DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS FOR
SPRING 2004
(excluding ENG 101, 102, 105, 203, 204, 205)
The undergraduate major program in
English requires students to take ENG 330 (Text & Context), one Language module
course (210, 211 or 310), four 300-level Literature modules courses (two in
British Literature, two in American Literature), and four additional courses
from the Area modules, at least two of which must be drawn from one Area
module. In addition, all majors must complete a one-hour capstone
course, taken concurrently with an Area module course. The Area modules
are: Literature, Film & Media, Writing, Imaginative Writing, Language
Study, Theory, Education. A complete description of the English major
is available in the English Advising Office (1227 The English Advising Office in The English Advising Office will be
open Monday – Friday, from
Note on registration for writing
courses (ENG 207, 305, 407, 507, and 607): Students wishing to take these courses should advance
register for them and attend the first class meetings. These students should be aware, however,
that (as stated in the UK Catalog) ultimate enrollment in the courses will be
by consent of instructor, given after the first class meeting
(thus, registration for the course does not guarantee a place on the final
roll). ENG 207-001 M BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING:
POETRY Description
not available at time of publication.
Please contact the instructor or check back here for updated
information. ENG 207-002 M BEGINNING
WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION “Gurney Students will
be invited to read their work aloud in class for practice and for gentle
critique by fellow students. English
207 Fiction is an introductory course that prepares students for the more
advanced English 407 and 507 creative writing courses. ENG 207-003 T BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION This is an introductory undergraduate course designed to
explore the writing of fiction, especially the short story. Students will
focus on the essential elements of fiction, including imagery, voice,
character, setting, the use of language, and narrative form. At times we will
draw on the rich genres of poetry and drama to enhance our discussions of
language, imagery, and dialogue. Students will look at both traditional and
experimental story forms, will explore these forms in their own writing, and
will participate fully in a supportive workshop setting, giving and receiving
thoughtful criticism, which will be used as a basis for revision. This is a
writing class, and that will be our focus, but since reading and writing are
a symbiotic pair, each essential to the other, we will also take close,
analytical look at published work, seeking to understand the forms and
unravel the process of creation. The class will be organized as a writing
workshop, in which you will have a chance to present your own work, and also
the opportunity to critique the work of your peers. You will be expected not
only to take your own work seriously, but also to give fair, constructive and
helpful feedback to the other students in the class. ENG 207-004 R BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: Description
not available at time of publication.
Please contact the instructor or check back here for updated
information. ENG 211-001 MW ENG 211-002 TR ENG 211-003 TR INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I This course will introduce and explore the forms and
structures of human language, how they are similar, how they are recorded,
and how they can change over time.
Significant sections of the course will cover: –human
speech sounds and how they are used (Why, for instance is ‘blaps’ a possible English
word, but not ‘bspla’? Why is the ‘s’
at the end of ‘leaves’ actually pronounced as a ‘z’?) –word-formation
(Why can we form ‘reality’ out of ‘real + ity’ and ‘sanity’ out of ‘sane +
ity’, but not ‘dearity’ out of ‘dear + ity?) –sentence
structure (Why is ‘pretty women and horses’ ambiguous? How are the two phrases in ‘looking sharp,
looking for love’ different?) Students
can expect daily homework assignments designed to enable them to understand
linguistic forms, and to deduce linguistic structures by applying methods of
structural analysis to data drawn from a variety of languages. Test formats will generally be based on the
homework. ENG 211-401 TR INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I This course is an introduction to the nature and
classification of language and to the methods used in contemporary linguistic
science to analyze and describe languages, with attention to the practical
application of linguistics. ENG 211-402 TR INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I SCOPE of the course: Linguistics is the scientific
study of human language as a system. Everyone knows a
language but what does it mean to know a language? How are
languages different from one another? How are they similar? This course
introduces students to the various fascinating sub-fields of linguistics,
focusing on the structure of human language (phonology, morphology, syntax),
selected writing systems, and historical linguistics, including the
historical development of the English language. GOALS of the course: 1) To demonstrate the recurring
structural patterns of language as a symbolic system. These regularities are
found in every language, and occur at all levels of structure (phonology,
morphology, syntax). 2) To illustrate the use and usefulness of linguistic
approaches to language in the course of our everyday life: from learning how
infants acquire their first language to understanding how we use language to
communicate and miscommunicate with one another to understanding the
complexities involved in the interaction of language and technology (eg.
