English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Fallon, D'Arcy
Introduces students to academic reading and writing processes. You will develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills through class discussions based on a series of essays and short stories. As you make your way through these essays and articles by the writers, remember that the dictionary lists “essay” only secondarily as a noun. It is first a verb—“to try out; attempt.” In this course, you'll be developing your own voice and testing your own thoughts in response to the assigned readings.
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: Memory, Memorial, and Restitution
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
All writing is 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 experiences of your life. The course will include a personal essay, an interpretative/analytical essay, a research paper, and finally the writing of your own memorial. 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, to work through several drafts of each paper, and to remember 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 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
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
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 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 180A - 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 Mondays from 7:30-9:30 PM. In addition, we will have frequent quizzes, several short papers, a long paper, a midterm and final examination.
English 180A - "Our Vampires, Ourselves": Vampires and Vampirism in Fiction and Film
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
For millennia, creatures of the night have descended upon us to drink our blood, drain the life from us, and ignite our imaginations. Succubi, lamiae, great white worms, and debonair counts all want one thing and one thing only--blood, for "the blood is the life." Vampires have fascinated us from their first appearances as creatures of our nightmares, to their manifestations as the undead swollen with grave gases, to the reluctant, beautiful, and sensitive outcasts we find in today's vampire novels and films. This course will study vampires across time and cultures in fiction and film with a special emphasis on understanding what our obsessions with vampires can tell us about ourselves and our cultures. What explains our obsession with vampires? Why do we now seem to be seeing an epidemic of vampire stories and movies? Extensive reading will include John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Polidori and Sheridan Le Fanu, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, and Octavia Butler. We'll screen vampire classics like Nosferatu , The Horror of Dracula, and Vampire Lovers, as well as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Near Dark, 30 Days of Night, Twilight, Interview with the Vampire and others. The course is writing intensive, and requires a comprehensive final examination and self-scheduled film screenings out of class.
English 180A—Jane Goes to the Movies
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Jane Austen would probably be bemused (and amused) were she alive today to see the veritable entertainment empire that has sprung from her novels, which she self-deprecatingly described as “little bit[s] (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, [producing] little effect after much labour." In her metaphor she is a miniaturist, producing tiny portraits—but for over sixty years, her work has filled the big screen, with no signs of stopping any time soon.
In this course we will read the major novels of Jane Austen and view representative film and television adaptations of them. Not only will we learn basic critical skills for reading fiction and viewing film, but we will find that our discussion of the novels will be illuminated by the choices made (and not made) by filmmakers. We will also explore the continuing popularity of Jane Austen and her novels: what does the current boom in Austen adaptations, sequels, prequels, etc. suggest about our own society's values, desires, and anxieties? We will also examine Austen's life in various versions, as well as considering other fictions and films related to her work. The graded work of the course will include several analytical papers, a final exam, and possibly quizzes and a creative project. Writing Intensive.
English 180A - Making Romance
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
Prerequisite: English 101
A love story: the oldest story—yet the least understood? What are the narratives of love? Their conventions, structures, familiar gestures? Their deep underlying meanings? Their psychological ramifications? And how do these stories vary according to the one telling the story? In particular, how does the gender of the author influence the nature of these narratives and, in turn, how do these narratives influence our understanding of gender and the roles we play as men and women?
This course will provide a historical overview of the romance, beginning with the highly scripted “luf-talking” of the Arthurian romance and moving to the fragmentary forays into love in the postmodern novel. The course will pair male and female authors, continually asking how these gendered narratives both differ and concur. We will read such authors as Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, F. Scott Fitgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jeannette Winterson. Along the way, we will explore the primary poetic device for declaring one's love—the sonnet—and the ubiquitous prosaic one—the fairy tale.
English 190A/C - Afro-Caribbean Studies: Migratory Subjects
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
This course will examine major writers from contemporary Caribbean literature. The course will introduce students to the literary works and cultural history of English-speaking Caribbean authors who have migrated from their respective Islands to the U.S., Canada and Europe. In Migratory Subjects, students will examine short stories, poetry, political essays and novels written by women authors from Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti. We will look at their work as an entry point into the migratory experience that aids in the formation of nationhood for Caribbean writers of the African Diaspora. Possible authors include, Dionne Brand, Grace Nichols, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat.
English 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H or 180A or 190A/C
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 semester hours
Rambo, Jody
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Rainer Maria Rilke advises the young writer. This course is a place to ask, and ask again, this question. In this workshop for beginning writers, the aim of our collective project will be to generate short stories, poems, and works of creative nonfiction that dare to be artful in fresh, original ways. In this studio workshop-style course, students will engage in a series of interlocking writing exercises that will lead them from their first rough conceptualizations of a story, poem, or essay through its completion and revision. We will be incorporating readings by great contemporary writers into our assignments, to inspire creativity, as well as spark an ongoing process of becoming a writer by reading, for pleasure, first, but also with attention to how other writers form sentences, structure a plot, create characters, employ detail, dialogue, and figurative language to make their art. Students will exchange work-in-progress for peer critique within a constructive atmosphere - offering a testing ground to determine how each piece of writing is connecting with the reader, successfully coaxing him or her into a new state of mind & heart through each piece of writing.
