English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty
Practice in the basic principles of expository writing with a focus on the writing process. Regular reading assignments, lively discussion, peer workshops, four papers, and an abundance of informal writing. (Writing intensive)
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Ravenwood, Emily
This course focuses on critical thinking and writing. In order to write the best possible document, be it a description, argument, report or letter, one must be aware of facts, context, and 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 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 and general resources such as Google. Assignments will include in-class writing and five essays. The first three essays will be submitted, revised, and submitted again, and students will meet individually with the instructor during the term to discuss the revision process.
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
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.
English 101E – Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
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 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
Wilkerson, Carmiele
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 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
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 180: Literature and Madness
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
If it’s haunted, freaky, surrealistic, or strange, it’s probably in this course. In “Literature and Madness” we’ll study literary depictions of mental illness by American writers and examine literature that mixes terror and beauty—an idea that’s shaped American notions of spirituality, subjectivity, and creative power since the 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. We’ll read some old favorites—Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—but we’ll also stretch the notion of “weird tale” to include poetry (by Anne Sexton), photography (by Diane Arbus), and film (by Stanley Kubrick). No previous experience with American literature is necessary, but it helps if you like to read. Prepare to be surprised, fascinated, and possessed. Writing intensive.
English 180-“End of Days: Dystopian World Literature”
4 semester hours
Thomas, Shannon
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
What happens when the world as we know it ends? What society or form of government would take its place? What happens when existing social ills are taken to extremes in a not so distant future? What is it like to live in these new worlds? This course will explore these questions through the genre of dystopian literature from around the world. By imagining new worlds, and past and future realities, dystopian literature offers critiques of existing social conditions or political systems. We will read a variety of dystopian literature as well as reactions and responses to this literature. Potential texts will likely be selected from the following works: George Orwell’s 1984, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow, and Suzanne Collier’s young adult novel The Hunger Games. We will also read a selection of dystopian poetry and short stories, as well as one utopian novel, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (to keep us from getting too depressed). The course will likely require 2-3 essays, a midterm and final exam, and an opportunity to write your own dystopian novel or poem.
English 180: Literature and Spirituality
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
The writers in this course are all over the religious map. We’ll read quite a few Catholic authors (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Simone Weil, and Flannery O’Connor, among others); several American transcendentalists (including Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard); with two contemporary playwrights (Tony Kushner and Margaret Edson) and a Beatnik mystic (Jack Kerouac) thrown in for good measure. What these writers share is an interest in spiritual experiences that release people from the walled-in boundaries of an encapsulated self. And they tend to stage that release in Golgotha-like scenes of shock and transformation. In this mood, the strangeness of the sacred is a saving grace. The authors in this course don’t rewrite the gospel stories to make them hipper and more contemporary. They tend instead to reclaim the sacred from churchy rituals of jello molds and Easter hats and recover powerful elements of ancient spirituality ignored by mainstream religious culture: the fantastic physicality of angels, the subversive voice of the outcast prophet, the teeth-rattling violence of religious grace, and the neglected sacraments of laughter and dancing. Nietzsche said he would only believe in a God who could dance, a claim that several writers in this course take to heart. No particular religious training is necessary, just an interest in how an extraordinary group of modern authors experienced and wrote about the Divine. Tap shoes optional.
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 if relating are supported or denigrated by these stories.
Class work will include reading one book a week, participating in discussion in class and/or online, six two-page papers, and a term paper.
Some learning goals for the course are:
To gain skill in close reading and textual analysis
To become familiar with some of the vocabulary of literary study
To learn how to find cross-connections between multiple texts
To research historical context and existing analyses
This is a writing-intensive course. Students will be expected to already have experience writing academic essays to Wittenberg standards. This class will focus on increasing the skills particular to writing and supporting literary analysis.