voice-activated products, machine translation, etc). METHOD: Daily quizlets; quizzes on individual chapters;
exams on related chapters; frequent analytical exercises from the Workbook to
reinforce what has been learned in class. No cumulative mid-term or final. TEXTS: Contemporary Linguistics, William O’Grady,
et al; 4th edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s. Study Guide to
accompany Contemporary Linguistics, same publisher. ENG 212-001 TR ENG 212-002 TR INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS II PREREQUISITE: ENG/LIN 211 completed in Fall 2002 only. PURPOSE
of the course: To expand students’ knowledge of linguistics as an
academic discipline through a study of various sub-fields of Applied Linguistics,
focusing on the main issues and problems of interest in semantics, first and
second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics,
sociolinguistics, and animal communication. GOAL of
the course: To demonstrate how language is acquired and used as a
system communication. LEARNING
OBJECTIVE: The student will be able to analyze language data, formulate and
test hypotheses, and argue persuasively for one solution over another. These
skills will be developed by doing linguistic analyses: discovering patterns
of acquisition and use in data drawn from English and a variety of foreign
languages. Learning to do this kind of analysis is the most important
part of the course. METHOD:
Daily quizlets; quizzes on individual chapters; exams on related chapters;
frequent analytical exercises to reinforce what has been learned in class. No
cumulative mid-term or final. TEXTS: Contemporary
Linguistics, William O’Grady, et al; 4th edition. Bedford/St.
Martin’s; the Workbook is NOT required for this course. 1) No
overrides will be given for this course. 2) A
section of ENG/LIN 212 will be offered during the 4-Week Summer Session. ENG 230-001 TR
INTRODUCTION TO
LITERATURE: CONNECTIONS - Theatre of the Absurd. A close examination of some seminal works of the absurd theater and of its sources. Plays by Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and
Genet. The literary and intellectual
roots of the absurd in dada, symbolism, surrealism and silent film. Absurdist
drama brought the forces of the unconscious and the irrational to the
stage, creating a different dramatic form to express them. Absurdist drama
depicted the individual suffering loss of identity and an inability to
achieve a relatedness in a world
increasingly atomized, mechanized, and depersonalized. Three papers, mid-term and final. ENG 230-002 TR INTRODUCTION
TO LITERATURE: MADNESS IN MODERN LITERATURE This course will examine representations of madness in twentieth
century American and British Literature.
Through the chosen texts and supplemental handouts, we will explore
the development of popular conceptions of what it means to be “mentally ill”
and the ramifications of a variety of terminologies, such as: madness,
lunacy, neurosis, psychosis, idiocy, and insanity. This is not to suggest
that we will be “diagnosing” the characters of these texts, but that we will
be discussing the ways in which mental illness has changed from the “stark
raving lunatic” to the “medicated Everyman.” Ultimately, this class seeks to
discover the social implications of the continuously changing definitions of
madness. Some of the questions this course will consider include: How have
our cultural perceptions of mental illness changed over time? What have been
the sources of stigma related to mental illness, and how current and
persistent are they? How does literature perpetuate and/or counteract this
stigma? How have representations of treatment and their relative “successes”
historically reflected perceptions of mental illness? ENG 230-003 MWF INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: WAR IN LITERATURE AND FILM Move over, CNN, Fox News, History Channel! An
investigation, based on readings and film screenings of the moral and
cultural paradoxes of war: why, for instance, are nations most united and
inspired just before they set out to destroy other nations? Why is it that
stories of war—studies of destroying other civilizations or cultures—so often
constitute the bases of cultures, of civilizations? How do the passions of
war justify killing in the name of
a nation’s loftiest ideals? ENG 230-004 TR
INTRODUCTION TO
LITERATURE: METAMORPH0SIS This course will provide a means to become acquainted
not only with literature from a broad range of historical periods, but with a
wide array of methodologies for reading and analysis. In this introductory
class there will be danger and domesticity, fairy-tales and fashion, monsters
of science and dramas of the drawing room, physical feats of amazement and
psychological thrills abounding at every step of the way as experts, novices,
and scientists, play-writes, poets and novelists metamorphose mythology, history, and literature right before your
eyes, changing statues into women, squashed cabbage leaves into ladies,
beautiful men into grotesque works of art, and the haunting memories of
slavery into a ghostly twentieth-century novel. In this course, bodies and
narratives, history and fantasy, dreams and nightmares are resurrected and
reborn again and again through a selection of texts chosen for their
investment in both stories of metamorphosis and the metamorphosis of story
across a variety of literary genres and historical periods. Next to the
writings of the Brothers Grimm, for example, we will study Anne Sexton's and
Angela Carter's erotic and feminist retellings of these well known fairy
tales for children into twentieth-century poems and short-stories for adults.
