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
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
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 thinking analytically and 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 at Wittenberg. Also, it will help you to discover that reading and writing are not separate activities, but closely related ones. The course is founded on the belief that learning to read, see, and think analytically is essential to becoming a proficient, accomplished writer.
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
Dixon, Mimi
In this course, students will work through the writing process, from planning to revising and editing essays. Our text for the course will be Seeing & Writing 3, which provides visual images and readings that will invite us to think critically about popular culture, everything from images of beauty in advertising, to ethnic stereotypes in film, gender roles on TV and music videos, to cultural icons and heroes. Writing in the course will move from more personal essays to researched arguments. The course will also provide an introduction to using Wittenberg's research resources in the library and on the Internet.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
This course will teach the writing process through essays, extensive class discussion and work shopping, reading, and journal-keeping. Students will improve their academic writing skills, including grammar and punctuation, and will learn that there is much more to successful writing than the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Along the way, students should learn more about themselves, their world and the many different values of writing, including the revolutionary concept that writing can be fun.
Class requirement includes four papers, class attendance and participation, regular journal writing and frequent in-class writing.
English 101E – 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:
(1) develop competency in all stages of the writing process
(2) develop critical thinking and reading skills
(3) develop a writing standard consistent with the MLA style guide
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 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 - Introduction to Expository Writing: Reading the Signs
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
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. 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 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 180 - Literature and the Green World
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
"Through metaphor to reconcile/ The people and the stones." -WC Williams
This introduction to literature will look at the ways fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction explore our human relation to the natural world. We will begin with myths which narrate origins or transformations, blurring boundaries between the human and the "green world" of nature. We will read the Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, both taking us into an innocent or magical "green world" that provides an escape from restrictrive laws and corruptions of the city. From these early works, we will move on to Milton's Eden, Romantic and contemporary poetry, a novel by Thomas Hardy, essays by Thoreau and Annie Dillard, and Stoppard's contemporary play Arcadia. Writing assignments will include several critical and creative pieces, and a final essay exam. Writing Intensive.
English 180 – “Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why The Ancient Greeks Matter”
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
The ancient Greeks invented everything from Western warfare to mystical prayer, from logic to statecraft and the city-state. That includes nothing less than Western literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, art, history, and architecture. The Jews gave us our Christian values; the Greeks set the foundation and framework for our intellectual lives, providing the tools we bring to bear on problems in philosophy, math, medicine, physics, and, really, all the sciences.
I am cribbing from the dust jacket of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea here, and that book will be our guiding text. Following it, we will read Homer’s two great epics, tragedies and comedies by the four great playwrights, a satyr play, a Greek novel, and smatterings of lyric poetry (Sappho), oration (Pericles), history (Thucydides), philosophy (the pre-Socratics as well as Plato and Aristotle), and plastic art. The Greeks also gave us militarism, sexism, slavery, total war, disenfranchisement, segregation (racial and sexual).
If how to rule, then how to fight; if how to think, then how to feel; how to see, how to play, how to party—we got it here first and we will essay it all. The course includes a series of very short papers, a reading log, some creative work, and two exams, written and take-home. It is not a course in Greek mythology per se, but the literature and drama abound in myth, and the first great thinkers about myth, analysts of myth in effect (mythographers), are—if you’d venture a guess—Greek. Writing intensive.
English 180 – Truth-tellers, Troublemakers and Other Dangerous Writers: Big Mouth Lit
4 semester hours
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequisite: ENGL 101\
From Blanche McCrary Boyd’s The Redneck Way of Knowledge to Rolling Stone reporter Tim Cahill’s account of what he saw when reporting on the mass suicides of Jonestown, Guyana, we’ll discuss, and write about writers who naturally locate themselves as outsiders. We’ll discuss the important role of the observer in American literature as we mine this genre of literary journalism, deadline reportage, and memoir. Fasten your seatbelt as you read the works of writers who felt obliged, no, compelled, to explore provocative and often outrageous topics and stances. Students will write several short essays, both analytical and creative, write a critical paper, and take a midterm and a final. We’ll read, we’ll talk, we’ll laugh, and we’ll write. Writing intensive.
English 180: Literature and Madness
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
If it’s haunted, freaky, surrealistic, or strange, it’s probably in this course. In “Literature and Madness” we’ll study literary depictions of mental illness by American writers and examine literature that mixes terror and beauty—an idea that’s shaped American notions of spirituality, subjectivity, and creative power since the 18 th century. We’ll study depression, addiction, suicide, schizophrenia, and sexual trauma. We’ll read a brand of horror story H. P. Lovecraft calls “the weird tale” and consider how American writers use tales of madness to explore complex issues of racial and sexual identity: topics too hot to handle in the daylight world of reason and sense. We’ll read some old favorites—Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—but we’ll also stretch the notion of “weird tale” to include poetry (by Anne Sexton), photography (by Diane Arbus), and film (by Stanley Kubrick). No previous experience with American literature is necessary, but it helps if you like to read. Prepare to be surprised, fascinated, and possessed. Writing intensive.
