English 100 - English for Non-Native Speakers
4 semester hours
Erwin, Bonnie
As international students at an American university, you'll all spend this semester developing some personal expertise about what happens when globalization brings people from different cultures together. You'll probably spend a lot of time thinking about how language, customs, and other elements of culture affect your relationships with teachers, with other students, and even with your friends and family in your home country. The authors we'll read in this class are interested in these topics, too: some of them write about classrooms, but others write about workplaces, households, and other "contact zones" where culture shapes the relationships between people from different backgrounds. In this class, we'll work together to investigate these various kinds of contact zones. You'll write a series of papers that build upon one another: we'll move from summarizing and analyzing one author's arguments, to uncovering a "conversation" among several authors about a single topic. Finally, you'll develop your own role in the "conversation," making your own argument with the aid of researched sources.
The primary goal of English 100 is to help you develop your writing skills in English, as well as the reading and critical thinking skills integral to college-level writing. We'll do a great deal of writing and reading in this class, and you'll practice some of the most important writing "moves" you'll need to make in your time here at Wittenberg. We'll work on summary, synthesis, research, and argumentation, and we'll also practice fundamentals of structuring and support. Of course, we'll also practice principles for clear and formal writing in English, but you should keep in mind that your work on English grammar and style will continue throughout your college career. Nobody-including students who write English as their first language-can become "perfect" in grammar or style in just one semester!
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Fallon, D'Arcy
English 101 introduces students to academic reading and writing processes. You will develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills through class discussions 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
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
This course will teach the writing process through essays, extensive class discussion and workshopping, 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 requirements include four papers, class attendance and participation, regular journal writing and frequent in-class writing.
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
Dixon, Mimi
In this course, students will work through the writing process, from planning to revising and editing essays. Assignments will include close reading and discussion of books and essays; frequent informal and formal writing, both personal and analytical; peer-editing, and a final portfolio. 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 : Adaptations
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
How often have we heard: "The book was better than the movie." Was it really? Is it always; only sometimes; never? Why, why not? In addressing these perplexing questions, this basic English 101 course, Expository Writing, will for its content explore the nature of the two genres, the grammar and aesthetics of both film and fiction. The works will range from adaptations of an essay, a Shakespeare play, three novels, and a children's story. To wit: Kaufman/Jonze's Adaptation, Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet or Hamlet, the novels Deliverance, True Grit, and No Country for Old Men. Also considering (if we do Hamlet), the classic absurdist drama, Waiting for Godot, and Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Pursuant to plumbing these various literary and cinematic genres, students will be assigned two short creative writing projects-exploring dialogue and dramatic structure, and a short adaptation of their own. (Strictly creative work is not graded downward: it can raise your grade, never lower it.) In addition to the smattering of creative work, there will be four shorter critical papers, one longer one that develops one of the four short ones, a reader/viewer's log, and two exams, which will be a combination of take-home and objective. Significant time will be spent on mechanics, and research techniques and documentation…are a staple of the course. Screening "labs" will generally follow the 3 to 4:00 pm class, and there are two field trips stemming from the film and novel Deliverance, and it's not banjo lessons. (Intentional mystery; take the class to find out, or ask last year's class-who loved it!)
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Erwin, Bonnie
In this class we'll practice the fundamental skills necessary for successful college writing. We'll target core habits of critical reading and thinking that are essential to developing good ideas, and we'll use a variety of writing assignments to practice turning good ideas into good papers. We'll write multiple drafts of each paper, using small group workshops and one-on-one conferences to practice valuable strategies for revision. Grades will be based on four formal papers (a personal narrative, two analytical papers, and a researched argument paper) as well as informal writing assignments and class participation. Our readings and writings are organized around a theme: "Eating our Words." We'll examine the rhetoric surrounding food (its production, marketing, consumption, etc.) in contemporary America, and we'll focus in particular on how discourses about food intersect with important discussions of subjects like gender, race, and class. Food can seem to be merely an issue of "nature," because of course any animal needs food to survive. Yet for writers, food is more often an issue of "culture," and we'll investigate how such writing allows authors to engage complex questions about who we are, who we should be, and how we should relate to one another.