English 180 – “By Any Means Necessary”: African-American Literature and Political Resistance
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 101
400 years of trans-Atlantic slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and a legacy of structural racism. Black writers in the “land of the free” have had no choice but to fight the power. Writing is, in itself, a non-violent act of resistance in a world that commits the violence of keeping some people in ignorance—but so were the spirituals that enslaved people sang in the fields, often containing coded messages of freedom or literal escapes. And while some black writers consistently advocate non-violent resistance, some used their pens to call for the sword. Or the bullet. David Walker, for example, printed an Appeal to black people in 1829 that justified violence against white people in self defense. (He was found dead on his doorstep a little while later). His friend Maria Stewart, was so radical that she angered both blacks and whites—and she was the first black woman to speak in public in the U.S., at a time when few white women dared to speak publicly (women weren’t even allowed to clap after performances!). Frederick Douglass justified stealing from any slaveholder, and called black men to arms in the Civil War. And then the great Ida B. Wells in the post-Reconstruction era wrote exposes of lynching that very nearly resulted in her death. And of course we’ll spend a lot of time with 20th century writers—Nella Larson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Loraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, TuPac Shakur, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison. This is a writing intensive course—which means you’ll write some papers, but you’ll get a lot of support. Can be taken as a CLAC course. Cross-listed: WMST and AFST.
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 Wednesdays from 3:00-6:00 PM. In addition, we will have frequent quizzes, several short papers, a long paper, a midterm and final examination.
English 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. The course will study closely an historical group, “The Windrush Generation” Caribbean men and women who immigrated to Great Britain in search of better lives for themselves and for their families. The course will ground class lecture in issues of migration and the politics of identity for the Anglophone Caribbean in Great Britain. We will discover the beauty of the works by selected authors as they lead us on the path of discovery into the world of literature, language and culture. This course is designated A (The student should gain an understanding of aesthetic experience and of how the arts enrich and express the human spirit.) and C (The student should gain an understanding of the diversity of non-Western cultures through a study of the history, institutions, or traditions of one or more of these cultures.) Thus, the course will integrate both the aesthetic and socio-historic aspects of the literature and the time period.
Course Goals
By the end of this course, students will have begun to
(1) develop critical thinking and reading skills
(2) develop an understanding of how geography informs identity
(3) gain an understanding and appreciation of the Windrush Generation
(4) locate the geographic region of the Anglophone Caribbean and Great Britain on a World map
English 200 – Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H or 180A or 190
This introduction to literary studies has two goals: to sharpen your current reading skills and to expand the range of reading skills at your disposal. To accomplish the first goal, we will start from the assumption that reading critically involves knowing the kinds of questions to ask of a text. With that assumption in mind, we will read works in a variety of genres (poems, fiction, drama), and we will identify the kinds of questions that lead us to 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
Fallon, D’Arcy
Prerequisite: ENGL 101 and ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
This course will introduce students to the essential elements of good writing, focusing on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Throughout the semester, students will read representative texts and study the fundamental elements of all these genres.
This course is centered around the “workshop,’’—essentially informal peer critique of student work as well as close reading and class discussion of selected texts. We’ll read and analyze, discuss and critique, but most of all we’ll be a community of people who write. Students will produce pieces in all four genres. There are no exams, but there may be an occasional quiz. The grade is based on a writing portfolio of one’s best, revised work, which will be handed in at the end of the semester. The rest of the grade will be based on a journal/writer’s notebook and class participation. Textbooks: The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief by David Starkey Prerequisite: English 101
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 newspaper production. We will discuss news, features, entertainment stories, opinion and sports writing, as well as interviewing skills, ethics, copy-editing, headline writing, and other related topics. Students will be expected to meet deadlines, do frequent in-class writing exercises, and to thoughtfully and constructively respond to their classmates’ stories. Grades will be based on stories produced, occasional quizzes, and class participation. Students are required to write at least one story a week for The Torch, Wittenberg’s weekly student newspaper. Prerequisite: English 101.
English 242: Writing Center Theory and Practice.
4 semester hours
Mattison, Michael
Prerequisite: English 101. By permission of instructor only.
Emphasis on writing processes, interpersonal dynamics, questioning techniques, evaluation of writing-in-progress, and rhetorical theory as it pertains to working one-to-one with writers. This course, designed primarily to prepare writing advisors for the Wittenberg Writing Center, includes a practicum. Writing intensive. Every year.
English 280 - British Survey I
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180, or 190
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 periods and a comprehensive final; two or three formal papers and several informal responses to the reading. Writing Intensive.