English 240 is Writing Intensive. It does not meet the Gen.Ed. Arts requirement. It is a prerequisite for all advanced creative writing courses in the English Department.
English 241—Beginning Journalism
4 semester hours
Fallon, D'Arcy
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
This course provides a basic introduction to the practice and principles of journalism, with an emphasis on writing for newspapers. We will discuss news, features, entertainment stories, opinion and sports writing, as well as interviewing skills, ethics, copy-editing, headline writing, and other related topics. Students will be expected to meet deadlines, do frequent in-class writing exercises, and to thoughtfully and constructively respond to their classmates' stories. Grades will be based on stories produced, occasional quizzes, and class participation. Students will be required to write some stories for The Torch, Wittenberg's weekly student newspaper. Prerequisite: English 101.
English 245-Writing for Teachers
4 semester hours
Mattison, Michael
Prerequisite: Department Permission Required
An intermediate course in composition for prospective teachers. Students will develop their own writing, study key issues in composition and assessment theory, and review the history of writing instruction. The course will also give students hands-on experience in the day-to-day work of a writing class: from designing assignments to teaching the writing process, from understanding grammar to managing the paper load, from using computers to responding to student drafts. English 245 provides an integrative approach to the teaching of writing: students will study composition not as an isolated skill but as a crucial component in a complex process of literacy, a process that includes active listening, critical reading and effective speech. Writing intensive. Fall semester odd-numbered years.
English 280A - British Survey I
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180A, or 190A/C
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 role 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 periods and a comprehensive final; two or three formal papers and several informal responses to the reading. Writing Intensive.
English 290 - American Literary Traditions
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180A or 190A/C
“Writers don't simply look at nature, or into their own hearts, and transcribe what they find there,” Robert Scholes argues. “This is so because for them the very act of looking is already shaped by the art and writing of the past. Once we realize that all texts are reworkings of other texts, that all writing is really rewriting, we can see that originality doesn't mean creating something out of nothing but rather making interesting changes in what's been done before.” The technical word for what Scholes is describing is “intertextuality”—which comes from the Latin word, intertexto, meaning “to intermingle while weaving.” In this way of thinking, writers do not create their books out of thin air but intermingle their experience and ideas with other texts and authors, “making interesting changes,” as Scholes says, “in what's been done before.” The more we know about the literary and cultural materials writers work with, then, the better we can judge what they're doing that's new. That idea is the premise of this course. English 290 takes in a wide sweep of American literature. We'll study Puritanism, rationalism, transcendentalism and the gothic, and look carefully at the works of individual writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, and Louise Erdrich. But the goal of this course is not just to expose students to the range and variety of American writing or to cover its historical periods. I'm more interested in teaching students how to think intertextually about literature—understanding how writers play off one another as they re-work and re-write the literature of the past.
English 306 - Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture: 1590's London
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 & 280
This course focuses on literature, art, and the material conditions of life in the last full decade of Elizabeth's reign in England's great capitol. We will read works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Johnson, and a host of less well known writers, study the role of the theater and other popular art forms in this period, explore life "on the ground" in London, and otherwise drink deeply from one of the richest literary decades of all time. A reading journal, three papers, a midterm and final. Writing intensive.
English 311 - Studies in American Renaissance
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 290A
This course spans a brief period—from the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature in 1836 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. That period, the American Renaissance, produced some of the most extraordinary writers in American literature—Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Douglass, and others—although it didn't seem that way at the time. Charles Dickens had overtaken Sir Walter Scott as the most popular writer on either side of the Atlantic, and American authors, by and large, were brushed off as trivial and derivative, hardly worth the trouble. “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” the British journalist Sydney Smith wrote. Emerson steps into this debate with iron-shod boots, insisting that a genuinely American literature—based on democratic literary models, capturing American idiomatic speech, and nourished by the spirituality of nature—was just coming into being. The word “renaissance” itself denotes this sense of rebirth or reawakening. We'll witness this birth moment many times in the course—in the natural resurrections of Walden and Leaves of Grass, in the rebirth of Jonah from the belly of the whale in Melville, and in the reawakening of spirit in Frederick Douglass. But there's a dark side to this story as well, as there always is. The bloated corpses “resurrected” in Poe's stories, Dickinson's poems, and literally and horrifically on the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg bear witness to another kind of renaissance, the resurrection of the monstrous, a return of the repressed. This internal tension between hope and terror, resurrection and haunting, gives the literature of the American Renaissance its unmistakable shape and power.
English 315 - World Literature in English: Africa, Asia and The Caribbean
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101, ENGL 180/190 or three writing intensive courses and ENGL 200.
