English 100 – English for Non-Native Speakers
4 semester hours
Staff
English for Non-Native Speakers is an introductory course in reading, writing, and speaking skills for students whose first language is something other than English. Course work will include essays, presentations, and a research project, but will be adjusted to meet the needs of the current group of students. The class emphasizes an introduction to American culture and college life as well as language skills. Departmental permission required.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
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 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
"Art is not meant to be polite, secret, coded, or timid. Art is the sphere in which the impulse to hide and lie is the most dangerous." Dorothy Allison, "This is Our World".
Taking intellectual and emotional risks lies at the heart of writing. Testing your limits, stretching your intellectual and creative abilities, expanding the boundaries of your intellectual and emotional lives - this is the writer's project. You will only realize your full potential as a thinker and writer by doing more and better work 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 semester hours
Davis, Robert
This course is an introduction to composition. We will cover many of the foundational skills of expository writing in class, and we’ll work with style and revision exercises from writing handbooks. But ultimately better writing comes from practice, practice, and more practice. Writing is not a matter of chance or good luck. It’s not a matter of first-draft inspiration. Successful prose in all disciplines is based on specific techniques any writer can master. We discover these techniques, in part, by analyzing prose we admire and by applying what we learn in that analysis to our own developing style. For this reason, I’ll urge you to become an active reader as well as an active writer and to study the essays and narratives in the course as a source for techniques you can use yourself.
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
The reading and writing in this course will center on the theme: “The Art of Memory.” We will study, through reading and class assignments, how memory is used in writing. The course will focus on the narrative, storytelling and autobiographical fiction. We will read short stories/articles by various authors as well as longer social studies of memory in fiction and storytelling. Because writing is the foundation of Expository Writing, this course has been designed to aid in your development into a confident, responsible and persuasive writer. This is a computer- aided classroom environment. We will write at each class meeting. We will use the computer most every class period. 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
(4) develop proficiency using Microsoft word to prepare essays
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 the epic Beowulf, and the novel The Dew Breaker, essays by Edward Said and Patricia Hampl, and articles that explore the nature of memory and the act of memorializing. We will also debate issues surrounding the theme of restitution; how do we make right the past, particularly when some injustice has occurred? In the process of exploring these themes, you will be asked to reflect on your own process of writing, expected to work through several drafts of each paper, and reminded of the value of careful editing in all writing projects. We will meet in conference, work together in small groups, participate in class discussions, and write frequent informal responses.
English 101E–Expository Writing: Writing What You Think
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Our primary goal in this course is, of course, to improve your skills as a writer of expository prose. To that end, we will do a lot of writing of various kinds, focusing on critical thinking, organizational skills, sentence structure, style, and argumentation. After a series of assignments of growing length and complexity, we will ultimately complete a short researched argument. Success in the course will depend on thoughtful reading, active participation and serious work through the process of revision as well as, of course, on the quality of the final papers. Writing Intensive.
English 101E - Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
In this class we will approach writing as having both a private and a public function. First, we will use writing as a means of personal reflection and as a way of examining and sharpening your own ideas. Then, we will focus on writing as an avenue for informing and influencing others, and we will practice using some techniques that can make your ideas more persuasive to a critical audience. In the process of preparing your writing for this public function, you will have opportunities to hone your research and writing skills, and you will read essays by some influential writers, especially Michel de Montaigne, who have successfully integrated personal reflection and a public function. The writing component of this class involves multiple drafts and critical feedback from classmates, and we will put the writing skills encouraged in this course to some public uses with multiple speaking opportunities.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Thomas, Shannon
E.M. Forster once said, ”How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” As an expository writing class, this course is designed, first and foremost, to help you develop your analytical and persuasive writing skills. E.M. Forster’s quotation will serve as a frame for how we will approach writing in this class. That is, we will write to learn about/develop our ideas, responses, and arguments as well as to communicate these ideas, responses, and arguments to various audiences. The format for the class will be heavily based on in- and out-of-class informal writing exercises as well as formal writing assignments.