English 101E - Introduction to Expository Writing
4 semester hours
Hinson, Scot
Taking intellectual and emotional risks lies at the heart of writing. Testing your limits, stretching your intellectual and creative abilities, expanding the boundaries of your intellectual and emotional lives--this is the writer's project. You will only realize your full potential as a thinker and writer by doing more and better work than you ever thought possible, and, above all, by learning to take risks. This course provides you the opportunities and the environment in which to take the risks necessary for thinking analytically and writing well. English 101 is a composition course designed to give you intensive practice in the art of expository writing. The course emphasizes the writing process and the development of clear and purposeful, well focused writing, which addresses a well-defined audience. English 101 will call on your analytical and organizational skills, as well as provide opportunities for you to enhance your ability to design and structure writing and to improve your technical expertise. The course will focus on the conventions of academic discourse and selecting, integrating, and documenting sources. This course is also designed to teach you how to read and write effectively at Wittenberg. Also, it will help you to discover that reading and writing are not separate activities, but closely related ones. The course is founded on the belief that learning to read, see, and think analytically is essential to becoming a proficient, accomplished writer. Writing Intensive.
English 101E-Expository Writing: Relationships in the Age of Technology
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. Our readings will center around the way our social networking, our dependency on the internet, and our love of our gadgets may affect the way we think of ourselves and the way we form and define our relationships to other people. Writing Intensive.
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, quizzes, and a creative/analytical project. Writing Intensive.
English 180A - Demons, Devils, and Hellfire
4 semester hours
Incorvati, Rick
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
One way of grappling with the problems of irrational malice, unwarranted suffering, and general wrong-doing is to imagine a force of evil at work in the universe, and in the Western tradition, there is no more vivid way of conjuring up such a notion than with images of hell and its resident demons. Once we've labeled and put a devilish face on these energies, though, a peculiar thing sometimes happens: despite their associations with all things abhorrent (or perhaps because of them), some of us find ourselves, truth be told, more than a little fascinated with these diabolical ideas, and this preoccupation with things devilish has consequently been responsible for unleashing some conspicuously exuberant works of literary imagination. This class brings together a number of texts preoccupied with demons, devils, and hellfire including works from the medieval world (Dante's Inferno), the early modern age (John Milton's Paradise Lost), the Romantic period (William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), and the 20th century (C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce); we will also consider the substantial inroads that diabolical forces have made in some contemporary films. Throughout this course, we'll use these various depictions of devils and the underworld to see how writers have attempted to account for some thorny aspects of human experience, and we'll also devote part of our semester to learning the conventions associated with a variety of literary forms (poetry, novels, plays, film) and to sharpening our skills as readers of these types of expression. There will be three exams, including a comprehensive final, as well as several papers in this writing intensive course.
ENGL 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 and retro-noir. We will also look at the debt that 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 examine particularly closely the cultural work of these films and the questions film noir raises about the nature of masculinity, femininity, and homosexuality and their representations in film noir. The course requires a series of midterms, some short essays, and a comprehensive final exam. Prerequisites: English 180. Non-Writing Intensive. Of special note: While a specific time has been set aside for "lab" screenings, students are not required to screen films at those times.
English 180A - Literature and Spirituality
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
This course considers the meaning of the "sacred" in seven American writers: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, and Tony Kushner. What these writers share is an interest in spiritual experiences that release people from the walled-in boundaries of an isolated self. And they tend to stage that release in Golgotha-like scenes of shock and transformation. Only a few of the writers in this course are particularly religious. What emerges instead is a distinctively modern kind of piety that cherishes powerful elements of ancient spirituality ignored by mainstream religious culture: the subversive voice of the outcast prophet, the holiness of wild nature, the teeth-rattling violence of religious grace, and the neglected sacraments of laughter and dancing.
English 180A - "How Like a God": Myth, Epic, and Metamorphosis
4 semester hours
Smith, Fitz
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.
