Course Descriptions: SPRING 2005

200 Level

ENG 207-001                         M 3:00-5:30 pm                                             Marksbury

BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION

We will concentrate on the essentials of fiction—voice, character, point of view, image, structure, and sequence—and the ways in which these mysteries intersect and cohere. We’ll keep one eye on the rudiments of narrative technique—description, compression, exposition, and dialogue—and the other on the look-out for lateral moves along the lines of scrimmage. We’ll forge taut and lyric sentences into chains of inevitable surprise.  We’ll find occult correspondences amidst reassuring dislocations, and start letting go of what we’ve been taught to keep hidden.  Maybe we can even figure out what needs to be withheld.  We’ll write stories.

            Or at least we’ll try.  Along the way, we enter into real and half-life dialogue with each other and everyone who dared to come before us—a heated conversation that’s been going on for quite a while.  We’ll look at established texts: some will serve as paradigms for generating narrative, and some will instructively disrupt those very paradigms. Then you will put your own work on the table.  And we’ll look into it as closely as we can.  The emphasis is on process.  You should be willing to take chances, and ready to revise.  Growth and forward movement will be rewarded.

            As Henry James was wont to tantalize, the house of fiction has many windows.  Let’s try to break into some of them.  Let’s try to come away with something useful.

ENG 207-002                         W 3:00-5:30 pm                                              Sexton

BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION

            Description not available at publication time.  Please contact the instructor for information.

ENG 207-003                         W 3:00-5:30 pm                                              Howell

BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: POETRY

Note: New classroom GCHI 201.

            A poetry writing workshop that focuses on how our writing improves when we are active members of a writing community. The workshop will act as this community; writers involved will be responsible for new work every week, while also being committed readers of their fellow members' work. As the weeks progress, we work to "experience" poetry, rather than "think through" poetry, understanding the difference between the academic-mind and the artist-mind.

ENG 207-004                         R 3:30-6:00 pm                                              Reece

BEGINNING WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: CREATIVE NON-FICTION

This course will introduce young writers to the art of shaping the truth, using many of the same techniques as fiction writers. It will also familiarize students with the major American writers who have helped create this emerging genre.

ENG/LIN 210-001                             MW  4:00-5:15 pm                                         O’Hara

ENG/LIN 210-401                             MW  6:00-7:15 pm                                         O’Hara

ENG/LIN 210-402                             TR  6:00-7:15 pm                                           O’Hara

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

PREREQUISITE: NONE

This is an introductory course in the History of the English Language in which we will study the ways in which English has developed from its origins to modern times.

PURPOSE of the course:  To answer the following questions: Where does Modern English come from? How has English changed over the last 1200 years? What do those changes show us about the process of language change in general? What influence have class, race, gender, and politics had on the development of English? What are some of the more common myths about language and why are they wrong? What is the future of English as a world language?

LEARNING OBJECTIVE: The student will be able to analyze, compare, and contrast language data drawn from all periods of  English and to explain the processes by which Modern English evolved. Learning to do this kind of analysis is the most important part of the course

METHOD: Four exams based on the assigned readings and selected videos; short analytical exercises and written assignments to reinforce what has been learned in class. No cumulative mid-term or final. 

TEXTS:  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, David Crystal,

2d edition, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

                Language Myths, (eds) Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, Penguin, 1998.

NOTES:           1) English majors will find that this course complements their work in literature.

2) Students in the College of Communications can satisfy their Language            

requirement (under Option B) by taking ENG/LIN 210 and

 ENG/LIN 211 in any order.

3) Attendance is mandatory from the first day of class for all students        

     including those on the waitlist.

ENG/LIN 211-001                             MW 4:00-5:15 pm                                          Guindon

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I

This course will introduce and explore the forms and structures of human language, how they are similar, how they differ, 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 ‘happity’ out of ‘happy + 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 concepts and forms, and to deduce linguistic structures by applying methods of structural analysis to data drawn from a variety of languages.  There will also be at least four exams and one quiz; exam formats will generally be based on the homework.  Heavy emphasis is placed upon classroom preparation and participation.

