4/5000-level

ENGL 3405: Professional and Technical Writing

XIDS

XIDS 2100-01: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Micheal Crafton
The Da Vinci Code
MW 5:30pm-6:50pm, Humanities 206

May count for credit in Core Area C1.

Description: Regardless of your own personal feelings about the book or the ideas in it, you cannot deny its popularity. Sitting atop the New York Times Bestseller list for weeks, this book has been read by millions upon millions and the someone okayed the investment of millions in the movie. Why? What is it about this in many ways mediocre murder mystery that has captivated so many people? Could it be the lure of the Holy Grail or the secret societies that are sworn to protect it? Could it be the somewhat ambiguous history of the early Christian church or the even stranger role of women in the Church? This course is designed to answer or explore if not answer these questions. We will read about Mary Magdalene, the early Church, non-canonical gospels, as well as some of the literature and film of the Holy Grail. We will launch, in effect, our own search for the Grail in an attempt to fathom the appeals of this book. If we discover the answers, then you can write your own book and sell millions.

Texts: Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code; Dan Burstein, The Secrets of the Code; Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval; Bart Ehrman, The Judas GospelMajor novels (Woolf, Forster, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald), poetry (Eliot, Yeats, Hughes, Williams, Parker, Burroughs, and Ginsberg), short stories (Lawrence, Joyce, Mansfield, and Parker), and supporting criticism.

Requirements: Reading Journal (three written pages per week), two major tests (mid-term and final examination), daily quizzes (five, plot-based questions), five cultural events.

XIDS 2100-02: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Debra Bourdeau
The Monstrous and the Grotesque
TR 9:30am-10:45am, Humanities 206

May count for credit in Core Area C1.

Description: Step right up! On display is a menagerie of fascinating, bizarre and haunting creatures. You will see physical deformities, psychological abnormalities and moral abominations. We will examine the “monster” as it appears in everything from fairy tales to epic poetry to carnival sideshows. We will discuss how the “monster” has been the object of everything from our disgust to our pity. Often reviled and sometimes romanticized, the “monster” appears in every culture, revealing the concerns and fears predominate in the age.

Texts: Patrick Suskind, Perfume; John Gardner, Grendel; Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng; The Brothers Grimm, Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales as well as films (including the recent Phantom of the Opera and other bits and pieces).

Requirements: Active participation, regular attendance, an oral presentation, two short papers and a final examination.

XIDS 2100-03: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Patricia Reinhard
Photography and Short Stories
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, TLC 1116

May count for credit in Core Area C1.

Description: Photography and Short Stories will study the dialogic relationship between photographic images and short stories. Fraternal twins separated at birth, the modern short story and the photographic image have flourished, one form shadowing the other, since their origins in the mid-nineteenth century. This course will analyze the synergistic effect created by photographic images and short fiction when they are scrutinized through the dual lenses of perspective and point of view. Both disciplines present sketches, slices of perspective that concentrate on a single or unique effect. In their uses and manipulations of point of view, both disciplines appear infinitely malleable and wildly flexible as artists continually craft and redefine the ways in which a story or an image can be “told.” Our study of the synergy between short fiction and image will begin with Eudora Welty, an artist who serves as the literal and physical embodiment of the interpenetration of these two disciplines. As a young woman, Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration in a job that allowed her access to places and people throughout her home state. Before she wrote, Welty photographed—recorded on film her sojourn through Mississippi’s eighty-two counties. Closely reading a Welty short story and several of her images will enable students to formulate a set of terms and concepts that are shared by both disciplines. Welty’s fiction and images, along with these specific terms and concepts descriptive of both disciplines, provide the springboard to all that follows—dozens of online photographic images, thirteen stories, and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and John Berger’s About Looking.

Texts: Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and John Berger’s About Looking; a course packet of thirteen short stories, an online portfolio of photographic images, and additional selected essays on photography.

Requirements: Students will write three essays on topics derived from the themes and concepts in the texts. These essays will be approximately 1000 words and will require secondary sources. Weekly informal response writing intended to generate ideas and concepts explored in greater depth and detail in the essays will be assigned. This writing is designed as write to learn exercises and offers students a free space in which to begin exploring the texts. A group/collaborative oral assignment in which students will select a specific photograph or series of images and a short story and present a report on them to the class. A midterm and a final exam.

