DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS FOR

SPRING 2007

(excluding ENG 102, 104, 105, 203, 204, 205)

Please check the English Department Web site for updates:

http://www.uky.edu/AS/English

Current English advising information.

Linguistics courses are listed as a group at the end of the ENG listings (by alphabetical order of prefix, then by course and section number).

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 R 0330PM 0600PM Edwards

BEG WKSP IMAG WRITING: FICTION

This class in imaginative writing focuses on fiction, particularly the short story.  Writing fiction is really a process of discovering the story you wish to tell and then working to give your narrative shape and coherence.  At this level students will focus intensively on generating new work through exercises, freewriting, and journal assignments.  These initial writings will then be shaped into stories.  This class is a workshop, so student work will be an important text, but we’ll also read widely from published work, with the goal of learning to read like writers.  That is, we will focus on elements such as dialogue, plot, character development, language, and imagery, seeking to understand the authors’ choices, and to unravel something of the process of creation.  English 104 is a requirement for this class.  Students with questions are welcome to contact Kim Edwards at edwards@uky.edu.

ENG 207-002 T 0330PM 0600PM Marksbury

BEG WKSP IMAG 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 207-003 W 0300PM 0530PM Howell, R

BEG WKSP IMAG WRITING: POETRY

ENG 207-004 M 0300PM 0530PM Cardiff

BEG WKSP IMAG WRITING: FICTION

THIS COURSE INTRODUCES YOU to the forms and practices of creative writing. Focusing on each individual, our workshop will develop the skill in writing stories and/or personal narratives. To help foster your work, weekly exercises will help you develop an understanding of the elements of the craft such as character development, narrative structure, dialogic engagement, and scene development. You also will be expected to read peer work with care and to discuss this writing with constructive, informed, and articulate criticism to specific elements of the text that go beyond simple like and dislike. The study of works by writers such as Italo Calvino, Wallace Stegner, and Jhumpa Lahiri in the context of craft—as opposed to literary interpretation or historical analysis—is a critical part of your artistic discipline and creative output.

The main feature of the course is (of course) THE WORKSHOP itself, and you will have the opportunity to provide stories for peer evaluation three times over the course of the semester. Vital to writing is re-writing, of returning to your work and sculpting it into the shape you wish it to take. For your efforts, you will have the opportunity to further develop one workshopped piece for a second round of peer and instructor critique. As you practice becoming an effective and careful reader of both peer and established writing, you do become an effective and careful reader of your own. Writing, reading, and evaluating peer work all further your own creative practice. By the end of the term, you will feature your two workshopped stories and your choice of three shorter “best effort” writing exercises in a portfolio that you can be proud of, and one day, pass on to future progeny and fans.

ENG/LIN 210-001 MW 0400PM 0515PM O'Hara

HIS 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; daily quizlets on the homework readings. 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.

The Story of English. Robert McCrum, 3d edition. Penguin Books, 2002.

NOTES: 1) 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.

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

including those on the waitlist.

ENG/LIN 210-401 MW 0600PM 0715PM O'Hara

HIS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

See description for ENG/LIN 210-401.

ENG/LIN 210-402 TR 0600PM 0715PM O'Hara

HIS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

See description for ENG/LIN 210-401.

ENG/LIN 211-001 TR 0330PM 0445PM Guindon INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

There is no prerequisite for this course.

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 ‘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 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/LIN 211-002 TR 0500PM 0615PM Guindon INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

See description for ENG/LIN 211-001.

ENG/LIN 211-003 TR 1100AM 1215PM Barrett

INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of human language, with an emphasis on the fundamental principles of linguistic theory, and applications of these principles in the investigation of grammatical structure, language change, language universals and typology, writing systems. The course will also focus on the application of linguistic study to real-world problems, e.g. language and technology. Credit will not be given to students who already have credit for ENG 414G. (Same as LIN 211.)

ENG/LIN 211-004 MWF 0900AM 0950AM Wheeler INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

This course is the first of a two-course introduction to the scientific study of human language. We will spend the bulk of our time becoming acquainted with four areas of linguistic study: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Topics in historical linguistics will also be included.

ENG/LIN 211-005 MWF 1000AM 1050AM Wheeler INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

See description for ENG/LIN 211-004.

ENG/LIN 211-401 MW 0530PM 0645PM Guindon INTRO TO LINGUISTICS I

See description for ENG/LIN 211-001.