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 200 - Introduction to Literary Studies
4 semester hours
Smith, J. Fitz
Prerequisite: ENGL 170H, 180A or 190A/C
Introduction to the discipline and methodology of literary study. Designed to refine skills in critical reading and writing, to build a vocabulary of analytical terms and concepts, to raise central questions of literary theory, to introduce a variety of critical approaches, and to give familiarity with the materials and methods of literary research. Readings vary in different sections. Required of the English major and minor. Writing intensive. Every year.
English 240 - Beginning Creative Writing
4 semester hours
Dixon, Kent
This is a beginning creative writing course. It assumes nothing about the student's previous reading or writing experience. We will take ourselves seriously as writers, however, and build from the rudiments individually, each at his and her own pace, and we'll do this in four major genres--fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. By the end of the semester, students will have narrowed the field to one or two genres, turning in their best work, in each genre, for a final portfolio evaluation. The balance of the grade is based on a journal/writer's notebook, which requires daily work, and on class participation. The mix is about a third each: works, journal, and participation.Class format is "workshop," essentially group critique of student work as well as published work--classic and current. All students will have at least two of their works edited and critiqued by the rest of the class. There may be an occasional quiz. English 240 is WI. It does not meet the Gen Ed Arts requirement. It is pre-requisite for all advanced creative writing courses in the English Department. Pre-requisite for Engl 240 itself is Engl 101, and Engl 180 (or 170 or 190) is strongly recommended. It's not a good first or even second semester freshman course, though experienced writers have by-passed these prerequisites on occasion by permission of the instructor, based on a review of the student's previous work. Accordingly, it is not recommended for High School Honors students, though exceptions may be made: HS students, see instructor, as per above for freshmen.
English 241 - Beginning Journalism
4 semester hours
McClelland,Michael
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.
ENG 243
Business and Professional Writing
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 101E
Most people in the business field will admit that writing is very important to their jobs and that writing well is important to the advancement in their careers. The purpose of ENG 243, Business and Professional Writing, is to teach the writing skills needed in order to write successfully in the business world. The course will take an audience-centered approach to writing using the conventional formats for letters, memos and formal reports. Students will also learn to write bibliographies for business documents and how to review and recommend improvements in writing by others.
Through the four projects assigned in the class, students will learn an audience centered writing process that teaches them to define their objectives, plan their writing, and draft their writing and to evaluate and revise their own writing. Corporate teamwork and attention to detail will be emphasized with each project assigned.
English 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: Money, Debt and American Dreaming
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 170, 180A pr 190A/C
The average college student leaves four years of college with more than $25,250 in debt. The average new car purchase, on the other hand, is done today with a slightly larger $30,738 loan-and that on a consumer item that loses value the minute we drive it off the lot. Those educations and cars are both supposed to do the same thing, in a way: move us to where we want to go. Take us to freedom and happiness. Take us away from a nightmare vision of poverty, repetitive work and drudgery to a life of middle management success, 2.5 kids and a picket fence. Car commercials and college brochures promise us open roads and smiling futures; they are a great, open space for American dreaming. And the dream and the debt seem to go hand in hand: the dream makes the taking on of debt feel easy and smart; it's often only when it's time to pay that the shine can come off-and sometimes a nightmare begins. America has been a land of false advertisements, or at least wildly exaggerated claims, from the start. And it has been a place where, in the pursuit of dreams, debts have piled high. From John Smith's portrait of the US as a place flowing with opportunity and ease and Mary Rowlandson's negotiations with her native captors, to Thomas Jefferson's debt-funded Monticello dreams and Ben Franklin's ironic frugality, from Thoreau's cry of "enough!" at Walden Pond and Mark Twain's con men to Edith Wharton's New York city elite, Americans have been buying and selling the American dream--or being sold by it, as we'll hear from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and more. Writing Intensive. CLAC. Crosslisted with Women's Studies.