Next to Ovid's Metamorphosis, we will consider After Ovid and discover
ancient mythology rewritten and transformed into our modern day world by
contemporary poets who return to Ovid's stories only to find that in the
return the tales he tells are no longer the same . Exploring texts such as
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray,
William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion we will
journey in this course through readings and class discussions designed to
offer you a chance to get your feet wet with a variety of literary genres,
historical fields, and critical approaches to literary study. Our general
thematic, loosely defined, will be metamorphosis -- bodily, psychic,
historical, generic, critical, etc.--and we will consider plays, novels,
fairy-tales, and poems which in one way or another turn upon this issue
either at the level of "plot," by telling a tale about
transformation, or at a more meta-textual level by retelling, reimagining,
and reconfiguring earlier sites of literary creation. The course requirements
will likely include two 5-8 page papers, a revision, an annotated
bibliography, and a final, group project. ENG 230-005 MWF
INTRODUCTION TO
LITERATURE: THE CITY This class takes as its central concern the trope of the
city in American fiction. The image of
the modern metropolis has long served as an opportunity for American authors
to explore the dual nature of place as both a physical location and as a
concept that embodies a host of competing ideologies and representations
(democracy and the great melting pot vs. segregation, the image of
opportunity vs. the reality of class and economic discrimination, etc.). We will look at literary (and cinematic)
representations of the modern American metropolis that embody these
dichotomies and demonstrate the city’s ability to affect change and alter –
for better or for worse – individual identities. As sociologists first began to note during
the early decades of the 20th Century, the city is a perfect
laboratory for the study of human nature and social processes. Drawing from this idea we will approach the
city as both fact and symbol, while at the same time using representations of
the city to explore larger issues of American identity, race, class, and
gender. Some of the questions/issues this course will explore
are: n
How has the development of the city affected modern
identity? n
How has the city been positioned as both the embodiment
of, and an impediment to, democratic ideals?
n
How do representations of the city contrast with rural
settings and what does this contrast reveal about competing American
mythologies? n
Shifting images of the city. How do contemporary literary
representations differ, if at all, from their past counterparts? What can we learn from this shifting image? Possible Texts – Maggie a
Girl of the Streets (1893) – Stephen Crane Sister
Carrie (1901) – Theodore Dreiser O
Pioneers! (1913) – Willa Cather Native
Son (1940) – Richard Wright Wise Blood (1952)
– Flannery O’Connor Another Country (1960) – James Baldwin
Mao II (1993)
– Don Delillo Three (3) papers and a Midterm ENG 230-006 MWF INTRODUCTION
TO LITERATURE: BANNED BOOKS: FROM HUCKLEBERRY TO HOLDEN TO HARRY Why are school districts and some parents afraid of
Harry Potter, Huckleberry Finn or others? Why are certain works and their
characters’ words either avoided or expurgated to gain admittance into the
corridors of learning? This course will open these works and examine the
historical, social, and cultural reasons for the books being challenged in
the past or today. Poems such as Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Ginsberg’s
“Howl” have rallied opponents to suppress their inclusion in anthologies,
Maya Angelou’s caged bird can’t sing and Huckleberry still is asking
questions about heaven over a hundred years later. We’ll try to redeem or
reject these texts through close readings and research into the complaints
about the books and into the themes of the texts. Coursework will include
daily readings, two 5-7 page papers, and other shorter writing assignments. ENG 231-001 MWF LITERATURE
AND GENRE: NARRATIVES OF THE ROAD IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE In this course we will explore road narratives in
American literature and ENG 231-002 MWF LITERATURE AND GENRE: THE NOVEL This course follows the development of the novel as a
genre from 200 A.D. to 1998. Topics to be considered: the relationship
between the novel and the romance; the novel in history and the history of
the novel; parody and intertextuality; the novel and popular culture. The
reading list features Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus's An
Ethiopian Romance, Fielding's Tom Jones, Austen’s Emma, Nabokov's Lolita, and
McEwan's Atonement. This is a demanding class. Each novel on the list
is challenging in a different way, and several of them pose difficult
questions that we may not be able to answer. Course requirements include
short bi-weekly papers, two longer papers, a midterm, and a final. ENG 231-401 M LITERATURE AND GENRE: DETECTIVE FICTION Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man
and yet an unusual man. He must be . .
