Fall 2014 Course Offerings
5:12 AM
ENG 203A: American Literature
Dr. Linda Joyce Brown
MWF 12:00-12:50
Core Humanities
Banned Books
Read the books you aren’t supposed to read! In this course, we will focus on American novels that have been banned or challenged by parents, school districts, libraries, or government agencies.
We will likely read 4-5 novels, some of which may be chosen from the following: Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye or Beloved; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Dorothy Allison. Bastard Out of Carolina; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Última; Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
English 301: Writers' Workshop
Dr. Deborah Fleming
T Th 1:40-2:55
Requirement for Creative Writing major
The major work of this course is discussing and critiquing students' own poetry.
English 310A: Literature for Adolescents
Dr. David FitzSimmons
T Th 12:15-1:30
Requirement for Integrated Language Arts major
Beginning with Jay Hosler’s highly publicized graphic novel Clan Apis (New York Times, NPR,Discover Magazine), we will examine a variety of young adult texts. We will examine graphic novels, traditional novels, short stories, and poetry. We will underpin all our literary endeavors with Peter Rabinowitz’s Before Reading.
Course Texts: cummings, e. e. Selected Poems. New York: Grove, n.d.; Faulkner, William.Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995; Hosler, Jay. Clan Apis. Columbus, OH: Active Synapse, 2000; Johnson, Angela. A Cool Moonlight. New York: Puffin, 2005; Rabinowitz, Peter J.Before Reading. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998; Silverstein, Shel. A Light in the Attic. New York: HarperCollins, 1981.
ENG 314A: Reading Gender across Contexts
Dr. Sharleen Mondal
MWF 2:00-2:50
Core Humanities, Elective for English and Integrated Language Arts majors
How does gender affect our expectations of others--and how does gender intersect with race, class, sexuality, and religion to impact these expectations? In this section of ENG 314, we will explore poetry, novels, and films from three historical contexts (Victorian, twentieth-century U.S., and twenty-first century Indian) to understand how gender, alongside other aspects of identity, shape the narratives people write and, in turn, how people are read. Assigned texts will likely include Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Richard Wright's Native Son, and director Karan Johar's My Name is Khan. Assignments will include short literary analysis papers, regular regular classroom participation in class discussion and occasionally leading discussion, regular reading quizzes, and two longer literary arguments incorporating multiple sources.
ENG 316HN: Engaging India through Literature and Film
Dr. Sharleen Mondal
MWF 1:00-1:50
Honors section, Core Humanities, Core GPS, Elective for English and Integrated Language Arts majors
In this course, we will explore the literature and film of colonial and postcolonial India beginning in the nineteenth century, when India was a British colony, through the early twenty-first century. We will focus our inquiry on how British and Indian writers and filmmakers represented the colonial encounter, decolonization, and the postcolonial social and political world of an independent India. This class will employ a critical reading practice which draws heavily on historical context for the literature and well as rigorous close reading of assigned materials. Assigned texts will likely include Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" and "Beyond the Pale," E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, excerpts from Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India,director Deepa Mehta's Earth, and director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti. Assignments include short literary analysis papers, regular classroom participation in class discussion and occasionally leading discussion, regular reading quizzes, and two longer literary arguments incorporating multiple sources.
English 319A: Modern Drama
Dr. Jayne E. Waterman
Th 6:30-9:10 p.m.
Humanities Core, Elective for the English and Creative Writing majors
From Chekhov’s trivialities, Beckett’s absurdism, and Pinter’s pauses to Churchill’s body politics, Renza’s white canvas, and Nottage’s triumph in trauma, this course will explore the key issues, ideas, texts, and contexts of European and American modern drama from the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The main focus of the course will be to analyze a wide range of plays from different periods and styles. Attention will also be paid to the cultural, historical, political, sociological, and dramaturgical aspects that surround and inform the works. Themes of gender and race, the tension of illusion and reality, and the crisis of the individual and the family will also be of significance as we explore modern dramatic sensibilities and discourse. In addition to the texts, the course will, where relevant, consider the adaptations and interpretations of the plays in performance and film. Assignments: Two essays, a play review, a presentation, class participation
English 322A: Modern Poetry
Dr. Deborah Fleming
T Th 9:25-10:40
Humanities Core, Elective for the English and Creative Writing majors
In this course we will study what makes a poem "modern" and discuss examples of modern poetry from Yeats to Walcott.