XIDS 2100-04: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Gregory Fraser
Creativity
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm, Hum 206

May count for credit in Core Area C1.

Description: What drives artists, writers, and musicians to create? What principles, if any, govern the creative process? What is it about creativity and creative people that we admire and envy? Is creativity really an individualistic attribute or is it systemic in nature? Is creativity an “either/or” situation? Are some people simply “hardwired” for creativity? We will attempt to answer these questions as well as engage in activities meant to spark our own creative potentials. We will also familiarize ourselves with four distinctive ways in which artists from a range of cultural and historical backgrounds make sense (and art) of the world. The course will introduce students to the rigors and pleasures of creative endeavors through workshopping and hands-on creative engagement in various media. Finally, we will work towards constructing a critical discourse regarding the nature of the creative process.

Texts: Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content, and a course pack—all to be available at the bookstore.

Requirements: Weekly readings, two substantive critical writing projects, creative contributions to in-class workshops, and a final portfolio that blends creative work with critical discussion of the creative process.

XIDS 2100-05: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Debra MacComb
Representing American Womanhood
TR 3:30pm-4:45pm, Humanities 207

May count for credit in Core Area C1.

Description: Through the analysis of representations in the literary and visual arts of both the high and popular cultures, this course will examine a range of identities, images and ideologies associated with the American woman from the early Republic to the modern period.

Texts: Chopin, The Awakening, Fern, Ruth Hall, Foster, The Coquette, Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; James, Daisy Miller.

Requirements: Active and informed participation in class discussion, two midterm exams, and a group media report.

XIDS 2100-06: Arts and Ideas, Prof. Lori Lipoma
The Graphic Novel: Alchemy of Words and Images
TR 2:00pm-3:15pm, Pafford 308

Satisfies Area C1 of the core.

Description: Far from being a 20 th century pulp-fiction genre targeted mostly to adolescent boys, graphic literature has its foundations in the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations, the Bayeux Tapestry, and even medieval biblical illuminated texts, up to its present-day reemergence into the mainstream. This course, therefore, will be an exploration of sequential art—variously known as comics, visual literature, graphic novel, picture stories, la bande dessinée, manga, etc. Since the late 1980s critics and scholars have recognized the graphic novel as a complex and dynamic form of communication, literature, and art.  It represents a new horizon in critical study, so in addition to our introductory texts, we will also learn to become theoreticians in our own right as we learn to analyze and describe what Scott McCloud calls the “alchemy” of mixing words and images in graphic novels.

Studying comics will help us cultivate our critical sensibilities so that we can more productively approach all sorts of hybrid, visual/verbal texts, from concrete poetry to illuminated manuscripts to artists’ books.  In the course of our study, we may discover some of the most stirring and beautiful work contemporary literature has to offer.

These are the goals of The Graphic Novel: Alchemy of Words and Images.  This will be a course like no other, one that stakes out new territory in word/image studies: We will test the distinctions between “comics” and “non-comics.”  We will examine (and practice using) the formal qualities of comic art.  We will read some of the best that English-language comics have to offer, with special emphasis on the contemporary work of such artists as Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Marjane Satrapi, Linda Barry, Harvey Pekar, and R. Crumb.

Texts: American Splendor, Shari Springer Berman, dir. Paul Giamatti, Harvey Pekar, perf. HBO, 2003; Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! Sasquatch Press, 2001; Eisner, Will. Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories. Princeton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1985; Foorhar, Rana. “Comic Relief.” Newsweek: International Editions. MSNBC.com, August 22, 2005. (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8941787/site/newsweek/) June 20. 2006; Groening, Matt. The Big Book of Hell. NY: Pantheon, 1990; McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993; Miller, Frank et. al. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns DC Comics, 1997; Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. NY: Pantheon, 2004; Spiegleman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, volumes 1 and 2. NY: Pantheon, 1993; Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix: Dawn. Viz Media, 2003; Ware, Chris, ed. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13. McSweeney’s, 2004; Any title from Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Books; Course Pack (CP). NOTE: All these titles are available used.

Requirements: Class Participation – 10% includes quizzes and critiques ; In-Class Writings and Student Presentations – 10%; Brief Response Papers – 20% (5% each) ; Field Research Essay – 20%; Minicomics Project – 20%; Final Exam – 20%.

