century’s most significant artists and thinkers: set in Zurich, 1917, “Travesties” gets tremendous mileage from the fact that Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce all fled to this city to escape the thunderings of World War I.
These communities of like--and unlike--minded artists flourished in the early century, and each took as its goal the rejection of complacency, habit, convention, and all things scoffingly labeled “bourgeois.” This course will read several of the century’s greatest literary revolutionaries-- Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, to name a few--alongside many other geniuses less favored by literary history.
Our readings will trace not only the origins of these intellectual and aesthetic revolutions, but also the guises in which they presented themselves: be it in the wild-eyed rage of a political revolutionary or the requisite slouch hat of the bohemian, these writers positioned themselves in a specifically antagonistic stance to contemporary culture. Through informed conversation, short essays, and a reading journal, our course will explore the relationships between revolutionaries, bohemians, and the cultures that they sought to subvert.

English 315 - Modern American Novel
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot

Prerequisite: English 200 or 280 or 290
Modernist literature is a literature of crisis, of chaos, and the dissolution of order. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the world saw dramatic shifts in religion, philosophy, literature, technology, and psychology that predicted the “modern condition.” Among other horrors, hundreds of thousands died in two mechanized and dehumanizing world wars. Countless thousands suffered in ghettos around the new industrial plants, living bleak, alienated, and lonely lives among the millions. Against this backdrop of crisis, the modern American novel emerged. American writers embraced modernism’s restless interrogation of subjectivity and existence, its insistence on change, and its quest for an aesthetic solution to the crisis of modern social disorder and psychic fragmentation. As a central tenet of their quest, American modernists denounce the nineteenth century’s rationalism and positivism, and “(turn) toward nonlinear and increasingly formalist modes of artistic presentation in the search for the new kinds of order” (Pearlman, “Modernism”). This term we will puzzle out this modernist pursuit of a new aesthetic to order experience and to find what Wallace Stevens termed “what will suffice” as we struggle through the modern. In the end, the modern American novel is ever new, dynamic, arresting, and one of the greatest literary experiments of all time. Requires reading quizzes, group research presentations, short essays, a longer researched essay, and midterm and final exams.


English 321 - Advanced Journalism
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy

Prerequisite: English 241
This course focuses on long newspaper and magazine features and profiles, as well as other kinds of “literary” and “immersion” reportage. Students will learn crucial skills needed to envision and shape feature stories and they will study and practice different story-telling modes. This course also covers the query letter, conducting research and interviews, analyzing the market, and the editor-writer relationship, among other things. This is a rigorous, writing-intensive course where revision is not only encouraged but expected. Students must send out at least one article to an outside publication.

English 322 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent

Prerequisite: English 240
This is a WI, advance creative writing course with pre-requisites of English 101 and English 240 (or permission of 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 possibly even narrative poetry and literary journalism (using the devices of fiction to report a true story). There is the option of working on a novella in lieu of genre experimentation. 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 work-shopping 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. The focus is primarily shorter fiction, but novella writers will read several novella for discussions and models.

English 322 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry - Rambo
4 semester hours
Rambo, Jody

Prerequisite: English 240
If poems are, as Jorie Graham writes, “records of true risks taken by the soul of the speaker” then the intent of this advanced writing course in poetry is to create the conditions for taking such risks. The course will be composed of equal parts reading and writing poetry to introduce students to developments in contemporary poetry and to help them develop further their craft. Students will also explore different forms of poetry such as the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, along with free verse and prose poems. Regular writing workshops, a poet’s notebook, diverse reading assignments, and a final manuscript.

English 380 - The Literature of the Beat Generation
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert

Prerequisite: English 200 or 280 or 290
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 (the bongo playing “beatnik” from the 60's sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobey Gilis) whenever anyone mentioned Jack Kerouac. Five or six years ago, however, I stumbled on a collection of Buddhist writings by Beat poets 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 for the course--On the Road, Dharma Bums, Minor Characters, Howl, Naked Lunch, Pieces of a Song, and No Nature-- 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 Seminar: Mapping Paradise Lost
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty

Prerequisite: Departmental Permission Required
Although in the first part of this course students will examine in considerable detail Paradise Lost and some of the best literary criticism it has inspired, the focus of the seminar will remain on the writing of a twenty-five page senior thesis on an author or work or theme of the student’s choice. Students will prepare for this task by extensive reading in primary and secondary materials relevant to their topics, compiling annotated bibliographies, drafting tentative outlines, and completing other assigned stages in the writing process. Throughout the semester students will assist each other by participating in writing groups and group conferences with the instructor; of course, the composition of a successful thesis will ultimately depend upon the pluck and hard work of each thesis writer. Additional course requirements include a formal oral presentation based on the thesis to select English department faculty and a thesis defense in class at the end of the semester.

English 402 - Senior Writing Seminar
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael

Prerequisite: Departmental Permission Required
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.

English 403 - Advanced Projects in Creative Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent

Prerequisite: Departmental Permission Required
Special Projects in Creative Writing, English 403, offers to serious creative writing students an opportunity to produce a significant piece of fiction or poetry (or creative nonfiction or screenplay). The class is structured to combine the group experience of a workshop with the private conference, typically requiring weekly group meetings in workshop format and individual meetings with the instructor in the given genre. Projects might include a collection of poetry, or of short stories, or a novella, or screenplay, or collection of creative non-fiction. Admission to the course is based on a writing sample and a brief description of the kind of project the student is proposing. October 10th deadline. Further details available from the Department secretary.