English180 - The Lost Generation
4 semester hours
Smith. J. Fitz
Prerequsite: ENGL 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 Steins idea of a lost generation by reading the works of this generations 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. Indeed, the question that might best give shape to our semester is simple: Was the Lost Generation ever Found?
As we explore the history of the ex-patriot community of post-war American writers, we will work to discover the connections between the historical period in which they wrote and the period in which we find ourselves today. Whether you enter the class with a fondness for Dorothy Parker and Art Deco or you have not knowledge of anything remotely connected to the Roarin Twenties, this course aims to provide you with the skills to study and discuss a historical periodand by extension, to better appreciate our own. Ultimately, the student will leave this course with not simply an appreciation for the literature of expatriation, but also the skills necessary for an engaged exploration of ideas--the hallmarks of a liberal arts institution.
English 190A/C - Afro-Caribbean Studies
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
This course will examine major writers from contemporary
Anglophone-Caribbean literature. The course will introduce students to the
literary works and cultural history of English-speaking Caribbean authors.
Class lecture will ground the course in postcolonial issues of independence
for the Anglophone Caribbean Islands. We will discover the beauty of the
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
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 170 H, ENGL 180A or ENGL 190
Few things compare to the exhilaration, the mystery, the promise of turning the first page in a new book. This course is designed to intensify that delicious feeling while at the same time introducing you to a new kind of textual awareness. Literary studies today is asking some fundamentally new questions, questions that challenge long-standing assumptions about readers, writers, and texts. Literary studies is also grappling with other questions about why we read, what we read, and how we read. We will not exhaust these questions any time in the near future. This course will introduce you to those questions currently shaping literary thought. In addition, you be given further practice close reading, and be introduced to a number of critical theories or schools of criticism. Our focus will be on understanding literary texts’ relationship to their historical moment of creation and their consumption today. Finally, it is difficult in most cases to figure out what attracts us to literature. In part, this course is designed to help you understand why you want to and must read and why you must study literature. English 200 requires several short essays, a midterm and final, a researched essay, and a final oral presentation. Writing intensive.
English 200 – Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180, or 190
This introduction to literary studies has two goals: to sharpen your current reading skills and to expand the range of reading skills at your disposal. To accomplish the first goal, we will start from the assumption that reading critically involves knowing the kinds of questions to ask of a text. With that assumption in mind, we will read works in a variety of genres (poems, fiction, drama), and we will identify the kinds of questions that lead us to the most meaningful and satisfying results. We will also take into account how considerations of genre as well as the features of each specific work help guide us in forming these questions. The second goal of the course, expanding your interpretive skills, will be addressed by covering a range of critical approaches that can be used to elucidate (and complicate) literary texts. These approaches can be broadly categorized in three groups: contextual criticism (including biographical, historical, new historical, Marxist, and cultural studies approaches), language criticism (including dialogic, structuralist, and deconstructive approaches), and gender criticism (including feminist and queer approaches). There will also be frequent writing assignments that will give you an opportunity to practice these critical perspectives as well as to sharpen your writing skills.
Writing intensive.
English 240 – Beginning Creative Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: ENGL 101and ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
This is a beginning creative writing course. It assumes nothing about the student’s previous reading or writing experience. We will take ourselves seriously as writers, however, and build from the rudiments individually, each at his or her own pace, and we’ll do this in four major genres--fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. By the end of the semester, students will have narrowed the field to one or two genres, turning in their best work, in their preferred genre(s), for a final portfolio evaluation. The balance of the grade is based on a journal/writer’s notebook, and on class participation. Class format is “workshop,” essentially group critique of student work as well as published—classic and current. All students will have at least two of their works edited and critiqued by the rest of the class. There are no exams; there may be an occasional quiz. Writing intensive.
English 240 – Beginning Creative Writing
4 semester hours
Rambo, Jody
Prerequisite: ENGL 101 and ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
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. Writing intensive.
English 241 - Beginning Journalism
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
This course will provide a basic introduction to the practice and principles of journalism, with an emphasis on newspaper production. We will discuss news, features, opinion and sports writing; interviewing skills, journalistic ethics, copy-editing, layout, and other related topics. Students will write regularly, and will be expected to contribute to The Torch, Wittenberg's weekly student newspaper. Writing intensive.