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ENGL 2050: Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Daily Life, Profs. Lori Lipoma and John Sturgis
Section 01 (Lipoma): MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, Pafford 308
Section 02  (Sturgis): TR 11:00am-12:15pm, Pafford 206
Section 04 (Sturgis): TR 2:00pm-3:15pm, Pafford 307

May count for credit in Core Area B1. Same as THEA 2050.

Description: Effective communicators are more productive, have enhanced career opportunities, enjoy more fulfilling relationships, earn more respect, and have more fun!   The good news is that you already have the tools you need to become a great communicator; it’s just a matter of learning how to use them consciously and masterfully…in other words, learning how to “self-stage.” 

In Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life, we will study and practice practical communication skills—creativity, quick thinking, risk taking, lateral thinking, active listening, subtext mastery, self-awareness—and apply them to virtually every interaction you encounter outside the classroom:  One-on-One Conversations, Public Presentation, Debate and Argumentation, Conflict Resolution and Confrontation Skills, Stress Management, Team Building, and Impression Management.   By the end of the semester, students will have had first-hand experience in all of these areas, and, more importantly, will know exactly how to continue honing and perfecting those skills long after.

Requirements: formal solo presentations, group projects and presentations, panel discussions/debates, vocabulary-building exercises, role-playing and improvisation exercises, journaling, and, of course, active, informed participation in each class session.

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ENGL 2080-01: Introduction to the Art of Film, Prof. Lucy Curzon
MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, Humanities 207

Description: In this course students will consider the primary visual, aural, and narrative conventions by which motion pictures create and comment upon significant social experience. Students will watch a wide range of films from a variety of countries and historical moments in film history. Students will have the chance to explore issues such as framing, photographic space, film shot, editing, sound, genre, narrative form, acting style, and lighting in the context of wider discussions of the weekly films. This is an introductory course, and assumes no prior knowledge of film. Students will be evaluated primarily on the basis of weekly postings, a shot-by-shot analysis, and exams. Weekly screenings will be offered.

Texts: Timothy and Patricia White. The Film Experience: An Introduction

Requirements: Weekly postings, quizzes, a shot-by-shot analysis, and two exams.

ENGL 2080-02: Introduction to the Art of Film, Prof. Stacey Morin
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm, TLC 1116

Description: In this course students will consider the primary visual, aural, and narrative conventions by which motion pictures create and comment upon significant social experience. We will watch a wide range of films from a variety of countries and historical moments in film history. Students will have the chance to explore issues such as framing, photographic space, film shot, editing, sound, genre, narrative form, acting style, and lighting in the context of wider discussions of the weekly films. This is an introductory course, and assumes no prior knowledge of film.

Texts: The Film Experience: An Introduction ISBN: 0-312-25566-7

Requirements: Students will be evaluated primarily on the basis of quizzes, short writing exercises and response papers, in-class writing, and exams.

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ENGL 2110-01, -02: World Literature, Prof. Robert Snyder
Section 01: TR 11:00am-12:15pm, Humanities 208
Section 02: TR 3:30pm-4:45pm, Pafford 308

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: As foundational texts of the Western literary tradition, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and the Bible suggest that “action” is that through which “character” or, more broadly, identity is defined. Other works of antiquity such as the Bhagavad-Gita, however, propose that “Action imprisons the world,” and ensnares the subject, unless it is performed with the discipline of detachment. Beginning with Gilgamesh (Babylonian), Old Testament stories (Judaic), and Homer’s The Odyssey (Greek), this course surveys selected classics of world literature while exploring the culture-specific codes that shape concepts of individual responsibility and action. The sequence of coverage will thus be chronological, culminating in such nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Texts: Maynard Mack (gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition in One Volume (1997).

Requirements: Twelve reading quizzes; two analytical essays (4-5 pages each); two tests (short answer plus quotations); final exam (same format as tests plus an essay).

ENGL 2110-25H: World Literature-Honors, Prof. Tom Dvorske
MW 3:20pm-4:40pm, TLC 1204

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F. Honors students only.

Description: This course is about sex, violence, despair, joy, and madness on a global scale! Otherwise known as a survey of the world’s literature from ancient times to modern, we will examine the aesthetic, cultural, and metaphysical arguments and ideas that shape national and individual identity and psychology. Rather than proceeding lock-step through the centuries, we will roam far and wide through time and space constrained only by genre. Thus we will begin with the epics like Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Son-Jara; turn to drama that concerns things like killing our fathers and searching for authors; and, read widely in prose and poetry of the religious, fictional, and philosophical varieties.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Expanded Edition in One Volume. Ed. Maynard Mack, et.al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Requirements: Two short papers, two exams, reading responses.