. a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and
certainly without saying. He must be
the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. Raymond
Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder We are concerned then in the whodunit with two stories
of which one is absent but real, the other present but insignificant. Tzvetan
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose Few genres have enjoyed the popularity of detective
fiction. Drawing on the Gothic (with
its emphasis on the grotesque, the mysterious, and the desolate), narratives
of detection inform many nineteenth and twentieth century texts as well as
compose their own separate literary identity.
However, as the detective story “took off” commercially in the middle
of the last century, the figure of the detective also abandoned the strictly
white male heterosexual aspect which had defined the tradition (without
encompassing the complexity) of the genre.
This course will sample the field of detective stories
examining both the landmarks which provide a legacy for this literary type
and the horizons which reveal its expansive potential. Some possible “landmark” writers include E.
A. Poe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue/The Mystery of Marie Roget),
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of
the Baskervilles/The Sign of Four),
Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep),
and Agatha Christie (Murder at the Vicarage
or Murder on the Orient Express); while Barbara Neely (Blanche on the Lam), Sherman Alexie (Indian Killer), and Barbara Wilson (Sisters of the Road or Gaudi Afternoon) constitute some of the writers on the
“horizon.” Students will write two papers, one shorter (5-6 pages)
and one longer (9-10 pages). In
addition, class participation and peer review will figure prominently in the
course. ENG 232-001 TR LITERATURE AND PLACE: SHAKESPEARE’S The English Renaissance was fascinated by ancient ENG 232-401 M LITERATURE AND PLACE: Description
not available at time of publication.
Please contact the instructor or check back here for updated
information. ENG 233-001 MWF LITERATURE AND IDENTITIES: EMERSON AND
AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM This
course will consider Transcendentalism as the springboard for the first
distinctly American forays into intellectual culture: social and religious
reform, philosophy, literature, ecology, and spiritualism. With Emerson’s Self-Reliance
essay as our central text, we’ll focus on the construction of personal and
national (or anti-national) identities in writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret
Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Walt Whitman. We’ll also read Texts
Hawthorne,
Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance. Myerson, Joel, ed. Transcendentalism: A Reader. ENG 234-001 MWF INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S LITERATURE:
AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS English
234 is a survey of American women’s writing. In this course, we will focus on
women and work, identity formation, and sexuality. We will begin in the 1920s
and work our way through the 1990s. Possible readings for this course include
Nella Larson’s Passing (1929), Zora
Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937), Lillian Smith’s Strange
Fruit (1944), Shirley Jackson’s Life
Among the Savages (1953), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001). ENG 234-002 TR INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S LITERATURE: WOMEN
WRITERS Description
not available at time of publication.
Please contact the instructor or check back here for updated
information. ENG 262-001 and -002 MWF SURVEY
OF WESTERN WORLD LITERATURE: THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE PRESENT This course surveys Western World literature from the
Enlightenment to the present, focusing upon works of great literary merit
which represent main elements in the evolving western culture. In this course
we will engage the ideas and examine the evolving world view of these three
hundred years, relating our discussions to our own ideas and values. There
will be three examinations, one paper and a number of short writing
assignments. ENG 262 – DISTANCE LEARNING UEBEL SURVEY
OF WESTERN WORLD LITERATURE: THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE PRESENT Like ENG 261, this is a television course based on the
PBS program "Living Literature: The Classics and You,"
involving one hour‑long television class per week. Student work
will be web‑based, and will involve short exercises in addition to a
midterm and a final. We will study several of the primary literary texts that
have shaped Western culture from the Enlightenment to
modernity. Readings include: Voltaire’s Candide,
Goethe’s Faust, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
Themes emerging during the course will include: the problem of
identity, the problem of ethical codes and value systems, the problem of
society formation, God, dieties, and religion, illusion and reality, and art
and the artist.