English 313 - Harlem Renaissance
4 semester hours
Wilkerson, Carmiele
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 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 319A--Women in Literature II: British
4 semester hours
Inboden, Robin
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A or 290A or 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 accounts 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, Rhys, 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 320 - Advanced News Writing
4 semester hours
McClelland, Michael
Prerequisite: English 241, Beginning Journalism
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 327 - Advanced Rhetoric and Grammar
4 semester hours
Mattison, Michael
Prerequisite:Â 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.Â
English 331A - Shakespeare
4 semester hours
Dixon, Mimi
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 280A for majors; junior standing for non-majors
". . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.; Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. Hamlet 2.3 Though Shakespeare himself made fun of categorizing plays into genres (in the voice of the foolish Polonius, above), his own writing falls into a wide range of dramatic kinds. Early in his career Shakespeare wrote mostly histories and comedies, later he wrote the great tragedies, and his last plays return again to comedy, this time deepened by tragic possibilities. In this course we will read a sampling of Shakespeare's genres, from the beginning, middle, and end of his writing life. It is always a challenge to make a selection of Shakespeare's plays for a semester-length course: enough plays to give you an idea of Shakespearean themes, language, and his development as a writer, but not too many, to provide enough time for serious discussion of each play. So inevitably a Shakespeare course is a compromise. You may find that you've read many of the plays on the list, but you will also discover that all the plays bear careful re-reading - they are so rich and complex that each engagement with a play will be rewarded with new pleasures and insights. Moreover, you will find that the experience of reading many of Shakespeare's plays together - putting them in context - changes your understanding of each play. Some of the plays in our list may be new to you - The Winter's Tale, for example; some will be familiar, like Hamlet. I've selected them not only for generic variety, but also because of the connections between plays. For example, Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter's Tale all tell the same story about falsely accused women and male jealousy, but they do so with very different results. Henry IV, Hamlet, and The Tempest also make an interesting triad, exploring male power and leadership, father-son relations, revenge and forgiveness. I've added The Merchant of Venice, a "revenge comedy," you might say, because it is problematic in many ways (including its genre) and a recent film usefully explores some of these problems. As You Like It and King Lear provide another fruitful pairing of pastoral comedy and anti-pastoral tragedy. Of course I've had to leave a number of my favorite plays off our list - Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, Midsummer Night's Dream, etc. But you are free to select a play of your own for your final research project. In addition to class discussion and some informal writing, there will be several short formal writing assignments plus the final paper required of all English majors (12-15 pages). We will decide on all projects individually, in conference (Theater majors may want to work our a project focused on performance or staging, for example). Prerequisites: junior status, English 101. 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. Prerequisite: English 240.
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 pre-req 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 City) 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 Blake 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. I will be in touch with you about this over the summer. Send me your email address. 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 the course.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 in the summer, 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, so I can be in touch with you.
English 380 - The Beat Generation
4 semester hours
Davis, Robert
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 290
I didn't discover the Beats until I was almost forty. I'd read Howl in high school (mainly because my English teacher had warned us that it was an obscene book). 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. In fact, 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. Repelled by the vanilla-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-On the Road, Howl, Minor Characters, Naked Lunch, Pieces of a Song, and Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems-grow out of these sources and explore, in the midst of suffering and despair, new ways of being alive in the world.
ENGL 380: 'Orphans' in Classic American Literature: From Huck Finn to Disney and Jane Jeong Trenka
4 semester hours
Askeland, Lori
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 and 290
The self-reliant American, picking himself or herself up by their own bootstraps is a central figure of US history and literature, and what better way to portray self-reliance than through an orphaned character? Nearly every Disney film to date has an orphaned, or at least motherless, child or animal at its center, and the storyline predictably takes its viewers on a trip from hardship to success. Yet, legally, the state of "orphanhood" has been much more complicated: the legal term for a child without a father was for most of our history the now insulting term "bastard." Enslaved children were legal orphans--they "followed the condition of the mother," and their masters could do with them what they wished. This course will focus on orphaned characters in great American literature by Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton and many contemporary texts by adoptees. We'll particularly focus on narrative theory, exploring how the adoption trope has shaped the origins in Western literature-Oedipus was, in fact, an adopted child whose tragedy was that he didn't know his origins, and so wound up killing his father and marrying his mother. Writing intensive, including a 15-page researched paper. CLAC opportunities welcomed. Crosslisted with Women's Studies.