English 290 - Early American Literature I-the American Gothic in Poetry, Fiction & Film
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, ENGL 180A or ENGL 190A/C
Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, that ARomance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture, made possible the sometimes safe and other times risky embrace of quite specific, understandably human, fears: Americans= fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; their fear of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; their fear of the absence of so-called civilization; their fear of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of freedom-the thing they coveted most@ (37). Morrison=s comments serve practically as a definition of the American Gothic. 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 the terror of what Melville called the Apower of blackness,@ Included in the course are works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, Raymond Carver, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Chestnutt, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Anne Rice, Don DeLillo, and many others. We=ll also consider contemporary expressions of the Gothic in such films as Francis Ford Coppola=s Dracula, Alien, and Blue Velvet. Writing and reading intensive, the course requires two long essays, a midterm and final, and in-class presentations, and is definitely not for the squeamish.
English 305 Medieval Literature: World Upside-Down: The Triumph of the Body in a Spiritual Age
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A
This course will explore the comic underside of the Christian Middle Ages. Like the often obscene or mocking images in the far corners of the cathedral or on the edges of sacred texts, medieval literature often inverts or parodies the official and serious culture of the period, opposing to it what the 20th century theorist Bakhtin calls the “carnivalesque” laughter of the folk. We will read texts from the twelfth-century “renaissance” to the beginnings of the early modern period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The course may include the following works: Marie de France’s Lais, Tristan and Isolde, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Rabelais’ Gargantua, Don Quixote, and The Taming of the Shrew. There will be some short papers and presentations, a research project, and a final medieval banquet.
English 310-Ulysses on Bond Street
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitz
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and ENGL 280A
Can we read a city? This question haunted many twentieth-century thinkers as they witnessed what was, in effect, a radical transformation of urban life. Artists around the world struggled to understand the new ideas and complexities of ‘modern life’, and literature found itself at the vanguard of this struggle. Writing in the aftermath of World War I, James Joyce and Virgina Woolf sought, in very different ways, to give voice to the modern city; in often anatomizing detail, these modernists inspected the many layers of the city. Joyce bragged after the publication of Ulysses that, were Dublin to be destroyed, we could rebuild it from the pages of his novel. Three years after the publication of Ulysses, Virginia Woolf responded to Joyce’s novel with a city of her own, set in London, Mrs. Dalloway approaches the city from a very different vantage point, but nevertheless asks the question that will inform our course: What is the relationship between the modern city and the modern novel.
In considering this question, this course will study closely two crowning literary achievements of the English modern novel: Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. To complement these close studies, we will draw from other contemporary writers—T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Djuna Barnes. Our conversation s will range widely and introduce the reader to the major ideas crisscrossing the complicated concept of ‘Modernism’. With daily journal entries, sustained analytical essays, and a series of group presentations, the course projects will equip the student to leave the course with a sound mastery of the challenges faced by readers of the modernist novel as well as an appreciation for the legacy that Modernism has bestowed.
ENGL 313-Harlem Renaissance
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ANGL 200 and ENGL 290A
The core ideals of the Harlem Renaissance fueled an ideological movement brought about by a keen political awareness of the oppression and inequity that Blacks faced in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance used this awareness as a tool to reach a large audience of Black and white Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was an era of enormous literary production written by and about Black Americans.
By the end of this course, students will
(1) recognize major writers of the period
(2) develop an understanding of how race informs literary identity
(3) be acquainted with a selection of women writers of the period
(4) have further advanced skills in critical reading, thinking and writing
English 318 Bad Girls: From Eve to Mary (Wollstonecraft)
4 semester hours
Richards, Cynthia
Prerequsite: ENGL200 and ENGL280A/Non-majors must have junior standing
This course will examine the work of women writers from the medieval period to the early nineteenth century and will be organized around the most common tropes by which a woman becomes a “bad girl.” I am sure you know those “tropes” already, but to remind you (and to use their less vulgar incarnations) they are: the fallen woman, the shrew, the prostitute, the coquette, and the promiscuous woman. The course will begin by looking at the original “bad girl,” Eve, and will examine in detail a period of particularly virulent misogynist attacks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all played out through an examination of Eve’s original transgression. We will look at the feminist responses to these debates, including—I would argue—Milton’s representation of Eve in Paradise Lost. We will then go back to discuss the shrew or masculinized woman, starting with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe’s account of her spiritual life and concluding in Margaret Cavendish’s early foray into science fiction The Blazing World (1665). We will then move on to the figure of the prostitute, focusing primarily on the Restoration stage and the work of Aphra Behn. From there, we will examine the coquette or the tease, a figure of womanhood intrinsically connected—interestingly enough—with the birth and development of the novel in the eighteenth century. We will conclude with the figure of the promiscuous woman, focusing on the overtly feminist work of Mary Wollstonecraft and how that intersected with the complexities of her own romantic history. As a coda to the class, we will look at two early nineteenth-century novels, Emma and Frankenstein, one written by a “good girl”—Jane Austen—and another written by a “bad girl”—Mary Shelley—and examine how the “bad girl” goes underground in both these novels, with one experiencing a happy ending and the other a tragic one.