003 MWF 12:00-12:50 pm 004 MWF 2:00-2:50 pm Tweedy MAJOR
BLACK WRITERS ENG 270-001 MWF 8:00-8:50 am Lewin THE
BIBLE AS LITERATURE This course is an introduction to the study of the
Hebrew Bible. Students will learn the analytical techniques with which
scholars understand biblical materials and apply these to issues of
authorship, translation, and narrative continuity. We will consider the
texts before us as literary artifacts and not as the basis of religious
doctrine. ENG 281-001 MWF 12:00-12:50 pm Fisher INTRODUCTION TO FILM: NARRATIVES OF
DISINTEGRATION The
films in this course depict human (and, in some cases, nonhuman)
conflicts. I use the term disintegration
to illustrate this conflict, which may be examined culturally, historically,
socially, aesthetically, spiritually, ecologically, and so on. For example, we can picture the process or narrative
of disintegration as a vortex, which is a continuous cycle of rapid
swirling, spiraling, whirling matter, often made up of air or water. In the films we’ll explore, the vortex is
often aesthetically represented through specific scenes of chaos and
disorder. While the study of the technical
aspects of filmmaking and an exploration of various genres will be a part of
this course, we will pay particular attention to how we read these
narratives of disintegration as texts:
aesthetically, culturally, psychologically, and so on. We will consider the significance of
isolation, fear, obsession, time, technology, etc., in terms of
disintegration and in terms of how these films connect with each other on
some level as a continual exchange of ideas, as part of a larger vortex of
images and situations developed by filmmakers from the United States to the
United Kingdom, from silent films to CGI-laden films. In addition, I’d like to spend “extra” time
with directors who frequent these themes of disintegration, like Terry
Gilliam and David Lynch. We are not
here to judge films, or to rate them, or to agree on only one
interpretation. We are here to ask questions,
make relevant observations, and to explore the films as a part of our
international culture, history, and art.
Some of the films we will examine
include: Chaplin’s Modern Times
(1936); Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960); Aronofsky’s Pi (1998); Bergman’s The Seventh Seal
(1956); Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998); Nolan’s Memento
(2000); Polanski’s Chinatown (1974); Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys
(1995); Myrick and Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999);
Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002); Lynch’s Mulholland
Dr. (2001); and Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002). ENG 281-002 TR 9:30-10:45 am Froula INTRODUCTION TO FILM: CONSTRUCTIONS AND DISJUNCTIONS: GENDER, IDENTITY, AND THE MOVIES Movies both instruct and reflect our cultural gender
roles, i.e., how men and women should define their behavior, appearance, and
sexual morés. In this course, we will
examine films as cultural documents, noting not only how they construct
characters’ gender and sexuality but also how gender intersects with
mythologies inherent in our conceptions of heroes and anti-heroes, family,
militarism, romance, and politics.
Films will include Rebel Without
a Cause, Bend It Like Beckham, Full Metal Jacket, Boys Don’t Cry, Chasing
Amy, G.I. Jane, Thelma and Louise, and Amores Perros, among others. ENG 306-001 TR 11:00-12:15 pm Reece INTRODUCTION TO PROFESSIONS IN WRITING This course
attempts to answer the question, “But can I make money at this?” “Professions in Writing” offers a pragmatic
introduction to the following career paths: freelance writing, editing and
publishing, and teaching writing.
Students will learn how to write a marketable magazine profile and
query letter, how to copy-edit, and how to edit for story. We will conclude by exploring some
philosophies of writing with an eye toward teaching. LIN 317-001 MWF 2:00-2:50 Guindon LANGUAGE
AND SOCIETY: LANGUAGE CONTRACT This course will explore the various outcomes of
language contact, particularly pidgins and creoles. We will examine various theories (from past
and present) of pidgin/creole origins, the languages which have contributed
the most to the creation of pidgins and creoles in the past few centuries,
how the structures of pidgins and creoles differ from those of languages with
a more natural birth, and what the development and structures of these
languages may be able to tell us about human cognition. The primary
readings for the course will be from An Introduction to Pidgins and
Creoles, by John Holm, Cambridge textbooks in Linguistics, Cambridge
University Press, 2000. Students
should expect to take frequent quizzes throughout the semester, and will
present one paper focusing on a creole language taken from a list given out
at the beginning of the semester. LIN
317-002 TR
2:00-3:15 Stump LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY: ENDANGERED
LANGUAGES |