ENG/LIN 211-002                             TR 3:30-4:45 pm                                            Stump

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I

This course is the first semester of a two-course introduction to the scientific study of human language; this section will be taught in a large lecture format.  We will explore the principles regulating three domains of linguistic organization (those of phonology, morphology, and syntax), examining both the ways in which languages differ in these domains and the ways in which they are alike; we will additionally investigate the causes and processes of language change in each of these domains.  Students can expect regular homework assignments designed to enable them to understand linguistic principles and to apply methods of formal analysis to data drawn from a variety of languages.  The textbook will be Contemporary Linguistics, 5^th edition (Bedford, St. Martin’s, 2004), by William O’Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff & Janie Rees-Miller.

ENG/LIN 211-401                             MW 5:30-6:45 pm                                          Guindon

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I

            See description for ENG/LIN 211-001.

ENG/LIN 211-402                             TR 5:30-6:45 pm                                            Guindon

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS I

            See description for ENG/LIN 211-001.

ENG/LIN 212-001                             MWF 9:00-9:50 am                                       Marks

ENG/LIN 212-002                             MWF 11:00-11:50 am                                   Marks

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS II

The goal of this course is to expand your 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, and writing systems.  Success in this class will be measured by your ability to demonstrate the recurring structural patterns of language and to analyze the function of language as a part of society as a whole.  In addition, you will be able to illustrate the usefulness of linguistic approaches to language in everyday life.

ENG 230-001                         MWF 10:00-10:50 am                                   Froula

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE

In this course, we will explore dreams and their function in culture as
they appear in mythology, fairy tale, poetry, fiction, film, and other
forms of storytelling.  We will also examine theories on the meaning of
dreams--as divine message, bodily and mental dysfunction, and voice of the
unconscious--from ancient, early modern, and modern times.   Examining
selections across several genres--novels, poetry, drama, short stories,
and films--we will structure our textual analysis around the following
issues: as readers, how do we approach literary representations of
dreams?  How do we recognize and react to elements in the dream as text,
i.e., "read" dreams?  How do concepts of dreaming shape our perceptions of
text, self, and world?  How do we use dreams as entry points through which
to effectively analyze a text?  We will consider these questions as the
basis to fulfill our course objectives:  to analyze literary and film
texts while interrogating the definitions and functions of "dream" and
"dreaming"; to investigate what narrative significance dreams carry; to
examine how authors use dreams to draw upon cultural ideas to affect the
reader/viewer; to move from the personal to the abstract, developing new
ways of seeing and understanding our own and the texts' relationships
to  fundamental social issues and universal human concerns; to understand
the representation of dreams within cultural contexts and theoretical
paradigms; and to study images from mass media to interpret how culture
"canonizes" certain representations or images as meaningful dreams.

Texts include:
  Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freud's On Dreams O'Brien's
 In the Lake of the Woods, Kingston's Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
 among Ghosts, and other short stories, essays, and poetry.

Films include: Mulholland Drive (2002), The Matrix (1999), Waking Life (2001) and Repulsion (1965), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Ring (2002).

ENG 230-002                         TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm                                  Fulbrook

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: METAMORPHOSIS

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 course, bodies and narratives, history and fantasy, dreams and nightmares are resurrected, revised, and rewritten 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 study of works by Hans Christian Anderson and 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, a collection of contemporary poetry wherein the great figures and scenes of ancient mythology are rewritten and transformed into stories of Elvis and James Dean, modern relationships and modern technology. Exploring texts such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, William Shakespeare's A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, this course will include 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 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, re-imagining, and reconfiguring earlier sites of literary creation. The course requirements will include two 5-8 page papers, a revision, an annotated bibliography, and a final, group project.

ENG 230-003                         MWF 12:00-12:50 pm                                   Simon

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: THE FRONTIER

This course will explore the literature of the American frontier, beginning with the thirteen colonies through the conquest of the West.  The topics we will explore are the significance of the American frontier, the development of frontier mythology, and the importance of the frontier to American identity.  Not only will we look at the stereotypical depictions of cowboys and Indians, but we will examine how the vision of the West changes throughout literature as well as adjusts to industrialization.  We will also explore racial and gender issues in these frontier texts.  Some questions we will explore: How did the frontier help shape our national identity? What stereotypes from frontier/Western mythology do we still use to define our Americanness?  How has the mythology of the frontier changed as America has moved from an agrarian nation to an industrial nation? Course texts may include: Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Norris’s McTeague, Gilman’s The Crux, Cather’s O Pioneers, Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, Ford’s The Searchers, and Stevens’s Shane.