The course will include a midterm and final, one shorter paper (@five pages) and one researched paper (12-15 pages.) There will also be response papers along the way and the research paper will include a personal component. Writing Intensive.
English 320 – Advanced News Writing
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: ENGL 240
This course will focus on honing the skills needed for a career in journalism, with a heavy focus on producing publication-quality work. Areas covered will include advanced news reporting and writing techniques, investigative journalism, editing, layout, writing for on-line publication, the state of American journalism today, and journalistic ethics and related issues. We will learn by doing—in addition to regularly assigned stories, the class will produce and publish its own magazine. Students will be in charge of every phase of this, from generating ideas to distributing the finished product. In addition, each student will be expected to do an outside internship at Wittenberg’s Torch or a comparable journalistic organization.
This course is designed for students serious about pursuing a career in journalism or a related field. The course is, obviously, writing intensive.
English 341 – Advanced Poetry
4 semester hours
Rambo, Jody
Prerequisite: ENGL 240
If poems are, as Jorie Graham writes, “records of true risks taken by the soul of the speaker” then the intent of this advanced writing course in poetry is to create the conditions for taking such risks. The course will be composed of equal parts reading and writing poetry to introduce students to developments in contemporary poetry and to help them develop further their craft. Students will also explore different forms of poetry such as the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, along with free verse and prose poems. Regular writing workshops, a poet’s notebook, diverse reading assignments, and a final manuscript. Prerequisite: English 240 or instructor’s permission.
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. Textbook: Creating Nonfiction, Becky Bradway and Doug Hesse. Prerequisite: English 240.
English 380 - The Epic
4 semester hours
Buckman, Ty
Prerequisite: ENGL 200
This course is designed to introduce students to arguably the greatest genre of western literature, the epic poem. In our search for the essential elements of the genre we will range across the millennia, from the five thousand year old Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to John Milton’s towering seventeenth- century poem Paradise Lost, visiting in between Homer’s Iliad, key sections of the Torah and the New Testament, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Icelandic Egil’s Saga, the Italian tradition from Dante through Tasso, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The works we will read are not only fascinating on their own terms, but they also warrant attention for their profound influence on western art. A walk through the Louvre (not part of the course, alas!) or a perusal of the footnotes in any literature anthology will indicate how the stories told by Homer and Virgil and Dante have echoed for centuries, inspiring Titian no less than Shakespeare, Walcott no less than Eliot. Indeed, one of the questions we will ask of these texts is why they have appealed to the sensibilities of so many different cultures in so many different periods. The work of the course will include substantial reading, two papers, a seminar presentation, and a final exam. (Writing intensive)
English 380 — The Essay: Writing at Work in the World
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 200
Writers have used any and all genres of literature to promote reforms of one sort or another, but the essay seems to be the genre of choice for people bent on shaping the world in their own fashion. From the biting satire of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” to the revisionist history of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to the theological reflection of Martin Luther King, Jr’’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the essay has been the means for writers to march out into the world, focus a beam of light on contradiction, and challenge readers to think in a new key. This course takes up the essay of social reform as practiced by British and American writers as we challenge ourselves to become more critical readers and writers in this genre. We’ll see what some sociologists and psychologists can teach us about the way people are moved to rethink their positions—and perhaps even act—and we’ll also consider the way that the essay is being reshaped with the proliferation of blogging. There will be two tests and plenty of opportunities to sharpen your own skills in essay composition.
English 403 – Special Projects in Creative Writing
4 semester hours
McClelland, Mac
Prerequisite: Department Permission
Special Projects in Creative Writing offers serious creative writing students an opportunity to produce a significant piece in their chosen genre, whether that be fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or screenwriting. Using both extensive class workshopping and regular meetings with the professor, students will produce a project of their own design, for example, a novella or novel section, a collection of related short stories, or a theme-driven collection of poems. Admission to the course is based on a writing sample and a brief written project proposal.