ENG/LIN 212-001 TR 0200PM 0315PM Barrett

INTRO TO LINGUISTICS II

This course is the second semester of a two-semester sequence introducing the study of Linguistics, the scientific study of human language as a system. This course focuses on the social aspects of linguistic study: Semantics, pragmatics, conversational interaction, language variation and register, dialects, linguistic aspects of sign languages, second language acquisition, and the acquisition of language by children. Prereq: ENG/LIN 211. (Same as LIN 212.)

ENG/LIN 212-002 TR 0330PM 0445PM Lauersdorf INTRO TO LINGUISTICS II

This course is the second semester of a sequence of introductory courses on the scientific study of human language. The purpose of this course is 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.

ENG 230-001 MWF 0100PM 0150PM Kelemen INTRO TO LIT

We'll read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Alice Walker's Color Purple, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, and Jasper Fforde's Eyre Affair, among others, to find out what texts have to do with death, especially the death of the author.  Students will write three essays, one of which will be a group project.

ENG 230-002 TR 0930AM 1045AM Schroot-Mitchum

INTRO TO LIT

ENG 230-003 MWF 1200PM 1250PM Staff

INTRO TO LIT

ENG 230-004 TR 0200PM 0315PM Varnes INTRO TO LIT

I consider this course an introduction not just to literature but also to literary studies, not just what but how. How do we select which pieces of writing become “great” and worthy of extensive study? And how do we study them, once they’re in hand? As you might expect, the two choices get tangled up, in the sense that an approach may predispose us to favor certain kinds of poetry, say, or stories about certain kinds of situations. We’ll talk a good deal about canonicity, which is a term that indicates the political and aesthetic vortex of text selection. We’ll dip into the language of literary criticism of various schools so that students can at minimum recognize the stakes in academic essays and perhaps begin to practice (by no means master) some of it in our three written assignments. We will attempt to master certain technical literary terms that allow for more interesting discussion of verse, drama, and prose fiction. And we’ll do all this as we consider the value of scandal, however we define it. Course texts will include Barton & Hudson, A Contemporary Guide to Literary Studies, works from contemporary authors such as Edward Albee’s The Goat, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, and a collection of canonized works reaching back no further than Jane Austen.

ENG 230-005 MWF 0200PM 0250PM Chaney

INTRO TO LIT

ENG 230-006 MWF 0100PM 0150PM Carter

INTRO TO LIT: 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 high schools? This course will read these works and examine the historical 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. 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 readings and two 5-7 pages essays as well as shorter writing assignments.

ENG 230-007 MWF 0900AM 0950AM Tarrant-Hoskins

INTRO TO LIT

This section of English 230 examines a selection of literature produced in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Concentrating on recognized literary figures, we’ll focus on each writer's view of contemporary life during this period of immense social change, pock-mocked by wars, increasing industrialization, and changes in the status of women. We’ll examine how authors respond, comment, and even influence life at this fervent point in British history. We’ll also attempt (but not necessarily succeed) in defining modernism itself. As an introduction to literature, much attention will be paid to literary devices and techniques, as well as key literary terms.

TEXTS:

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1899)

West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier (1918)

Forster, Edward Morgan. A Passage to India (1924)

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies (1930)

Gardner, Janet E. Ed. Writing About Literature

Murfin, Ross. Ed. Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms

Selection of Poetry (handout)

*We will also devote some time to analyzing the film versions of these novels.

ENG 230-008 MWF 1000AM 1050AM Fetters

INTRO TO LIT

This will be conducted as a broad survey of literatures produced in the United States throughout the Twentieth Century. We will treat texts which are in many representative of or which speak to historical moments in time. Beginning with Edith Wharton’s mobilization of the upper echelons of New York City at the turn of the century, we’ll then look at Edgar Master’s modernist experimentation, Tennessee William’s look at the conflict between fantasy and reality in post-war American, Patricia Highsmith’s Cold War creation, Alice Walker’s look at the specific subjectivity of black women’s place in the Civil Rights Movement, Sherman Alexie’s comedic glimpse into the hyphenated existence of his tribe of Native Americas and Margaret Atwood’s dystopic view of the future status of women in America. As an introduction to literature, we will pay close attention to literary devices and learn much about literary terms and major trends in literary criticism.