ENG 230-004                         TR 9:30-10:45 am                                          Zunshine

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: LYING BODIES: PRETENSE, PERFORMANCE, AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL

Eighteenth-century novels feature a spectacular array of liars, from Defoe’s Moll Flanders (Moll Flanders) and Henry Fielding’s Blifil (Tom Jones) to Frances Burney’s Mr. Moncton (Cecilia) and Jane Austen’s Wickham (Pride and Prejudice). This course takes as its starting point the proliferation of liars in eighteenth-century fictional narratives to consider the following questions: 1) The eighteenth century is credited with developing what we consider today a recognizably modern novel, that is, a novel attuned in subtler ways to the psychology of its characters and readers and capable of representing the unprecedentedly nuanced interpersonal consciousness. What is the relationship, then, between the period’s obsession with lying and the emergence of this new “psychological” novel? 2) Given the popularity, in the eighteenth-century, of non-fictional treatises on the body language associated with faking one’s emotions on stage, what is the relationship between the theatrical and the novelistic treatments of lying? 3) And, finally, how does our desire to identify liars in our social environment influence the kind of fictional stories that we want (or pointedly do not want) to read?

A tentative reading list includes Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Burney’s Cecilia, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma, as well as several plays and non-fictional treatises on the “art of lying.” Two long papers, six short writing assignments, a midterm, and a final.

ENG 230-005                         MWF 2:00-2:50 pm                                       Godbey

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: THE CITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

As one of the defining features of American life since the Civil War, urbanization, alongside the development of American cities into centers of culture and politics, has had a profound effect American life and literature.  This course seeks to explore this effect throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries by using American novels and their relationship to cities as an introduction to American literature.  We will read a variety of authors from diverse backgrounds, literary traditions, and time periods in order to better understand the effect of urbanization on both literature and American life.  Thus, while the focus of the class will be on texts that address cities and urbanization (whether directly or by contrast as in the suburban novel), it is also a broad introduction to American literature. 

Class discussions, exams, and papers will be based on close textual reading and analysis, supplemented by research that will help you place each text in its proper historical and cultural context.

Some of the questions this course will address are: How has the development of the city affected modern identity?  How has the city affected our conception of what it means to be an American as well as ideas about individual identity?  How has our relationship with the city changed?  How can we see urbanization and its changes reflected in literature?  In what ways have authors responded, stylistically and thematically, to either life in the city or urbanization?

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

Revolutionary Road (1961) ­ Richard Yates

Less than Zero (1985) ­ Bret Easton Ellis

Tropic of Orange (1997) - Karen Tei Yamashita

ENG 230-401                         TR 6:00-7:15 pm                                            Fisher

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: TALES OF HOLLYWOOD

This course will explore the novels and films about the Hollywood film industry itself.  We'll examine the social, cultural, historical, ethical, and aesthetic issues of Hollywood, from what goes into making a successful film, to what happens to the human characters who get involved with filmmaking, either as a producer, director, or actor.  We'll also look at how Hollywood promotes itself as a "land dreams," while the texts more often than not suggest a "land of nightmares."

Books (tentative):  Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon; Ray Bradbury's A Graveyard for Lunatics; Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister; Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty; plus a few others

Films (tentative):  Sunset Blvd.; Mulholland Drive.; Sherlock, Jr.; The Player; Adaptation; Lost in La Mancha; Ed Wood, Barton Fink, Sullivan’s Travels

ENG 231-001                         TR 2:00-3:15 pm                                Rogers-Carpenter

LITERATURE AND GENRE: NOVELS & FILM ADAPTATIONS, OR IS THE BOOK ALWAYS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE?