English 243 - Business and Professional Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
Most people in the business field will admit that writing is very important
to their jobs and that writing well is important to advancement in their
careers. The purpose of ENG 243, Business and Professional Writing, is to
teach the writing skills needed in order to write successfully in the
business world. The course will take an audience-centered approach to
writing using the conventional formats for letters, memos and formal
reports. Students will also learn to write bibliographies for business
documents and how to review and recommend improvements in writing by others.
Through the projects assigned in the class, students will learn an audience
centered writing process that teaches them to define their objectives, plan
their writing, draft their writing and to evaluate and revise their own
writing. Corporate teamwork and attention to detail will be emphasized with
each project assigned. Writing intensive.
English 245: Writing for Teachers
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
P rerequisite: ENGL 101 and department permission
This class begins with the assumption that our ability to teach is connected to our own desire to learn. In terms of writing, that means we’re very likely better suited to help others strengthen their skills when we’re actively asking ourselves difficult questions about how we can push our own writing to the next level. Since this is a class designed for prospective teachers and since good teaching often demands a familiarity with a range of assignments, we’ll devote our time to a variety of writing tasks including argumentative writing, analytical essays, and personal narratives. And so that we learn to employ these different options in a deliberate and productive way, we’ll do some reading in pedagogy and in composition theory as we seek to understand the particular struggles that confront young writers at various stages in secondary education. In sum, this class aims to develop your own writing skills while also giving you some ways to approach writing instruction—from designing a course on down to conducting individual class sessions—in an informed way. English 245 is a writing intensive course, and most of the grade will be based on your compositions; there will also be several exams and the occasional quiz to reinforce our reading in composition theory.
English 280 – British Survey I
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H, ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
In this survey for 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 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 290 - American Literary Themes and Traditions: American Gothic
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H, ENGL 180A, or ENGL 190A/C
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 and terror of what Melville called the “power of blackness” and the sublime mixture of terror and beauty. This course is driven by America’s fascination with Gothic literature, and with what can accurately be described as a Gothic revival in American culture. What is it about the shadowy, diseased, the grotesque, and sublime that so attracts us? What scares us and what spectral shapes do those fears inhabit in our literature. This course in the American Gothic is definitely not for the squeamish and requires frequent reading quizzes, one short and one longer researched essay, a midterm and a final, and a group presentation and bibliography.
Writing intensive.
English 290A - American Literary 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. Writing intensive.
English 309 BStudies in Victorian Lit. and Culture: Victorian Arts and Society
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Prerequiste: ENGL 200, 280A, or 290A
The arts Bliterary, visual, performing, and architectural Bwere exceptionally intertwined in Victorian England, and the aesthetic principles underlying those art forms reflected and often reinforced the culture =s notions about morality, history, religion, and the balancing of the personal with the public, desire with duty. Major Victorian Asages @ such as Ruskin looked at paintings and buildings and nature and saw the dangers—and the salvation—of industrial Britain; poets such as D. G. Rossetti were also painters; novelists such as Dickens and Hardy exposed social evils and inspired reforms with their novels; Tennyson contemplated scientific discoveries in geology and paleontology and tried through his art to define a personal, loving God; the great novelist Marianne Evans (George Eliot) was celebrated as Athe great moralist @ for her books while being marginalized in private life for her Aimmorality. @ While we will mainly study examples of literary art, we will also become familiar with Victorian painting, sculpture, theatre, and architecture and the ideologies behind the aesthetics, including the question of realism and the morality of art. We will also be touching on major themes in Victorian culture such as industrialization, class distinction, the woman question, and the interrogation of spiritual beliefs. We will read texts by such authors as Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Morris, the Rossettis, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Wilde. The graded work for the course will consist of short quizzes, two shorter papers, a mid-term, a comprehensive final exam, and a longer researched critical paper. Writing intensive.
English 310 - Savage Wit: Humor, Myth, and Strangeness in Modern Irish Literature
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitz
Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 280A, or 290A
When Oscar Wilde wrote that in matters of importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing, he stated more than a dandy’s doctrine; he outlined an entire history of troubled relations between English and Irish letters. Sometimes marginal, sometimes mystical, sometimes outright maddening, Irish writers have held curious and difficult positions in the canon of English literature. This course will look at a range of modern Irish writers known for their stylistic innovations in poetry and fiction. Our readings will begin with Swift, Sterne, and Edgeworth, continue through Wilde, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Joyce, OBrien, and Bowen, and conclude with the contemporary poets Kinsella, McGuckian, Ni Chuilleanain, Heaney, Montague, and Muldoon. Ultimately, this course will investigate how these writers have used that vital thing, style, to address matters of aesthetic and political importance. Writing intensive.