This course examines 20th and 21st century World Literatures from Africa, Asia and The Caribbean that respond to issues of identity, colonization and migration. According to scholars Pin-Chia Feng and Kate Liu, “As English majors, we need to know that ‘English' is not always British, and ‘America' -not necessarily the U.S. How about English Literature? British and U.S. Literature? In the past, maybe, but now in the age of postcolonialism—definitely no.”
In this World Literature course we will read selected literature from Africa, Asia and The Caribbean that share studied issues of the influences of colonization, imperialism and the quest for identity. Heavy reading.
English 319 - Stories and Theories of Their Own: Women's Literature II
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A or 290A
In a landmark essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich makes the case that all writers need to radically “re-see” the world in which they live, and, she argues, have all the freedom of a space of their own—the mental and physical space that Virginia Woolf called for 50 years before Rich—in which to ask dangerous questions, “to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.” We're going to look at American, transnational women writers who have used a variety of genres (poetry, novels, short stories, and drama) to tell their own stories—to re-name the world in a way that helps us to re-see our own worlds—and who, like Woolf, Rich, Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua, have written powerful and beautiful essays about what it has meant to be a woman writer in the modern world. We'll look at American and English-speaking writers from around the world and of a variety of races and ethnicities who have explored and sometimes argued with each other across the decades about womanhood, motherhood, sexuality, writing, art, and relationships, and survival itself. Writing and reading intensive, this course will have a CLAC option and a Service Learning option. WMST cross-list.
English 331A - Shakespearean Tragedy on Film
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A for majors; junior standing for non-majors
Is it possible to translate Shakespearean tragedy into film, that mass medium known for its happy endings, wordless closeups, and (often) shallow characterization? This course will give us a chance to explore Shakespeare's great tragedies not just on the page, but in production—on the screen. Though we will focus on the later tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra), we'll begin with the first play Shakespeare wrote, the violent revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (and the movie Titus directed by Julie Taymor), and we will end with Shakespeare's final play, a tragicomedy, The Tempest, and the new film of it, also directed by Taymor. We will screen and compare two film versions of most of the plays, by a wide range of international directors—British Peter Brook and Kenneth Brannagh, Americans Michael Almereyda and Orson Welles, plus Roman Polanski (Poland), Russian Grigori Kozintzev and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Though we will focus on understanding the tragic drama that Shakespeare developed, we should have time to theorize as well about tragedy as a form, joining a literary and philosophical discussion that has persisted from Aristotle to Nietzsche. This will be a discussion class, requiring several informal short writings and one longer research project, in which you will be able, if you wish, to branch out into other Shakespearean plays, other dramatic forms, or other films of your choice.
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" or “flash fiction”), 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 the portfolio of sub-genres, but some of the class assignments will be required of everyone, viz., short shorts, magical realism, and metafiction. If you're clever, you can work these sub-genre into your novella. Typically, by the way, most everyone does the sub-genre run; but if you're hankering to write a novel or a novella (50 to 15 pages), I don't want to stop you.
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 2/3rds on a final portfolio of work and 1/3rd 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 four to five 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 for publication 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 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 and the science essay. 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.
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. However, note that its prerequisite, English 240, may be waived, by permission of Instructor. See him. THDN 240 (Playwriting) is 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 acquire at least one screenplay (from $0.00 on line to $15 at Script Cty) 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 andBlake Snyder's Save the Cat. 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 play guidelines, suggestions, if you're interested. You Need to Think Up a Story (or three) this Summer!!! There is not enough time in the semester if you start out cold.
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 or less. So, a 110 page script is tantamount to about 55 pages of regular prose. The few that don't finish are recognized with an appropriate grade. Steady wins the race, and making the treatment and other modes of development work for you, and getting a healthy early start. Ask anyone who's taken it.
There are no tests unless too many are malingering, not keeping up with reading. Participation counts for about a 4th of the grade. Dour as I may sound here, the course is a ball. And be aware of the Screenwriting Institute being offered this summer and possibly in 2013, taught by national award-winning TV writer (Witt ‘99) (West Wing, 2005), Lauren Schmidt. The emphasis in that summer 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: that's the crucial prerequisite. Email me. I will be in touch with you.
English 380 - Madness, the Mind, and the Literary Imagination
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280
“There is no doubt that this poor man was mad,” wrote Wordsworth about the then little known poet William Blake, “but there is something about the madness of this man that interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.” Wordsworth's comment raises questions about what he means by “madness” and how it is that the literary productions of an ostensibly unbalanced mind might prove to be of greater interest than those by writers of a presumably more stable cast. In this class, we'll take up this question of madness, we'll examine some 18th and 19th-century theories of how the mind actually works, and we'll see how such ideas worked their way into the literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras. This investigation will take us through some gothic fiction (early and late), some poetry by the “mad” William Blake and others of his time, and some writing by women who seemed to ascribe a particular kind of madness to their own gender. There will be three exams in the course and at least two papers, one of which will be a 12-15 page literary analysis incorporating your knowledge of some 19th-century psychological theories.