In this course, students will examine the film adaptations of five different novels in conjunction with the original works in order to gain a better understanding of how literature plays a role in their everyday lives. The diverse formats of the novels included here—Choderlos De Laclos’s epistolary Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1842), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Susan Orleans’s The Orchid Thief (1998), and Max Allan Collins’s graphic novel, The Road to Perdition (2002)—present distinctive aesthetic challenges for screenwriters and producers. As a class, we will analyze what happens to these narratives when they are adapted to film paying special attention to aesthetic implications, in addition to exploring political and commercial influences on this process. Course requirements include two group research projects, weekly responses, one shorter paper, and one longer final essay.
Course texts--novels/films:
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1842 [Trans. Douglas Parmée—1999])/ Dangerous Liaisons (1988: Dir. Stephen Frears)
Gone With the Wind (1936)/ Gone With the Wind (1939: Dir. Victor Fleming)
Beloved (1987)/Beloved (1998: Dir. Jonathan Demme)
The Orchid Thief (1998): Adaptation (2002: Dir. Spike Jonze)
The Road to Perdition (2002): The Road to Perdition (2002: Dir. Sam Mendes)

Also ancillary excerpts from Film Studies and historical sources

ENG 231-002                         MWF 9:00-9:50 am                                       Voss

LITERATURE AND GENRE: WRITING LIVES, WRITING LIES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND/AS FICTION

When is one’s story fact and when is it fiction?  In this course, we will investigate the thin line between “fact” and “fiction” by examining (embellished) autobiographies and (autobiographical) novels from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, including Lauren Slater’s Lying, Herman Melville’s Typee, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, John Griffin’s Black Like Me, and James McBride’s The Color of Water.  We will investigate corroborating (or contradictory) “evidence” for some of these texts and consider questions such as: Why do some authors choose to write autobiography and some novels?  What are the distinctions between the two genres?  How might the conventions of each genre influence the composition of a piece?  Which texts are “true” and what does that mean, anyway?  Finally, we will begin writing our own (fictional?) autobiographies.

ENG 233-001                         MWF 10:00-10:50 am                                   Reese

LITERATURE AND IDENTITIES: SEXUALITY AND CENSORSHIP

We will examine a series of texts in this class that deal explicitly with a variety of issues concerned with sex and sexuality (from sex itself to homosexuality to “perverse” sexualities) and that because of their explicitness have in some way been censored or banned in the past.  We will concern ourselves with how these texts articulate a variety of approaches to talking about or “dealing with” sex and sexuality.  We will also examine how the censoring of these texts exhibits certain fears or concerns that we have had culturally in the past and discuss whether or not we have “gotten over” these issues.  As part of this process, this class will ask questions such as:  How do we think about sex and sexuality and why do we think about it in these ways? How have we thought about sex in the past?  Why are we afraid to talk about some of these issues?  Are these texts pornographic?  What is pornography and how do we decide when a text has crossed that line?  When does a person become capable of dealing with these issues?  Note:  This class will contain texts that deal very explicitly with sexual content using explicit language to do so.  We will talk frankly about these uses in this class.

Texts for this class:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Maurice by E.M. Forster

The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

ENG 234-001                         MWF 1:00-1:50 pm                                       Oaks

INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S LITERATURE

            This course samples the richness of women’s literature focusing on life writing. As well, students will be able to explore their own lives through the individual creative forms that appeal to them—journal-writing, poetry, essays. Possible authors include Alice Walker, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Cecilia Woloch, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Hacker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Julia Alvarez. In addition to creative explorations, course work will involve expository writing as well as much class discussion.

ENG 234-002                         TR 8:00-9:15 am                                            Davis

INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S LITERATURE

English 234 is a survey of American women’s writing.  In this course, we will focus on the following themes:  women and work, identity formation, and sexuality. We will begin in the 1920s and work our way through each decade to the present, employing a historical and cultural approach to American Women Writers and gender studies.  In addition, we will place the works we are studying in their immediate historical context by recovering contemporaneous reviews of the novels, as well as reading additional works by the authors we are studying. Possible texts for the course include works published by past presenters and upcoming participants in the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.  The following is a sample list of the texts we will most likely read:  Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), selections from Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993), Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998), Alexandra Robbins’s Pledged (2004), as well as poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikky Finney, Adrienne Rich, and Sonia Sanchez. 

