DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
Fallon, D’Arcy
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. As you make your way through these essays and articles by the writers, please 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.”
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
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 emotion 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 that 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 – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
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 – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
Askeland, Lori
Theme:”Begging, Borrowing and Stealing.” The quip “amateur poets borrow; professionals steal,” often attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot, suggests a potentially dangerous paradox. This course is designed to ask questions rooted in that misquotation: what role do copying and imitation play in the creation of new works of writing, art, music, and life in general? After all, writing in English really just means the re-arranging of the same old 26 letters of the alphabets into words and grammatical structures shared by most speakers of the language for hundreds of years. Likewise with most musical composition—there are a limited notes and keys available. So then what does it mean to write an “original” piece, as opposed to something that is “derivative”? What is “plagiarism,” and what is “allusion,” what is “sampling”—and are they different? These are the kinds of questions we will be asking all term. Obviously, we may not come to any clear consensus on these questions, but it’s my hope that by asking these questions you will: arrive at a richer understanding of your own writing/creative process, learn to think more carefully about how to ethically work with the ideas / words of others, and better understand the academic rules that govern this process for college-level writing. Writing intensive.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
Wilkerson, Carmiele
“…everyone eventually goes on a journey. You leave home and undergo trials and rites; you come back from the journey transformed…we leave home to find home.” (taken from Leaving Home) This semester we will study the act of leaving home mentally, physically and spiritually. The reading and writing assignments in the course focus on the theme “Leaving Home” and are 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 credits
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 provide 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 credits
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 credits
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 19th 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 18th 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 101 – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
Smith, J. Fitz
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 inevitable 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 101 – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 credits
Ravenwood, Emily
This course focuses on critical thinking and writing. In order to write the best possible description, argument, report or letter, one must be aware of one’s own perspective and that of one’s audience. To foster this awareness we will read essays by a variety of authors, and discuss in class both the issues they write about and the mechanics of how they do so. Students will then apply what we have discovered to their own writing. Since good critical thinking includes finding information one may lack to make a good evaluation or argument, we will also cover basic research tactics and how to find information using campus resources such as the library. Assignments will include in-class writing, three five-page essays, and one eight-to-ten-page researched argument. All formal papers will go through at least two drafts, and students will meet individually with the instructor during the term to discuss the revision process.
English 180 - So You Say You Want a Revolution? Literature of the ‘60s
4 credits
Michael McClelland
Prerequisite: English 101
The counter-culture of the 1960s and early 1970s inspired a creative explosion in many artistic fields, including fiction, poetry, drama and film. In this course we will read some of the most important writing from a tumultuous period in American history, including works by Richard Braughtigan, 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 numerous short papers, 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. Writing intensive.
English 180 - The Lost Generation
4 credits
Smith. J. Fitz
Prerequsite: 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 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 period and 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 180 - “Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Ancient Greeks Matter”
4 credits
Dixon, Kent
Pre-requisite: English 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 (Herodotus), philosophy (the pre-Socratics as well as Plato and Aristotle), and plastic art. The Greeks also, not to get too dewy about it, gave us militarism, sexism, slavery, total war, disenfranchisement, and 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 is Writing Intensive, with a series of very short papers, a reading log, some creative work, and two exams, a combination of objective and take-home essay. 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.
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English 180 - Literature and Madness
4 credits
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: English 101
If it’s haunted, freaky, surrealistic, or strange, it’s probably in this course. In “Literature and Madness” we’ll study 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 18th 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. No previous experience with American literature is necessary, but it helps if you like to read. Prepare to be surprised, fascinated, and possessed.
English 180 – From Benjamin Franklin to Barack Obama: American Autobiography and American Masculinities
4 credits
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: English 101
This course will focus on the way American male writers, from a variety of backrounds, have defined and approached their own stories and their own relation to “the American story”—whether viewed as the “American dream” or an American nightmare. Writers will probably include: Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Black Elk, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm X, Richard Rodriguez, Tupac Shakur, David Sedaris, Sherman Alexie, Barack Obama. This course will be reading-intensive and writing-intensive.
English 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies: Violent Modernism
4 credits
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: English 170H or ENGL 180A or ENGL 190
This course is designed to prepare students for advanced literary study. It refines close-reading skills developed in earlier literature classes, introduces students to different approaches to literary criticism, and develops a working knowledge of literary theory. The first half of the course is an introduction to modern poetry (with a glance back at two nineteenth-century poets: Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins). We’ll study poems of friendship, mourning, sexuality, trauma, and spiritual vision. In the second half of the course, we’ll consider the theme of violence and recovery in modern literature. We’ll meet a woman descending into schizophrenic madness (in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night), a traumatized combat veteran convinced he’s been abducted by aliens (in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five), a child burned alive by his mother (in Toni Morrison’s Sula), and a college-professor-turned-would-be-killer (in Don Delillo’s White Noise). At times, the violence of modern experience robs people of speech and the novels we’ll study are filled with characters who experience their lives as hollow, fictive, ghostly, and unreal. Some characters barely speak above a whisper. Others speak only in ad slogans, TV clichés, or the monotone mantra of Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim: so it goes. We’ll also encounter characters, however, who speak themselves back from the dead, authoring their own life-saving fictions. Finding one’s voice is more than a creative writing cliché in modern literature. It’s a way of pushing back against the voicelessness of deep trauma and recovering the promise of intimacy and shared expression.