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ENGL 2120-01: British Literature, Prof. Bonnie Adams
MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, Pafford 307

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: Over the course of the semester, we will examine not only the significant works of British authors, but we will also discuss the corresponding literary periods as well, spanning from The Middle Ages to The Twentieth Century. Students will examine these works within the context of their cultural importance; we will discuss at length how these works both shaped and reflected their cultures. As we progress, we will also examine how cultural ideals (regarding such issues as politics, education, war, gender relations, religion, and the individual) have evolved over the course of British history.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors (Eighth Edition)

Requirements: TBA

ENGL 2120-02: British Literature, Prof. Emily Hipchen
Monsters and Martyrs
TR 9:30am-10:45am, Pafford 308

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: This survey of British literature will concentrate on literary embodiments of seeming oppositions—on uncivilized and hyper-civilized others. We’ll be reading about monsters such as Beowulf and martyrs such as Victor Frankenstein, participating as voyeurs in the burning, maiming, and blessing, watching as normal folks like us, befuddled and benighted, drive these outsiders out of their minds, out of town, into their graves, and into stories whose ultimate lessons are deeply ambiguous. Why is one murderer good, but another one bad; one child molester evil and the other inspired? What are the ethics, the politics, of that decision? What historical events and real people influenced the perspective of these pieces, and how do world events create the anxieties whose alleviation requires we good British citizens find folks to fill these roles (or maybe fit folks to these roles whether they will or not, by chopping, bending, and stretching)?

Texts: Among others, works by Shakespeare and Chaucer and Milton, of course, but also William Blake, Seamus Heaney, Christina Rossetti, Mary Shelley, Angela Carter, Martin MacDonagh, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Requirements: Required daily attendance and participation, online quizzes, three short answer and essay tests, two two-page papers, and one ten-page research project.

ENGL 2120-03: British Literature, Prof. Lisa Crafton
TR 2:00pm-3:15pm, Humanities 208

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: "I Must Create a System or be Enslav'd by Another Man's," warns Romantic poet/painter William Blake. In this study of British literature, we will read British literary texts, medieval to contemporary, with an emphasis on the dynamic between individuals and communities (familial, cultural, political), how individuals are shaped by/resist these forces, and how literature and critical practices respond to these changing dynamics. We will analyze diverse texts of fiction, drama, poetry, film, and music which nevertheless offer recurrent themes; for example, conflicts between spiritual and material culture from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich to U2 and the compelling power of what Heaney will call "the tribe" in Irish literature.

Texts: Longman Anthology of British Literature (compact ed, Frankenstein, The Tempest, and a course pack, including Julian of Norwich, Chaucer (interlinear translation), Gordimer, and introduction to postcolonial literature.

Requirements: Active discussion, response essays, midterm and final.

ENGL 2120-25H: British Literature-Honors, Prof. Meg Pearson
Exploring Englishness
MW 12:20pm-1:40 pm, TLC 1204

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F. Honors students only.

Description: Traveling through more than 500 years of English literature is a journey unto itself. This class will explore how English authors incorporate the motif of the quest into a variety of genres ranging from chivalric romance to travel literature to epic poetry to science fiction. Through the readings, the course will interrogate whether these journeys ever discover a truly English or British national literature.

Texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Utopia, The Blazing World, historical travel narratives.

Requirements: TBA

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ENGL 2130-01: American Literature, Prof. Mitzi McFarland
The Making of an American Self: Conversations Past and Present
MW 3:20pm-4:40pm, Pafford 308

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: Throwing the gauntlet at patriarchal roles for women, Toni Morrison’s heroine Sula enumerates a quintessential theme in American discourse: “I don’t want to make somebody else.  I want to make myself.” The search for self and place—within and without the community—is not a uniquely feminist project: it resonates as a whole mode of national consciousness, illuminating the conundrums of individuality and community that are the core of the American character. Our readings this semester will take us through a sweeping study of cultural constructions of the self in American literature from the Enlightenment era to the present. Collectively, our readings view narrative not merely as evidence of identity but as instruments for its fashioning. We will situate our trajectory within American historical, cultural, and literary contexts, analyzing disparate religious, philosophical, psychological, racial, and gender models of identity at contrasting moments in our nation’s history. Through careful study and close reading of texts, we will probe the notion of literary value (“What makes a text American?” and “What is an American masterpiece?”) as we foray multiple genres and look at some of the aesthetic, literary, psychological, and socio-historical facets out of which our texts are both generated and interpreted.