ENG 234-401                         MW 6:00-7:15 pm                                          Purdue

INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S LIT: SCIENCE FICTION BY WOMEN WRITERS

In this course we will read nineteenth and twentieth-century science fiction by women writers.  We will consider the common elements, approaches, and techniques among the authors; the importance of race, gender, class and “otherness” in the texts; and the subgenres and special themes that emerge as characteristic of science fiction. Some questions that we will explore are:  If science fiction reflects the world of the present in its presentation of worlds of the past, future, or elsewhere, what kinds of judgments/ appeals/ criticisms can we draw from the texts about the contemporary world?  What is unique or different about women’s science fiction? Why do the themes of sexuality, gender roles, reproduction, and genetic engineering occur frequently in science fiction texts by women?  Texts include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

ENG 262-001             MWF 11:00-11:50 am                                   Campbell, D.

WESTERN LITERATURE: 1660 TO PRESENT

English 262 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 two examinations, one 5-8 page paper, and two shorter papers. 

ENG 262-201                         M 5:00-7:30 pm                                             Wilke

WESTERN LITERATURE: 1660 TO PRESENT

            Meets at Carnegie Center.   Contact Distance Learning for more information: 257-3377.

ENG 264-001                         TR 9:30-10:45 am                                          Barrio-Vilar

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

            This course serves as an introduction to literature written by Black authors. Although our main focus will be the study of African American literature, we will also consider works by other writers of the African Diaspora. We will explore various literary genres in order to discover how different writers articulate the Black experience in specific cultural, historical, and political contexts. Moreover, we will consider how Black literature has evolved over time and has impacted various social and political movements around the world, such as Emancipation and Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude and Negrista movements, Postcolonialism, Feminism, and the Black Arts movement. We will discuss issues such as the following: What kinds of works constitute the (Black) literary canon? How is the Black experience articulated in literature? In what ways do race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture affect the construction of Black identity and Black literature? How does Black literature influence society? How do the assigned texts speak to each other?

ENG 264-002                         MWF 9:00-9:50 am                                       Tucker

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

Using texts from various time periods, we will examine how the search for African-American identity manifests itself through the desire to connect with one's individual history as well as attempts to negotiate through and belong to a community. This search takes places across political, literary, and historical cycles such as slavery, reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and contemporary society. By viewing the combination of these cycles, we will view these works to see how the authors create characters who navigate through the minefields of race, gender, and class to find a place they can call home.  

ENG 264-003                         MWF 1:00-1:50 pm                                       Fairfield

ENG 264-004                         MWF 2:00-2:50 pm                                       Fairfield

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

Description not available at publication time.  Please contact the instructor for information.

ENG 281-001                         MWF 12:00-12:50 pm                                   Staff

INTRODUCTION TO FILM

Description not available at publication time.  Please contact the instructor for information.

ENG 281-002                         TR 12:30-1:45 pm                                          Staff

INTRODUCTION TO FILM

Description not available at publication time.  Please contact the instructor for information.

300 Level

ENG 301-001                         MWF 1:00-1:50 pm                                       Roorda

STYLE FOR WRITERS

This course is meant to help you understand prose style and develop as a stylist in your own writing.  We’ll consider what it means to have or discern a style, how style in writing can be attended to and discussed, how styles and registers shift with changes in situation, what principles and techniques help us manipulate texts to achieve (or betray) varied effects.  We’ll move between activities dealing with style in global, descriptive, even philosophical terms, and those that focus on composing and editing in a particular, practical, broadly effective style stressing “clarity and grace.”  Class sessions will shuttle between small group tasks and whole class recitations based on regular daily work of several sorts—short writings, reading responses, analysis and imitation of passages, exercises in constructing and editing sentences and paragraphs—all toward the end of improving our prose, not to mention (a related thing) what we take as ourselves.  There will be quizzes and a final project as well, the project entailing the drafting, revising, editing, and stylistic analysis of a prose work of your own, in a genre and for purposes you determine.  While the work will seem detailed and even niggling at times, our credo is broad: style is that aspect of any activity involving the grounds for choice.  Working with style, we try the possibilities and conditions of our expression, and thus, our freedom.