The thematic focus for this course will be an in-depth study of American teen culture through the lens of gender. Some questions that we will address include: How do gender stereotypes affect teenagers? How do teen girls and boys experience their teen years differently? What are the central issues that affect teen girls? Teen boys? How are teen girls and boys portrayed in American pop culture? Under this theme we will read a variety of essays, and a few short stories, that address the American teenager.
101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Mattison, Mike
“What our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the ‘what might be said’ and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community.
-David Bartholomae
That’s a mouthful, yes. But, Bartholomae’s words speak to the main question of this class: how do writers “extend” themselves into the conversations that take place within different disciplines? To try and answer that question, we will talk about the various moves that writers make (the commonplaces and set phrases); we will examine writing from various fields and question writers from those fields about what is valuable to them; and we will write. We will write often, and we will write in a variety of forms. We will even write about our writing, investigating our processes and our results.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Theme: Begging, Borrowing, and Stealing. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Plato quoted the words of his teacher, Socrates, thousands of years ago, and since that time thousands of teachers have borrowed it, and sometimes just stolen it. But what do his words mean? To me, he means: in order to live a truly authentic life, a life we can really call “our own,” we have to re-examine our lives and ask hard questions of ourselves. Because it might turn out that we’re living a script that serves someone else’s needs, but not our own. So, ideally, in a liberal arts college, we learn to reflect on our lives and choices, to narrate our past experiences to ourselves and our reactions to those experiences, in order to understand what our lives mean, now, and how best to live our lives, with integrity, into the future. The
processes and questions we’re going to develop in this course will help you, because they require you to pay careful attention to the sources of the ideas you have borrowed, to make sure you can explicitly explain those sources and that you can discern their underlying goals, values, and assumptions even
(regardless of whether you share them or not). You do this work in order to figure out where you stand in relation to them. I will ask you to keep asking questions like: Who is likely to benefit from this idea? Who is likely to be hurt by it? What kind of world does this writer imagine, and do I want to be
a part of that world? What kind of world would I like to help create, for myself and, someday, my children? Which ideas have the most promise, to borrow and build on? In what ways might they need to be re-vised, for us, today? And, by doing so, you’ll be on your way to an examined life. Writing
intensive, includes a researched paper.
English 180 – A Sense of Wonder: Science Fiction in Literature
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Time travel, alien contact, alternate worlds, transformative new technology, and just what the heck is out there anyway? From Shelley to Stephenson, science fiction writers have always asked questions that provoke a deep sense of wonder. In this course we’ll look at some of the best of those stories, in short fiction, novels and film. We’ll discuss the elements of society that inspired and were inspired by those stories, and see if we can’t find ways to express the wonder in our own lives and time.
Course requirements will include several short papers, a final exam and a final paper. You will be expected to come to class having read the day’s assignment, and to be ready to participate in what should be lively and sometimes controversial discussion. Writing intensive.
English 180 – Themes in Children’s Literature
4 semester hours
Ravenwood, Emily
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
The stories we tell our children display many of our beliefs about how the world is and how it should be. This class will read a wide variety of children’s and young adult books from the past century, and analyze the themes we find in them. We will look for patterns that repeat over time, and examine what elements change or remain the same. We will read closely to discover what actions, thoughts, and ways of relating are supported or denigrated by these stories.
Class work will include reading at least one book a week, participating in discussion, a reading journal, six short response papers, a midterm, and a term paper.