Proposed Texts:

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Edgar Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Alice Walker, Meridian

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

ENG 230-009 TR 1100AM 1215PM Freeman

INTRO TO LIT: BRITISH NATIONAL IDENTITY & EMPIRE: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD THROUGH THE FIRST WORLD WAR

This course will look at various novels and poems beginning in the mid-Victorian period and ranging through the First World War which reflect and construct representations of British national identity as England's empire steadily expanded. We will examine the intersection between the glorification of the English countryside as formative in national identity and the way in which this phenomenon is remembered and portrayed in English literature. While colonized groups around the world suffered from the exploitation of colonial rule, English citizens at home feared the presence of the foreign "other." As a result, a sense of urgency to identify and define true Englishness alongside the ethnic "other" became even more pronounced. The following works reflect these tensions and will be read together with selected critical essays:

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre 1847, Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd 1874, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm 1883, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness 1907, E.M. Forster's Howards End 1910, and selected poems from W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and the War poets.

ENG 230-010 TR 0800AM 0915AM Varnes INTRO TO LIT

I consider this course an introduction not just to literature but also to literary studies, not just what but how. How do we select which pieces of writing become “great” and worthy of extensive study? And how do we study them, once they’re in hand? As you might expect, the two choices get tangled up, in the sense that an approach may predispose us to favor certain kinds of poetry, say, or stories about certain kinds of situations. We’ll talk a good deal about canonicity, which is a term that indicates the political and aesthetic vortex of text selection. We’ll dip into the language of literary criticism of various schools so that students can at minimum recognize the stakes in academic essays and perhaps begin to practice (by no means master) some of it in our three written assignments. We will attempt to master certain technical literary terms that allow for more interesting discussion of verse, drama, and prose fiction. And we’ll do all this as we consider the value of scandal, however we define it. Course texts will include Barton & Hudson, A Contemporary Guide to Literary Studies, works from contemporary authors such as Edward Albee’s The Goat, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, and a collection of canonized works reaching back no further than Jane Austen.

ENG 230-011 MWF 0300PM 0350PM Hopson

INTRO TO LIT

This course introduces students to the genre of the novel. The term “genre” designates a style category in which literary works are grouped. These groupings are often according to form (i.e. organization/structure), technique (i.e. how something is done), and subject matter. Often writers will combine genres. In this class you will acquire tools to better interpret fiction (i.e. what does it ‘mean’) as well as tools to analyze fiction (how does it “make” that meaning). We will also learn, identify in the works, and apply in our analysis of the works major themes and literary styles. This is a writing intensive course.

The novels we will read take as central focus the interpersonal, generational, and trans-cultural connections among females of varying racial, ethnic, socio-economic, sexual, and geographic positions. All are driven by dynamic and complex female characters. All stress the importance and difficulty of coming to voice for women, as well as of sustaining connection among women. And all present fascinating and diverse female protagonists, examples of which include Barbara Wilson’s enigmatic lesbian sleuth Cassandra Riley, Marge Piercy’s Cuban time traveling Consuela Ramos, and Toni Morrison’s discerning yet dutiful Black domestic Ondine.

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981)

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1985)
Edwidge Danticatt’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1998)
Barbara Wilson’s Gaudi Afternoon (1990)

A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms with Strategies for Writing Essays About Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

ENG 230-012 MWF 0800AM 0850AM Postma

INTRO TO LIT

ENG 230-401 TR 0600PM 0715PM Dummit

INTRO TO LIT

This course aims to guide students through the artistic and literary movement of modernism. We will seek answers to several key questions: What is literary modernism? What came before it, and what was thus able to come after it? What did the modernists want to achieve, and were they successful?

        In this course, we will engage the American scene of modernism to interrogate its purposes and effects in connection with our own understandings of culture and society. We will study modernism as both a programmatic, unified movement and as a fragmented, multiply intentioned venture. We will examine how modernists use language to achieve numerous goals related to the era’s major beliefs and anxieties about gender, race, class, and nationality. We will study both modernist novels and poetry to help us understand the social, political, historical, and aesthetic situation in which certain modernist authors found themselves and in which they tried to intervene.