English 334X: American Studies Seminar
Dr. Dan Lehman
T 6:30-9:10
Humanities Core, Elective in the English major
What do we mean when we talk about a true story? How are writers, characters, and readers implicated when a narrative claims to be true? What is the calculus between facticity and imagination in literary memoir, reporting, and essays? Building from a deep interrogation of John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's controversial The Lifespan of a Fact, the seminar builds close and theoretical readings of such narratives as Richard Hoffman's Half the House, Terri Jentz's Strange Piece of Paradise, and other particularly American texts and films.
ENG 338A: Themes and Topics in Literature
Dr. Linda Joyce Brown
Tu Th 1:40-2:55
Core Humanities, Elective in the English major, English minor, and Creative Writing minor
Utopias and Dystopias
What would your ideal world look like? What would make the world unbearable? In this course, we will read and discuss fiction that explores such imaginary worlds, utopias and dystopias. We will read four or five novels, as well as some short fiction and nonfiction. As time allows, we may also examine one or more films, such as Blade Runner, Gattaca, or The Hunger Games series.
English 365A: Greek Literature
Dr. Russell Weaver
T Th 9:25-10:40
Core Humanities, Elective in the English major
In this course we will read some of the great masterpieces of Greek Literature. This particular semester we will be reading Homer=s Odyssey along with ten plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus: Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, The Women of Trachis, Ajax and Philoctetes; Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus, Iphigenia at Aulis, Electra; and Aeschylus, Agamemnon. There will be two take-homes, one on either Antigone or Medea and one on The Odyssey and one presentation on two of the other plays.
English 372A: Nietzsche and the Problem of Values
Dr. Russell Weaver
MWF 10:00-10:50
Core Humanities and Elective in the English major
We will be reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Conrad’s Lord Jim, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Dostoevksy’s Crime and Punishment, and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.Two papers and two presentations.
English 408A: Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Dr. Hilary Donatini
MWF 12:00-12:50
Elective in the English, Creative Writing, and Integrated Language Arts major
Love and Passion in the Age of Reason
The eighteenth century is often referred to as the “Age of Reason”—a time when philosophical inquiry and scientific discovery blossomed, when the human mind and natural world were scrutinized with empirical methods, many of which endure today. English 408 will examine poems, novels, and plays that both reflect and resist the rational and empirical—often in the same work.Texts will be chosen from the following list and are subject to change: John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, “Satire Against Reason and Mankind”; Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, The Rape of the Lock; Jonathan Swift, selected satirical poems; John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera; Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling; Frances Burney, Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World; William Hogarth, Marriage à la Mode; Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
English 418X: History of the Language
Dr. Deborah Fleming
Th 6:30-9:10
Elective in the English, Creative Writing, and Integrated Language Arts major
In this course we will read and discuss literature in English representative of different eras, the ways in which political history influences language, and the differences between spoken and written forms.
English 425X: American Literature
Dr. Dan Lehman
M 6:30-9:10
Elective in the English, Creative Writing, and Integrated Language Arts major
Native tales and legends; Colonial stories of the New World; Indian captivity narratives; true stories about slavery and brutalization; the stirrings of Enlightenment and the Revolution; the first ideas of the American renaissance. Read with and against these initial American stories, tales, essays, and poems. How did its early literature help to create and complicate the idea of America? These questions and ideas become the work of a fast-paced and surprisingly interesting seminar.
English 432A: Teaching English/LA Grades 7-12
Dr. David FitzSimmons
T 6:00-8:40
Requirement in the Integrated Language Arts major
This course will help language arts teachers with classroom management and instructional skills, as well as methods and strategies in teaching English in grades 7‑12. Course Texts: Burke, Jim.The English Teacher’s Companion. Fourth Edition;
Levin, James and James F. Nolan. Principles of Classroom Management. A Professional Decision-Making Model.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 230, 250, 287, PSYC 218, or permission
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