Fall 2018 English Course Descriptions

ENG 201: Introduction to Creative Writing
Dr. Deborah Fleming and Dr. Joe Mackall
MWF 10:00-10:50
Requirement for Creative Writing Major & Minor, Requirement for the Integrated Language Arts Major

This course introduces basic techniques and forms of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Regular writing and reading assignments illustrate specific aspects of poetic and prose narrative form.

ENG 203: American Literature
Dr. Russell Weaver
MWF 10:00-10:50
Core Humanities

We will be reading Dickinson’s Poetry, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth.

Two papers and two presentations.

ENG 301: Writer's Workshop: Poetry
Dr. Deborah Fleming
MWF 1:00-1:50
Requirement for Creative Writing Major & Minor, Elective in the Integrated Language Arts Major

Students will write and discuss their own poetry, study poetic form, keep journals of reading, and write one paper on a book of contemporary poetry.

ENG 306: The Essay
Dr. Joe Mackall
MWF 11:00-11:50
Requirement for Creative Writing Major & Minor

This course is an analysis of the essay as both literary genre and source of ideas. Student writing may include essay composition.

ENG 314: Literature and Gender
Online 16-week format
Dr. Sharleen Mondal
Core Humanities, elective in the English and Integrated Language Arts majors, elective in the English and Creative Writing majors and minors

This course focuses on literature that centrally engages issues of gender, including but not limited to masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, biological vs. socially constructed notions of sex and gender, and intersections between gender and other factors--including race, class, religion, and sexuality--in shaping human experience

ENG 316: Postcolonial Literature
Dr. Sharleen Mondal
MWF 11:00-11:50
Core Humanities, elective in the English and Integrated Language Arts majors, elective in the English and Creative Writing majors and minors

This course focuses on literatures shaped by colonialism and imperialism. The course emphasizes in-depth study of colonial and postcolonial literature supported by an understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political contexts of that literature.

ENG 317: Studies in Shakespeare
Dr. Naomi Saslaw
T Th 10:50-12:05
Core Humanities, requirement in the English and Integrated Language Arts majors, elective in the English and Creative Writing majors and minors

Students will read examples of Shakespearean histories, comedies, romances, and tragedies, exploring language and dramatic technique to develop an understanding of the structure and themes.

ENG 319: Modern Drama
Dr. Jayne E. Waterman
T Th 12:15-1:30
Core Humanities, elective in the English and Integrated Language Arts majors, elective in the English and Creative Writing majors and minors

This course will begin with the close reading analysis of some powerful one-act plays from the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. We will also consider a range of full plays from, for example, Ibsen’s realism to Quiara Alegría Hudes’ triumph in trauma. All of the course texts will help the class explore key issues, ideas, texts, and contexts of European and American modern drama. The main focus of the course will be to examine plays from different periods and styles. Attention will also be paid to the cultural, historical, political, sociological, and dramaturgical aspects that surround and inform the works. Themes of gender and race, the tension of illusion and reality, and the crisis of the individual and the family will also be of significance as we explore modern dramatic sensibilities and discourse. In addition to the texts, the course will, where relevant, consider the adaptations and interpretations of the plays in performance and film.

Assignments: Two essays, a presentation, in class projects and participation.

ENG 338: Themes and Topics in Literature
W 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Naomi Saslaw
Core Humanities; Elective in the English major, English minor, and Creative Writing minor

This course explores a major idea or theme through a wide range of literary and related texts. Typically, the seminar will focus on a particular historical, social, or artistic idea

ENG 351: Advanced Composition
MWF 2:00
Dr. Linda Joyce Brown
Requirement in the English and ILA majors

This advanced course is designed to give you extensive practice writing, revising, and editing nonfiction prose, with an emphasis on revising for rhetorical and stylistic effectiveness.  Our goal will be to write prose that is not only clear and efficient but powerful enough that a reader will feel compelled to keep reading. The skills you develop in this course should help you beyond college, no matter your career path.

ENG 372: Nietzsche and the Problem of Values
Dr. Russell Weaver
T Th 9:25
Core Humanities, elective in the the English and Creative Writing majors and minors

We will be reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Conrad’s Lord Jim, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Dostoevksy’s Crime and Punishment, and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

Two papers and two presentations.

ENG 408: Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Dr. Hilary Donatini
T Th 12:15-1:30
Elective in the English, Creative Writing, and ILA majors, Elective in the English and Creative Writing minors

The eighteenth century is often referred to as the “Age of Reason” or “Age of Enlightenment”—a time when philosophical inquiry and scientific discovery blossomed. English 408 will examine poems, novels, and plays that both reflect and resist the rational and empirical—often in the same work. The great eighteenth-century works are endowed with intellectual seriousness yet bursting with vitality and joie de vivre. Our attention will be constantly trained on genre, as we explore poetic, novelistic, and dramatic form. Throughout the semester we will appreciate what is often called the golden age of satire, a mode that cuts across all genres, skewering its targets and setting forth a moral vision. Because the literature of the period was so grounded in its world, we will pay attention to relevant historical contexts as well.

Selected Texts (subject to change):
John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer  
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
poems by Anne Finch and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

ENG 425: American Literature I
Dr. Linda Joyce Brown
MWF 12:00
Elective in the English, Creative Writing, and ILA majors, Elective in the English and Creative Writing minors

Our course will begin with precolonial oral narrative, move to colonial-era texts, and conclude with literature from the early republic. The course will provide an introduction to the origins of American literature and an opportunity to closely study significant works.

Readings will include travel journals, captivity narratives, essays, poetry, and fiction. Texts will likely be chosen from the writing of the following authors:  Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, William Grimes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.