English 180 - Film Noir
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Film noir, or "black film," has been variously labeled as a period in film history, a style of film, and as a separate film genre with its own themes and conventions. No matter how you define it, films labeled as film noir are "deeply unromantic" films that "take a sneaking delight in their displays of passion gone wrong and of murderous calculation confounded.” This course will examine the distinctive "noir" visual style and the characteristic "noir" thematics of lives ruled by an unkind fate. We will also trace the history of film noir from its origins in German expressionism and postwar nihilism, to its golden period in the 1940's and 1950's, and to its persistence through the rest of the 20th century in neo-noir (post classic noir or nouveau noir). We will also look at the debt these films owe to what the French called "serie noir," the searing crime and detective fiction of the 1930's, 40's, and 50's. We will also examine particularly closely the cultural work of these films and their representations. Our goals will include confronting and exploring film noir's and neo-noir's sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. The course requires weekly screenings of film outside of class on Monday’s from 6:00-8:00 PM. In addition, we will have frequent quizzes, several short papers, a long paper, a midterm and final examination.
English 180 – Finding a Place at the Table: Identity and Social Justice in Gay and Lesbian Literature
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Any group of people who find themselves somewhere outside of the mainstream will likely confront a common problem: the terms they use to describe themselves may actually be demeaning and self-limiting. Consider that before women could feel entitled to privileges like voting and higher education, they first had to see themselves in terms that did not restrict them to domestic roles, and before African Americans could challenge policies that kept them out of some restaurants and theaters, they needed to dispense with racist assumptions that disentitled them from such privileges in the first place. For over the last hundred years or so, gay and lesbian writers have taken on just this kind of work through their fiction, their plays, and their poetry, and in this class—the first of its kind at Wittenberg--we’ll consider some major figures in this effort to “find a place at the table.” We’ll read lesbian writers like Radclyffe Hall and Jeannette Winterson as well as gay writers like James Baldwin and Tony Kushner, all of whom have been creating—or rather recreating—homosexual identities in their work in an effort to challenge some self-defeating assumptions. Through these readings, we’ll ask questions about the received ideas that such writers contest, and we’ll critically examine the new assumptions that they appear to make about gay and lesbian identities. In the process, you will encounter some ideas about the way identities of any kind can be influenced by language and by narrative (i.e. the kinds of stories available within a given culture), and you will take a critical view of the history of sexual identities more broadly. This is a writing-intensive course.
English 180A19th-Century Literature into Film
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Since the beginnings of popular cinema in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, filmmakers have gravitated to telling stories already established in the publics mind. Early silent films recorded Shakespeare plays without dialogueit was only a matter of time before more recent classics inspired film versions. Immensely popular 19th-century British novels soon became standard fare for the movie-going public, inspiring the question, which is betterthe book or the movie? In this class, well explore the reasons that question may be misleading, as we examine the different ways we experience the two media and the different ways in which we judge the aesthetic appeal of books and movies. In so doing, well discover the ways that a comparison of a film version to a novel illuminates key themes and tropes in each. Authors whose works we will read and watch may include Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Several short papers/projects, a mid-term, and a final. Writing intensive.
English 180 - “How Like a God”: Myth, Epic, and Metamorphosis
4 semester hours
Smith, Fit
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
This course will introduce the student to the work of Greco-Roman myth. With intensive readings of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Metamorphoses, this course not only will consider the various stories and ideas that myths construct and entail, but also will work to question the more modern myths by which we live today. As a writing intensive section, this course will require a daily reading journal, several short essays, two examinations, and a final analytical paper. The course will emphasize student engagement with the readings and ideas, so class sessions will entail lecture but rely heavily upon class participation. The student will leave this course with a familiarity with the dominant myths of the ancients, as well as a broadened understanding of those myths by which we live—myths more naively known as reality.
ENGL 190A/C – Black Britain
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
This course will introduce students to the literary works and cultural history of English-speaking Caribbean authors who have emigrated from the Anglophone Caribbean Islands to Great Britain. In ENGL 190: Black Britain, students will examine short stories, poetry, political essays and novels as an entry point into the migratory experience that aids in the formation of a Black British identity for Caribbean writers.
English 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies: Violent Modernism
4 semester hours
Robert Davis
Prerequiste: ENGL 101 and ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
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 see 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), 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 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.