ENG 306-001             MWF 9:00-9:50 am                                       Morley

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 market their work to journals and magazines, including how to find the right journal, what to write in a cover letter, and how to edit for publication. Also, we will also focus on professional editing in theory and practice, in both publishing and teaching. We will have guest speakers and an occasional field trip to see and meet professional editors and publishers in their own environment. In this course you will get resume-worthy experience as a Peer Tutor in the UK Writing Center, as a special staff member of Limestone (the Literary Art Journal at UK), and hopefully your own publication.

ENG 306-002                         TR 9:30-10:45                                                Dotson

INTRODUCTION TO PROFESSIONS IN WRITING

400 Level

ENG 401-001                         TR 12:30-1:45 pm                                          Reece

SPECIAL TOPICS IN WRITING: NATURE WRITING

For students looking to get outside the classroom walls, this course might offer an open door. We will study many of America’s important nature writers, but we will also range freely ourselves through various natural and unnatural environments around campus and around Lexington. A major portion of the grade for this course will depend on a field journal kept throughout the semester.

ENG 401-401                         M 5:30-8:00 pm                                             Oaks

SPECIAL TOPICS IN WRITING: ADAPTATIONS

This course examines contentious versions of stories.  Clearly, an individual narrative creates its own singular life out of experience (actual or psychic); but the raw material of experience can elicit any number or representations.  In fact, representations themselves can provoke alternate narratives.  Since the act of comparing works evokes meanings not available in an examination of each piece in isolation, the comparison process can enhance our understanding of texts and expand the possibilities for writing creatively about them.

Possible works to be explored include: “Tony’s Story” by Leslie Marmon Silko and “The Killing of a State Cop” by Simon Ortiz, Devil in a Blue Dress (novel and film versions), “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, The Business of Fancydancing (book of poetry and film adaptation), “Snow White (variations by the Grimm Brothers, Anne Sexton, and Angela Carter), Gaudi Afternoon (novel and film versions), and “Death and the Compass” (short story and film versions).

ENG 407-001                         W 3:00-5:30 pm                                              Finney

INTERMEDIATE WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: POETRY

This mid-level poetry writing course is a seminar designed for the student writer drawn to the music and craft of poetry. The burgeoning, serious, poetically-inclined or poetically-inquisitive student, who is committed to a continuing dialogue about the magic and mechanics of this most ancient and gracious literary genre is invited into this circle. This course begins with a refresher moment that looks at some of the foundations of the form: line length, image and symbol, rhythm, and various themes. Mid-semester the focus shifts to a discussion of how poetry wraps its long luscious arms around art, history, science, and geography. In the last weeks of the semester the course wraps up with a look at the importance of poetry in contemporary society: How, when, and why, it is used. From the beginning to the end of this class the student poet writes and shares poetry in the poetry circle, which is always dedicated to sincere improvement of the poem. From the beginning to the end of this lyrically-inclined conversation we learn how to read and talk about poetry. We do not try and define what a poem means. We look at how the poet accomplishes what she/he has set out to do. As a student writer in this course you are encouraged to leave all safe zones and construct risky thoughtful writing. Any and all texts will be announced on the first day of class, which is a mandatory attendance day.

ENG 407-002                         T 3:30-6:00 pm                                               Finney

INTERMEDIATE WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION

This intermediate section of Imaginative Writing – Fiction is a seminar dedicated to the reading, understanding and crafting of strong imaginative narrative. After an introduction and review of the elements of good fiction which include; character building, the placement of conflict, lovely luminous language, strategic openings and closings, the class moves into the major journey of the semester, the workshop setting. Within the workshop circle the various student voices come together to share in the common goal of moving the work in progress closer to clarity and completion. During the semester, two stories, 6 – 10 pages in length, are crafted by each student with special time and attention given to the Revision process towards the end of the semester. The weekly critique uses the foundational elements of good fiction as guide. Each week the student writer is also given complimentary reading material and writing exercises to help steward and gird the original student work in progress. The published stories used for this mentoring work are explicitly chosen from exciting and inventive writers from around the globe. Any and all texts will be announced on the first day of class, which is a mandatory attendance day.