English 200 – Introduction to Literary Studies
4 credits
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: English 170H or ENGL 180A or ENGL 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 some meaningful and satisfying interpretations. 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 involve testing out a variety of perspectives and assumptions in order to further develop (and complicate) our meaning-making practices. In order to give you ample opportunity to try out some of these interpretive approaches—and also to sharpen your writing skills—we’ll have frequent writing assignments including one 8-10 page literary analysis.
English 240 – Beginning Creative Writing
4 credits
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 credits
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: English 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, journalism as a profession, and other related topics. Students will learn by doing – expect to report and write regularly. Prerequisite: English 101. Writing intensive.
ENG 243 - Business and Professional Writing
4 credits
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: English 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 four projects assigned in the class, students will learn an audience-centered writing process that teaches them to define their objectives, plan their writing, and draft their writing and to evaluate and revise their own writing. Corporate teamwork and attention to detail will be emphasized with each project assigned.
English 244 - Opinion Journalism
4 credits
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequiste: English 241
This course will help you learn how to write newspaper editorials and a broader array of opinion pieces. Through practice, you will experience what it is like to be an opinion writer today. In addition to mastering the practical aspects of opinion writing, you will learn about the historical and theoretical as well. You will gain an appreciation for the important role that balanced, articulate, and well-thought out opinion plays in democratic society.
English 245: Writing for Teachers
4 credits
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: 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 credits
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 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 genres--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 period exams and a comprehensive final; two or three formal papers and several informal responses to the reading. Writing intensive.
English 280 – British Survey I
4 credits
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 - Early American Literature Survey I - The American Gothic
4 credits
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 Apower 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 309 – Studies in Victorian Literature: Saints and Sinners
4 credits
Inboden, Robin
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A
The popular image of the Victorian period is rather too close to that of the Queen herself: drab, prudish, and repressed. When we actually read Victorian literature, however, we find a cornucopia of life. Full of fantasy, rebellion, confidence, realism, generosity, neurosis, and luxury, Victorian literature is nothing if not grand. The Victorians are often themselves full of contradictions, too: great moralists who are themselves moral outcasts, sensualists who are deeply reflective on matters of spirituality, thinkers of all types who experience spiritual crises and overcome them–saints and sinners. This paradoxical blend of the moral/spiritual concerns with sensual/worldly concerns and styles will inform our readings of such writers as Tennyson, Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, the Brownings, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Wilde. Through a mixture of lecture and discussion, we will become familiar with the historical, social, and aesthetic qualities of the works. Graded work will include two or three short papers, possibly a mid-term, a longer paper, and a final examination. Writing intensive.
English 310 - Revolutionaries and Bohemians: Readings in Twentieth-Century Literature
4 credits
Smith, J. Fitzpatrick
Prerequisite: ENGL 280
In his hilarious play ATravesties,@ Tom Stoppard imagines the interactions between three of the century=s most significant artists and thinkers: set in Zurich, 1917, ATravesties@ 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 Abourgeois.@ 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 313 - African American Women Writers
4 credits
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and ENGL 290A
“It was not natural,” says the poet June Jordan about the career of, the indomitability of, the first African American woman writer in any genre, Phillis Wheatley. Stolen from her home in Africa, enslaved, and then treated like a pet, Wheatley somehow found her voice in this alien land, even seemingly conceiving of herself as an “angel of God,” speaking poetic Truths to powerful people, without flinching. “It was not natural,” says June Jordan, “And she was the first.” Wheatley and many of the black women writers who followed her managed to “make a home” for themselves in an alien culture, in an alien tongue. And, miraculously, they did so under the threat of a dominating philosophical world view that justified their abject enslavement and perpetual servitude. Like a knife at the throat of their very integrity, this world view continually imagined them, most brutally, as “animals,” or as sexually available “Jezebels” or Mammy figures, designed to cater to the needs of white folks—who needed to see black women as bereft of any independent imagination. “But Still I Rise,” Maya Angelou would sing, across the centuries, speaking with and for her sisters.
This course takes the word and voices of these women as its serious, inspiring focus. We will work to take an Afrocentric approach to understanding their literary tradition, exploring, along the way, the wisdom of communal art forms like folktales, music (spirituals, blues, hip-hop), and dance, as well as both male and female black thinkers—all of which will help set up a theoretical context for our better understanding. We will gain insights into the historical realities faced by black women and the variety of issues and themes that they have confronted in their literary works. We will gain a familiarity with critical terms and concepts that are most significant to working with African American literature and women’s literature, and a broad overview of the processes and problems associated with the development of a “canon” of African American women’s literature. We will develop skills for literary research and/or Africana studies. We’ll especially focus on the kinds of secondary scholarship that are authoritative in Africana studies and/or literary research contexts. And we’ll write extensively about the reading we accomplish and, in particular, each student will complete a 12-15 page researched essay on a work of literature of the student’s own choosing.