Texts to be studied

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives

T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems and The Wasteland

Willa Cather’s My Ãntonia

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Hart Crane’s White Buildings and The Bridge

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

John Dos Passos’s 42nd Parallel

William Carlos Williams’s Selected Poems

ENG 231-001 TR 1230PM 0145PM Floyd

LIT AND GENRE: THE SOCIAL PROBLEM NOVEL & WORKING-CLASS WRITING

This course will examine responses to and representations of the problems created by the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. In England, this resulted in a new sub-genre of fiction emerging: the “Condition of England” novel, also called “The Social Problem Novel” was made famous by writers like Dickens, Gaskell and Disraeli. However, others were writing literature about the same topic, without the same attention or fame. Through close readings we will explore how similar metaphors and motifs appear in both the social problem novel and the working-class/Chartist literature but how they function differently. In other words, we will question the competing representations of social problems involving the working class. Additionally, the course will explore the two sub-genres’ portrayals of the problems and visions for solving them. Some attention will be given to what makes a novel canonical, and how literary theories like New Historicism and Deconstruction aid our readings of political texts.

Fiction:

Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell

Hard Times -Charles Dickens

Sibyl - Benjamin Disraeli

Helen Fleetwood - Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

and....a coursepack of Chartist Literature to include Thomas Wheeler’s “Sunshine and Shadow,” Thomas Copper’s “Seth Thompson, the Stockinger,” Ernest Jones’ “The Working Man’s Wife” and “The Young Milline,r” and the anonymous “Will Harper, A Poor Law Tale.”

Non-fiction:

Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution” and Thomas Carlyle’s “The French Revolution” and “Chartism.” Selections as part of coursepack.

A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms. Eds, Edwin J. Barton and Glenda A. Hudson.

ENG 231-002 MWF 1100AM 1150AM Phillips

LIT AND GENRE

This course will attend to changes in the novel from the nineteenth century to modernism and beyond. We will be thinking about aesthetic development and how each novel we'll read imagines its position in literary history as well as how these novels contribute to larger social commentaries. Readings will likely include Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Great Gatsby, as well as short readings on the history and the idea of the novel.

ENG 232-001 MWF 1200PM 1250PM Huffman

LIT AND PLACE

ENG 233-001 MWF 1100AM 1150AM Connors-Manke

LIT AND IDENTITIES

As part of our national mythology, we claim to be a land of immigrants. But who comes to the U.S. and why? Who stays and who leaves? In this course, we will examine the ways migration constitutes the American identity and experience in the 20th century. We will ask the question: Is it possible that all Americans are migrants? This course will examine migratory movements within the U.S., especially the African-American Great Migration and the forced migration of Native Americans. We will also read texts detailing migratory movements to and from the U.S., paying attention to the historical circumstances that allow and/or encourage migration. In our investigations we will consider the ways migration necessitates changes in the American cultural identity at large and in specific communities. Our tentative reading list includes:

Barton and Hudson’s A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms

Toni Morrison, Jazz

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Louise Erdrich, Tracks

Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Willa Cather, My Ãntonia

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers

ENG 234-001 MWF 1100AM 1150AM Oaks

INTRO TO WOMEN'S LIT

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—short stories, poetry, essays. This opportunity will allow class members to see life writing “from the inside out,” in other words, to look at the creative process as both readers and writers. Possible authors include Alice Walker, Cecilia Woloch, Julia Alvarez, Dorothy Allison, Amy Tan. We will also view several films, probably What I Want my Words to do to You: Voices from inside a Women’s Maximum Security Prison (featuring Eve Ensler, of Vagina Monologues fame), Earth (directed by Deepa Mehta), and Eve’s Bayou (directed by Kasi Lemmons). In addition to creative explorations, course work will involve expository writing as well as class discussion, regular quizzes, and a take-home exam.

ENG 234-002 MWF 1200PM 1250PM Oaks

INTRO TO WOMEN'S LIT

See description for ENG 234-001.

ENG 234-401 MW 0600PM 0715PM Floyd

INTRO TO WOMEN'S LIT: WOMEN AUTHORS & SOCIAL PROBLEM WRITING

Women writers have a long relationship with political/social writing and activism. This course will have two parts: the first exploring women writers like Gaskell, Tonna and Charlotte Bronte and their Industrial social problem novels in the first half of the 19th century -and then 20th century novels by women of diverse ethnicities exploring global, political and social injustices. We will seek to explore likenesses and differences from within likenesses in the two bodies of work and will explore the role of the authors’ class, race and gender (for instance, all in Part I are middle-class women) in allowing them the power of the pen.