ENG 480G-001                                  TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm                                  Prats, A.

STUDIES IN FILM: THE VIETNAM WAR AND/IN FILM

An exploration of Hollywood’s many versions of the Vietnam War, with particular attention to the historical and cultural questions raised by these movies, from The Green Berets (1968) to We Were Soldiers (2002). We will screen some 18 or 20 movies, all of them outside of class (in the Media Lab of the Young Library). Some of the titles that I will consider for discussion (in addition to the two mentioned above): The Deer Hunter; Full Metal Jacket; Coming Home; Apocalypse Now; Apocalypse Now Redux; Platoon; Born on the Fourth of July; First Blood; Rambo: First Blood, Part II; Uncommon Valor; Jackknife; Tigerland; 84 Charlie MoPic; Jacob’s Ladder; Go Tell the Spartans; Twilight’s Last Gleaming. In addition we will screen all the installments of the famous PBS series: Vietnam. Required Text: Karnow, Vietnam: A History. Requirements: Midterm (essay & “objective”); Final (essay & “objective”); Research paper. Class Participation.

ENG 481G-001                                  MWF 12:00-12:50 pm                                   Allison

STUDIES IN BRITISH LITERATURE: MODERN POETRY

An examination of a range of 20th century poets, British and Irish, in relation to social and literary contexts. W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney and one or two more. Stress on close reading, poetic language and poetic forms, but also on backgrounds­ social, political, biographical. When do you want to make background materials really matter, and when not? We’ll talk a lot about meaning and interpretation, and about how you understand your role as a reader.

ENG 482G-001                                  TR 2:00-3:15 pm                                            Doolen

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: RISE OF THE U.S. NOVEL

This course is an introduction to the rise of the novel in the United States.  We will read a mix of famous and relatively unknown authors, as well as investigate how the form of the novel changes over the first half of the nineteenth century. In our reading, we will focus on two related questions: how does the novel capture the social and political pressures of a particular historical moment? Where is the line between fiction and history, dreams and reality? The works we will study cut across several literary genres, including the American Gothic, the Sentimental Novel, and the Historical Romance, and we will try to understand the relationship between literary and historical writing. Requirements include an extensive portfolio, both analytical and creative in nature, a positive attitude, and an openness to new ideas.

ENG 483G-401                                  R 6:00-8:30 pm                                              Dathorne

STUDIES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN/DIASPORIAN LITERATURE: GLOBAL SURVEY OF BLACK LITERATURE

            This course will be concerned mainly with texts from African, African American, and other Disaporian writers.  Note that after each section there will be a book which you MUST purchase.  This will constitute the basis of lectures, and assignments will be set from this.

            Grades will be awarded as follows:

                        Participation in class – 20%

                        Oral presentation in class – 20%

                        A take-home mid term – 25%

                        A take-home final – 35%

ENG 487G-001                                  TR 12:30-1:45 pm                                          Blum

CULTURAL STUDIES: PSYCHOANALYSIS & CULTURE

What can psychoanalytic perspectives contribute to our understanding of cultural phenomena—practices, ideals, the contemporary stories of pleasure and happiness that “work” for us?  This course will focus on certain key themes in psychoanalytic theory—the child, gender difference, narcissism, and borderline disturbances and will go on to consider in some more depth psychoanalytic accounts of body image and beauty culture.  The course will introduce students in depth to psychoanalytic principles (which will involve weekly two-page response papers).  There will also be a final take-home examination.

500 Level

ENG 507-001                         R 3:30-6:00 pm                                              Edwards

ADVANCED WORKSHOP IN IMAGINATIVE WRITING: FICTION

This is an advanced undergraduate/graduate level course designed to explore in great depth the writing of fiction, especially the short story.  Students will gain an extensive understanding of narrative form, and will examine many aspects of the story, including characterization, narrative motio