English 319 - Women’s Literature Survey, 1800-present
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 280A, or 290A In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf playfully asserts that “there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head”—about the size of a US dollar coin—“which one can never see for oneself.” So, she says, one of the good things that men can do for women, and vice versa, is to “describe . . . that dark place that the back of the head.” But we should do so not in order to hold the flaws one may see “for scorn and ridicule,” but rather simply to tell the truth, as we see it, about one another, from the limitation and uniqueness of our own perspective. “Be truthful,” Woolf commands college women like yourselves, “and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.” Women's voices have not been heard consistently, for a variety of reasons, in most Western cultures. Yet, this does not mean that therefore all women are victims and all men are monsters. Rather, we have all lost out on the truth of these lost women’s perspectives—the new ideas that those women might have been able to show to all of humanity, had they the chance to be heard.
Part of the goal of a course like this is to recover some of these unheard, lost, or forgotten voices of the past, from about 1800 to the present, and also to really listen to the voices of women writing literature today—focusing especially but not exclusively on the US. We will especially seek to see the ways that new generations of women—particularly women of color—have responded, sometimes critically, to Woolf's command that they be honest about the world they see, even if it is scary, even if it makes other people upset or even angry. Another part of our goal is to practice being truthful to the world as we see it, and to see it in all its richness and complexity, rather than repeating the stereotypes that our own culture today encourages us to see. That is why, in the second half of the course, you will be selecting and researching the texts for us to read. You will also help teach the work of your choice and compose a 10-15 page researched paper on the novel, collection of stories, essays, poetry or play of your choice. This course is reading and writing intensive, and will involve regular response papers or reading journals, oral presentations (students will be involved in selecting texts for us to read during the second half of the course, and helping to teach them!), two shorter papers, a midterm, and the research paper. Writing intensive.
English 330 – Major Authors: Hemingway
4 semester hours
Jones, Mary Ellen
Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 280A, or 290A
Ernest Hemingway was a football player, a poet, an ambulance driver, a father, a lover, a serial husband; a reporter, a bullfight aficionado, a suicide. Seemingly larger than life pre-mortem, he has, since death, become something of an industry, exploited by literary critics, publishers of posthumous novels, the tourist industry, and even the Gap. One of the most versatile of American writers, Hemingway became something of a 20 th century icon. We will examine a good cross-section of his writings: poetry, plays, personal memoirs, short stories, novels and journalism. And we, too, will write.
The course grade will emerge from a variety of elements: daily class discussion, two or three short papers, a longer, more substantial paper, and a presentation/discussion of the findings of that paper to the class. Writing intensive.
English 331 – Shakespeare
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 280A, or 290A
This course will explore the ways Shakespeare creates complex male and female characters in his histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. We will begin with the histories (1 Henry IV and Henry V), move on to the festive comedies of the 1590’s (Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It or Twelfth Night), then the great tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, and MacBeth, and we will end with the “problem comedy” Measurefor Measure and the late romance The Winter’s Tale. (I may make some adjustments in the reading after I learn which plays he class members have read or would like to read.) The course should serve as an introduction to Shakespeare for juniors and seniors, but it can also serve students who have already taken a Shakespeare course and are ready for more advanced work. Students who have taken English 180 Shakespeare on Film are welcome. There will be a final exam, several short papers, and a longer research project. Writing intensive. Note: For those interested there will be a Wittenberg trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada this fall.
English 340 – Advanced Creative Fiction
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: ENGL 240
There is 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 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. Writing intensive.
English 342 - 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. Writing intensive.
English 380: American Poetry
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 280, or 290A
Near the end of his life, Walt Whitman wrote a retrospective of his career as an American poet in a book called A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads. He’d tried this sort of thing several times before—defining the purpose of poetry differently each time. But in Backward Glance, he felt that he got it right: “Leaves of Grass has mainly been an attempt to put a Person, a human being (myself in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America) freely, fully, and truly on record.” The principle texts in this course are written in this autobiographical mode: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson’s Final Harvest, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Partway Back, and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Thinking of poetry as a personal record has its limitations of course (just think of the moody poems you wrote at sixteen), and some of the most influential poets in American literature—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens—scorned the soft romanticism of poetry based on the self and cherished the impersonality of the poem-as-object—a verbal icon, what one poet called a “a machine made out of words.” The poets in this course work the other side of the street. They’re not all that interested in high-art theories of objectivism and impersonality, and they certainly don’t want poems that run like machines. They write in the accents of common speech—sounding a little like “Brooklyn” or “ Boston” even through the printed page. They break open closed forms and experiment with poetic rhythms based on the body and the breath. The autobiographical and “confessional” poets in this course are willing to risk a little adolescent cheesiness if that method allows them to push back against cultural forces of shame and silencing and open literature to a wider range of experience: sexuality, illness, ecstasy, suicide, the care of children, the longing for God—the whole rag-and-bone shop of the human heart. Writing intensive.