Part I

Mary Barton or North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Helen Fleetwood - Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

Shirley - Charlotte Bronte

Part II

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

In the Time of the Butterflies - Julia Alverez

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

Poetry of Daisy Zamora, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Naomi Shihab Nye.

Short fiction of Kate Chopin and others

ENG 262-001 MWF 1000AM 1050AM Campbell, D. WEST LIT 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 examine three hundred years of developing ideas and values, relating our discussions to our own ideas and values. This course satisfies the new Graduation Writing Requirement, and therefore involves drafting, instructor review and peer review. It also satisfies some University Studies program requirements. Discussion is an important component of the class. There will be three papers, totaling at least 15 pages, as well as more informal writing.

ENG 262-002 MWF 0100PM 0150PM Campbell, D. WEST LIT 1660 TO PRESENT

See description for ENG 262-001.

ENG 262-201 T 0600PM 0830PM Wilke

WEST LIT 1660 TO PRESENT

ENG/AAS 264-001 TR 0800AM 0915AM Fairfield

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

Using a variety of literary texts, we will examine the ways in which the individual and collective search for an African American identity has manifested itself within and across specific periods of African American history. Periods covered will include the Slave Era, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jim-Crow Era, and Contemporary Thought. In addition to reading the literary texts, we will spend time discussing their historical and cultural contexts. Class requirements include three exams, three essays (5pp each), and regular class participation.

Potential texts include:

Douglass, Fredrick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Griggs, Sutton. Imperium in Imperio

Larsen, Nella. Passing

Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah's Gourd Vine

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom's Children

Baldwin, James. Blues for Mr. Charlie

Jones, LeRoi. Dutchman and The Slave

Walker, Alice. Meridian

Lee, Spike. Do the Right Thing

ENG/AAS 264-002 MWF 0900AM 0950AM LaCroix MAJOR BLACK WRITERS: WORK, LABOR, & IDENTITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT

Ask for an image of black people in America, and the picture drawn for you will likely have to do with work: sharecroppers toiling in a field; black professionals striving for recognition; black teachers instructing their students in literacy and dignity; black domestics working in white people’s houses; black musicians practicing their craft and technique, on stage and off; urban dwellers scuffling to get by on irregular employment; and, of course, black writers expending ink, paper, and time to find the right word to express their vision. African American writers respond to debates about productivity, humanity, and identity because they are sources of power, topics for argument, and reasons to live.

Texts for this course all center around work and labor, and how they contribute to one’s social and individual identity. In examining a selection of major black authors, this course also will explore central themes of the African American literary tradition, such as migration, history, memory, and double consciousness. Students will also learn techniques of literary, textual, and historical analysis. And, as should not surprise anyone interested in the GWR requirement, students will do the hard work of writing, revising, and writing again.

Likely texts: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957); Alice Childress, Like One of the Family (1956); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (1959); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Louise Meriweather, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970); Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog, Underdog (2001); Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)

ENG/AAS 264-003 MWF 1200PM 1250PM Towles

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

ENG/AAS 264-004 MWF 0200PM 0250PM Towles

MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

ENG/AAS 264-005 TR 1230PM 0145PM Schoenfeld MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

According to the 1965 report of the U. S. Department of Labor, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the struggle of blacks in America to achieve equality is significantly hampered by irregularities (not to say deviance) in the black family structure. The report attributes these irregularities to the legacy of slavery. In this course, we will examine how several major black authors develop and express their own understandings of the legacy of slavery on the black family. These authors develop themes including: separation, reuniting, the challenges of limited employment opportunities to the integrity of the family, the taboo of race mixing and its violation, the strengths and challenges of matrifocal families, etc.

Main texts are likely to include:

        Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig
        Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
        Harper, Frances. Iola Leroy
        Chesnutt, Charles. The Marrow of Tradition
        Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon
        Butler, Octavia. Kindred
        Baldwin, James. Go Tell it on the Mountain

ENG/AAS 264-006 MWF 1000AM 1050AM LaCroix MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

See ENG/AAS 264-002 for description.