ENGL 243 - Business Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
English 243, Business Writing, teaches students how to write successfully for the world of work. Accordingly, in this course students will learn to use conventional formats for letters, memos and formal reports, use a conventional format for bibliographies, use the conventional structural patterns (superstructures) for resumes, brochures, reports and proposals, and learn to review and recommend improvements in the writing of others. We will study the audience-centered approach to writing to facilitate planning, drafting, evaluating, revising and defining objectives for business writing.
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 290A American Literary Traditions: Home / Economics
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
I know a family--mother, father, and child--that lives and works on an organic farm outside Yellow Springs, in a tent-home called a "yurt," on about $10,000 a year. And these are some of the most joyful and intense people I know. Like Thoreau, who said, "My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there," they, too, want "to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life." My friends are striving to joyfully survive and engage in honorable exchanges with others--and, like Thoreau, with a sense of the real cost of things--in time, in damage to the environment, to human relations, and to their own souls. But Thoreau was a man living alone, as an experiment, for a couple of years--my friends are striving to make this simple life work as a family with a child to raise, in a modern age, with many more "tools" to use, and be used by. ("Man is the tool of his tools," said Thoreau). We're (eventually) going to visit my friends on their farm, maybe even get our hands dirty, and read a lot of stories about houses, families, food, and money. The presence of women and children in a home or a workplace is often a marker of hominess and, in the US, of a certain kind of "domestic ideology"--i.e., a set of ideas about what "work" and "home" are, and how people ought to live their daily lives. It seems so gentle and warm, but recent scholars are asking us to take this ideology more seriously as a weapon of colonization, working in the heart of the family....which is exactly where we'll focus our attention. Coursework will include: midterm, two essays, a final exam. Likely books: Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1; Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple; Thoreau's Walden; Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories; Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence.
English 308 – Anarchy for the U.K.: A Study of Romantic Literature
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A
This class considers the innovative and challenging writing of the Romantic-era as well as the remarkable cultural events that helped to shape those texts. We’ll take the anarchist theories of William Godwin as our touchstone as we examine the reformist ideas that permeate writings of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical poet William Blake, the proto-Marxist Percy Shelley, and the mad, bad, and dangerous Lord Byron, among others. These texts will help us to raise some challenging questions about political authority, about individual identities, and about the nature of divinity. We’ll most likely have three exams and two papers, including one 15-page semester project, in this course.
English 319A- Women in Literature II: British
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Prerequiste: ENGL 200 and ENGL280A/Non-majors must have junior standing
In the last two centuries, the enforced silence of women in the preceding millennium has been broken, sometimes indignantly and sometimes joyously, by a chorus of important women writers. These women begin to give not only a feminine perspective on the "universal" (often mostly male) experience of humanity, but also their versions of specifically feminine experience. Many of the themes we will explore are continuations and expansions of those in Women in Literature I, but this course is not dependent on that one. We will be looking at such common themes as the domestication of woman into the private sphere, the stereotyping of women as either madonna or whore, the education of women, the repression and degradation of women's writing, and the creation of the feminine self. In exploring these themes, we will, I hope, recognize the roots of many of our own ideas about gender, both positive and negative.
We will read a broad selection of British, Irish, and Commonwealth writers, beginning with Jane Austen and including authors such as the Brontës, Barrett Browning, C. Rossetti, George Eliot, Woolf, Mansfield, Boland, and Byatt. Graded work will include two short papers, a mid-term exam, a longer paper (12-15 pages), and a final examination or project. Writing Intensive. Fulfills the requirement in post-1800 British literature for the teaching licensure track. Counts towards the Women's Studies minor.
English 327- Advanced Rhetoric and Grammar
4 semester hours
Mattison, Mike
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E and departmental permission
This course extends students' understanding of general composition; rhetorical strategies for reading and writing; the purpose of grammar use in the composing process; the manner in which language changes as a result of social, political, and cultural influences; and the ways Americans use the English language to promote change and progress through perspectives of American rhetoric. Fall semester even-numbered years.