English 315 - Modern American Novel
4 credits
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 Amodern 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 A(turn) toward nonlinear and increasingly formalist modes of artistic presentation in the search for the new kinds of order@ (Pearlman, AModernism@). This term we will puzzle out this modernist pursuit of a new aesthetic to order experience and to find what Wallace Stevens termed Awhat 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 330 – Major Authors: Hemingway
4 credits
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 20th 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 331a--Shakespeare
4 credits
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280 for majors; junior status for non-majors
“. . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.; Seneca cannot be tooheavy, nor Plautus too light. Hamlet 2.3
Though Shakespeare himself made fun of categorizing plays into genres (in the voice of the foolish Polonius, above), his own writing falls into a wide range of dramatic kinds. Early in his career Shakespeare wrote mostly histories and comedies, later he wrote the great tragedies, and his last plays return again to comedy, this time deepened by tragic possibilities. In this course we will read a sampling of Shakespeare’s genres, from the beginning, middle, and end of his writing life.
It is always a challenge to make a selection of Shakespeare’s plays for a semester-length course: enough plays to give you an idea of Shakespearean themes, language, and his development as a writer, but not too many, to provide enough time for serious discussion of each play. So inevitably a Shakespeare course is a compromise. You may find that you’ve read many of the plays on the list, but you will also discover that all the plays bear careful re-reading – they are so rich and complex that each engagement with a play will be rewarded with new pleasures and insights. Moreover, you will find that the experience of reading many of Shakespeare’s plays together – putting them in context – changes your understanding of each play. Some of the plays in our list may be new to you – The Winter’s Tale, for example; some will be familiar, like Hamlet. I’ve selected them not only for generic variety, but also because of the connections between plays. For example, Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale all tell the same story about falsely accused women and male jealousy, but they do so with very different results. Henry IV, Hamlet, and The Tempest also make an interesting triad, exploring male power and leadership, father-son relations, revenge and forgiveness. I’ve added The Merchant of Venice, a “revenge comedy,” you might say,because it is problematic in many ways (including its genre) and a recent film usefully explores some of these problems. As You Like It and King Lear provide another fruitful pairing of pastoral comedy and anti-pastoral tragedy. Of course I’ve had to leave a number of my favorite plays off our list – Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, Midsummer Night’s Dream, etc. But you are free to select a play of your own for your final research project.
In addition to class discussion and some informal writing, there will be several short formal writing assignments plus the final paper required of all English majors (12-15 pages). Some of you who are Theatre majors may want to opt for an acting or directing project rather than a straight research paper. You will still need to hand in a written analysis explaining your work, but it will be shorter and accompanied by performance or other work. We will decide on all projects individually, in conference. Writing Intensive.
English 342 - Advanced Creative Nonfiction
4 credits
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequisite: English 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 help launch you on that voyage by studying, discussing, and writing creative nonfiction, also known as literary nonfiction. It’s a branch of writing that employs some of the same literary techniques that novelists use (dialogue, narrative, scene setting, exposition, story arc, shifting point of view, characterization, etc.) to describe actual persons, places, and events. You will study and analyze the many shapes of literary nonfiction, from the personal essay to literary journalism, memoir, and travel writing.
English 343 - Advanced Screenwriting
4 credits
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: English 240;Theatre/Dance 240 strongly recommended
This is an advanced creative writing course: it is Writing Intensive, and its prerequisite is English 240, or in rare cases, by permission of Instructor. THDN 240 (Playwriting) is strongly recommended, but not required, and is also acceptable as a prereq in lieu of Engl 240. 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 read and write several shorter dramatic works (plays) in the first two weeks of the course.
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, such as Syd Field's classic Screenwriting andTom Lazarus’ The Secrets of Filmwriting. Another recommended but not required text is the current screen writer’s Bible, Robert McKee’s STORY: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. I mention these in case anyone wants to get a head start over the summer, though the best thing you could do is write a couple of short plays. Email me for guidelines, suggestions, if interested.
A standard length screenplay runs 90 to 120 pages. That may sound daunting, but when you follow screenplay formatting, the number of words on a page of a screenplay averages out to around 200. So, a 110 page script is tantamount to about 55 pages of prose. The few that don’t finish are compensated with an appropriate grade. Steady wins the race, and making the treatment and other modes of development work for you.
There are no tests unless too many are malingering, not keeping up with reading. Participation counts for a lot. Dour as I may sound here, the course is a ball. And be aware of the Screenwriting Institute being offered this summer, taught by national award-winning playwright (Witt 2000), and award-winning TV writer (Witt ‘99) and Emmy-winning producer (not Witt, but West Wing). The emphasis in that workshop will be collaborating on dramatic television writing. That course would certainly serve as a pre-req for this one, or vice-versa.