ENG/AAS 264-401 TR 0730PM 0845PM Bayens MAJOR BLACK WRITERS

This course serves as an introduction to literature written by Black authors. The course focuses on ways in which Black writers (American, Caribbean, and African) from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries have negotiated personal, social, and political identities by writing about relationships to and in natural spaces. That is, we will analyze how Black writers have dealt with the violent legacies of colonialism and slavery by using as a frame their responses to the conquest strategy that equated people of color to nature (i.e., animals). We will explore such topics as naturalist and postcolonial discourses, “scientific” rationalizations for racial hierarchies, plantation myths and pastoral ideologies, Africanist relations to plant and animal life, and environmental justice in urban and rural places. The tentative reading list includes: narratives by John Marrant and Frederick Douglass, short stories by Charles Chesnutt and Alice Walker, novels by Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, and poetry selections from Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Nikki Giovanni.

ENG 270-001 MWF 0900AM 0950AM Ubelhor

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LIT

The Hebrew Bible (referred to by Christians as the Old Testament) is one of the foundational books of both western and world culture, and serves as the basis for Judaism and Christianity. This course will pursue close readings of selected biblical stories, acquaint students with critical methods for the study of the Bible, and situate the Hebrew Bible within the literature and culture of the ancient Near East. The focus will be primarily literary, stressing issues such as style, compositional history, plot and characterization. Finally, students will be introduced to basic methods of scriptural interpretation among modern literary critics. All texts will be read in English translation.

REQUIRED TEXTS:
1. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Third Edition, New Revised Standard Version.
2. The Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. By Stephen L. Harris and Robert Platzner.

REQUIREMENTS: One five-page paper, one ten-page paper, final exam.

ENG 281-001 TR 1100AM 1215PM Marksbury INTRODUCTION TO FILM

A basic overview of film technique, form, genre, and theory. We’ll try to look at films from different times (from the 1920s until today) and places (predominantly USA but also France, Italy, Russia, and maybe Japan), in black-and-white and color, silent and sound, genres like the western, the noir, the musical, the documentary and the horror film, in addition to truly unclassifiable “art” films.

We’ll discuss a film each week, and with the help of our text, The Film Experience, we’ll try to look more closely into the many particulars, the facets of the medium, which must cohere into that unified experience. Movies ranging from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. to Sunset Boulevard, from The Man with the Movie Camera to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and from Godard and Fellini and Nicholas Ray to The Stunt Man will serve as a springboard to talking (and writing) about reflexivity--films to the second power, films about films.

Three fairly short essays, two exams.

ENG 281-002 TR 1230PM 0145PM James INTRODUCTION TO FILM

War is famously hard to represent.  It takes place over large areas and long expanses of time. Each enemy side calls it by a different name, explains its origins differently, interprets its events from opposing points of view.  Its violence exceeds perception; as Tim O’Brien writes, “you tend to miss a lot.”   The experience of psychological and physical damage at the heart of war make it difficult, if not impossible, to remember and tell about war experience.  And that is only among the survivors.  Many witnesses of war are, of course, the dead.  And yet, we go on telling stories about war, making movies about it, trying to capture what it is like, its meaning.  Many have claimed a privileged role for cinema in the ongoing attempt to represent war experience, either because the camera’s objectivity transcends the limitations of human vision, or because the cinema’s capacity to tell narrative seems specially adapted to the skewed angles of vision produced in war.  Those stories, and those “skewed” angles of vision, are our subject here. This section of English 281 focuses not on war experience, then, but on its cinematic representations.  We will consider the following questions: who are war movies made for?  What cultural work do war movies do for their various audiences?  Can a war movie be an anti-war movie?  What formal elements of film have filmmakers used to try and tell “true” war stories?  In the process of discussing these questions, this course provides a writing-intensive introduction to the formal analysis of film: you will learn how to critically evaluate the ways filmmakers tell stories, and to present your analyses in writing.  

ENG 281-003 MWF 1000AM 1050AM Hendricks INTRODUCTION TO FILM

While most people are used to thinking of movies only as entertainment, and thus not thinking about them much at all, we will be looking at cinema as an art form. Toward this end, we will study canonical films which exemplify the basic elements of filmmaking and represent a wide range of genres, styles, and nationalities. The goal here is to give the student a broad understanding of complex form and wide array of artistic choices made in constructing a motion picture. This will hopefully lead to a greater appreciation of and taste for quality films. Each week we will focus on a specific film for viewing and discussion, and examine a portion of a film textbook to better understand terms and concepts. Grading will consist of three papers, midterm and final exams, and viewing quizzes.

Text: Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An