English 340 - Advanced Fiction Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: ENGL 240
This is a WI, advanced 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 sub-genre portfolio, but some of the class assignments will be required of everyone, viz., short shorts, magical realism, and metafiction.
For eleven or 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. Conferences with the instructor every two to three weeks. 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 selections from a collection of novelle for discussions and models.
English 343 - Advanced Screenwriting
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
Prerequisite: ENGL 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 and Tom 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 you’re 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 the summer after next, taught by national award-winning TV writer (Witt ‘99) and Emmy-winning producer (West Wing), Lauren Schmidt—head writer/producer of current Parenthood. 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.
The only thing that can go wrong in this course is for the novice screenwriter to show up first day with little to no idea of what he, or she, wants to write. That can take up to two weeks, or more, and that will put you way behind. So, do some story work over the summer. Email me. I will be in touch with you.
English 380
The Literature of the Beat Generation
Robert Davis
Prerequisite: ENGL 200
I didn’t discover the Beats until I was almost forty. I’d read Howl in high school (mainly because it was banned from the public library in my hometown). And I’d heard Diane DiPrima read her poetry at something called “The Tribal Stomp” in Berkeley in 1978. I didn’t think much of the Beats as serious writers at that point: I always thought of Maynard G. Krebs—Dobie Gillis’ beatnik friend from the 1960s television program—whenever someone mentioned Jack Kerouac. Several years ago, however, I stumbled onto a collection of Buddhist writings by DiPrima 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 emerges from that discovery. Rejecting the bland conservatism of the 1950s, the Beat movement expressed a literature of raw intensity, a rock-and-roll mix of existentialism, transcendentalism, and working-class Zen. The primary texts of the course grow out of those sources and explore, in the midst of suffering and despair, new ways of being alive in the world.
English 380 – “Road Trip! Mobility in American Autobiography”
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequiste: ENGL 200
Emerson, that spoilsport, famously complained, “Travelling is a fool’s paradise….At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” Nevertheless, he, and many American writers have ignored the implications of this sage advice and have jauntily set off for some destination in the US or abroad, and recorded the experiences of their “sad selves” on that journey. In fact, travel in American autobiographical writing often becomes itself a means to explore questions of social mobility—of movement across class, race and gender lines. America famously loves the rags-to-riches narrative, the success story, the person who travels from a lowly social status to a higher one. We’re famously a nation of immigrants, of travelers, who have believed that if they move to the United States, they can achieve anything, and even become anyone, they want to be, if they are just willing to work. This, however, has sometimes proved to be a fantasy that real life does not sustain—and often people end up somewhere they didn’t quite imagine at the start of the journey. In the life stories we will read in this course, travel will sometimes involve cross dressing, racial passing, or some attempt to shed social status or stigma. The life-writing may come in the form of traditional book-length autobiography, but will also include poetry and essays, and maybe photography, film or graphic works. Here are some likely texts: Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, poetry by Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Ellen and Richard Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory, Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Allison Bechdel, Fun Home: An American Tragicomedy.
English 380 - Learning to Live: Contemporary Fiction
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 200
Why do we read? It isn’t a new question. We read to better know the world, to get outside of ourselves, to learn to empathize, to be entertained, titillated, interrogated, edified. Given the intensity, anxiety, and confusion of a post-9/11 existence in America, is it naïve to believe that literature can teach us something about how to live better lives in the 21st century? In Contemporary Fiction, we’ll try to answer this question by reading some of the latest fiction from around the world. We’ll read in a variety of genres, including magical realism, fantasy, detective fiction, and science fiction. To garner some idea of the kinds of questions we are asking in our new century and how fiction writers of our age are trying to answer them, we will explore a range of ethnic literatures in North America and writers from around the world. The course will include postmodern and contemporary writers like Louise Erdrich, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Edwidge Danticat, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Susan Straight, and others. Reading and writing intensive, this course requires frequent reading quizzes, reading journals, a series of short essays, a comprehensive final examination, and a final research project.