Texts: Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.

Requirements: 3 out-of-class essays; a midterm and final exam

ENGL 2130-02: American Literature, Prof. Brandy James
TR 9:30am-10:45, TLC 1116

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: On defining the creation of identity, American essayist, novelist, and playwright James Arthur Baldwin comments, “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” Baldwin’s statement encompasses far-ranging ideas and introduces questions that have historically characterized American literature: How have Americans characterized their own identities at different points in time, and how have historical events, cultural phenomena, social environments, and personal experiences become meshed with and changed these identities? To what extent does the American landscape, either as a physical or symbolic space, attribute to this definition? Is the definition “American” even a valid identity? As we closely examine these questions by examining the various literary genres that span almost four centuries, we will focus on how language and writing has been used to construct and alter the meaning of “American identity.” In addition, we will also delve into the formation of identity from the perspectives of race, gender, and social class and examine how each has been used for this purpose.

Texts: TBA

Requirements: TBA

ENGL 2130-03: American Literature, Prof. Debra MacComb
TR 5:30pm-6:45pm, Humanities 207

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F.

Description: This course will develop a range of enduring themes that have characterized American literature: the encounter with and appropriation of nature; the crafting of an identity that attempts to reconcile the desires of the individual with the needs of society; the individual’s ability to chart his own path to success; the “problem” of the socio-cultural “other”; and the tension between the public and private spheres. In exploring these themes, we will consider how American authors “speak” to each other, endorsing, correcting, and even rejecting previous ideas and ideals. Finally, we will also examine the authorial strategies that developed over time which make these works aesthetically as well as historically pertinent.

Texts: Franklin, The Autobiography, Parts I and II; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Wharton, The House of Mirth.

Requirements: Active and informed participation in class discussions, brief weekly writing assignments; midterm and final exams, two short essays (3-4 pages each).

ENGL 2130-25H: American Literature-Honors, Prof. Barbara Brickman
MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, TLC 1204

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F. Honors students only.

Description: This survey of important works in American literature will address several issues central to the conception of “American” identity: the encounter with and/or exploitation of the natural world; the quest for an independent, unified, and/or original self; the differentiation of the self from a series of “others” (or the production of “otherness”); and the conflicts and negotiations between social demands and values and the individual self. The readings for the course will consist of both canonical texts, such as The Scarlet Letter, and texts challenging the mainstream, such as Jean Toomer’s Cane. Furthermore, four cinematic texts, Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992), Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989), and The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999), will complicate and complement the class’s literary instances of “Americanness.”

Texts: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Henry James, Daisy Miller; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Jean Toomer, Cane; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.

Requirements: 3 short essays, one presentation, midterm and final essay exams.

ENGL 2130-26H: American Literature-Honors, Prof. Josh Masters
American Literature, Backwards and Forwards
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, TLC 2237

May count for credit in Core Area C2 or F. Honors students only.

Description: This survey of American literature traces the development of such themes as nature, nationhood, law, gender, race, and identity in our national culture, from first contact to the present day. However, rather than marching across the centuries with the mission of conquering our nation’s literary history, we will “light out for the territories” in a somewhat unconventional fashion. The subtitle of the course, “American Literature, Backwards and Forwards,” is meant to suggest both the intertextual and the transhistorical nature of the class. Throughout the semester we will work with at pairings of authors who share similar concerns and interests but come from different historical periods (and often have disparate cultural perspectives). Section One of the course, “Puritanism and its Other(s),” will pair the writings of William Bradford with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. Section Two, “The Making of the (White) American,” pairs Ben Franklin’s Autobiography with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Section Three, “The American Captive,” pairs Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Section Four, “The Vanishing American,” pairs an excerpt from George Catlin’s North American Indians with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. And Section Five, “Remaking the American Self,” pairs Mark Twain’s Huck Finn with Russell Banks’s recent novel Rule of the Bone. In reading their texts side by side, we will imagine the writers engaged in a dialogue, exchanging ideas and expressing their concerns through their literary works.

Texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Ben Franklin, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Toni Morrison, TheBluest Eye; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone.

Requirements: Students will write two short essays, a research paper, and an oral presentation. In addition, students must earn a passing reading-quiz average, attend class without fail, and participate in round-table discussions.

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ENGL 2180-01, -02: Studies in African-American Literature, Prof. Stacy Boyd
Section 01: MW 3:20pm-4:40pm, Humanities 209
Section 02: MW 5:30pm-6:50pm, Humanities 205

May count for credit in Core Area C2. 

Description: This survey course introduces the student to the literature that writers of African American heritage created from its beginning in Colonial America to 1960. The course will examine a number of writers, issues, genres, styles, and themes; furthermore, it will analyze the historic, socio--political and cultural forces which helped to shape the African American experience. The course will also emphasize interlocking race, gender, and class perspectives, whenever applicable, for analyzing literary works.

Text: Norton Anthology of African American Literature

Requirements: Normally, daily reading quizzes, presentation, two critical essays, a midterm, and a final.

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ENGL 2190-01: Studies in Literature by Women, Prof. Alison Umminger
MW 12:20pm-1:40pm, Humanities 206

May count for credit in Core Area C2.

Description: This course will begin with a look at Naomi Wolf’s book of cultural criticism, The Beauty Myth, as a springboard for a survey of literature by women. Wolf brings up the ongoing problem with expectations of femininity as they affect “modern” women, but one can see that struggling with and against such expectations is nothing new for women writers and their fictional characters. We will look at how different writers and critics have responded to the various pressures placed on women to be beautiful, to be good mothers (or mothers at all), or to inhabit a particular place in society, and to create a space for themselves as subjects in a culture that (still) places many women in an object role.

Texts: The Beauty Myth, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Waking Beauty, The Bluest Eye, Real Women Have Curves, Veronica, Autobiography of a Face, The Awakening, Quicksand, and The House of Mirth.

Requirements: Students will be expected to write one short paper (4-6 pages), one longer paper (10-12 pages), complete weekly responses, and take a midterm and final exam. Active participation and engagement with the material is, as always, expected.

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ENGL 2300-01: Practical Criticism: Research and Methodology, Prof. Micheal Crafton
MW 12:20pm-1:40pm, Humanities 205

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland (sholland@westga.edu). Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study. Not offered during summer session.

Description: As a prerequisite for upper-division English studies, this course provides an introduction to representative critical approaches to literature. Enabling students to develop and articulate interpretations from a variety of theoretical approaches, the course investigates the historical development and the key assumptions and methodologies of significant schools of literary criticism. As the aim of the course is not literary theory, per se, we will examine each critical theory in context of application to literary texts in a variety of genres. In order to prepare students for critical writing on both poetry and the novel, the course will include intensive study of representative critical essays on James Joyces’ The Dead. We will also view the film version of this long short story as well as some other film clips.

Texts: James Joyce, The Dead (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) (Paperback); Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (4th Edition) (Paperback).

Requirements: 3 critical essays, research paper (including proposal, required drafts, editing workshops, a formal annotated bibliography, and final documented research paper), oral report on critical approach to contemporary film/music, final exam.

ENGL 2300-02: Practical Criticism: Research and Methodology, Prof. Tom Dvorske
MW 5:30pm-6:50pm, Humanities 209

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland (sholland@westga.edu). Education students only. Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study. Not offered during summer session.

Description: This course is your introduction to the methods of critical reading, writing, and research necessary for advanced study in English and the humanities. We will learn to read critically and develop theoretically informed questions that are useful for exploring the complex aesthetic and social functions of literature. Chief among our goals is to establish viable critical lenses for negotiating textual phenomena as a foundation for critical writing and a gateway toward in-depth, discipline-specific research.

Texts: Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6 th Ed); Culler, Jonathan, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction; Lentricchia, Frank and Thomas McLaughlin (eds) Critical Terms for Literary Study (2 nd Ed); Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (8 th Edition); Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49; Wilson, August. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; course packet of poetry and critical readings.

Requirements: 3 papers, one research project, short response papers and quizzes.

ENGL 2300-03: Practical Criticism: Research and Methodology, Prof. Lisa Crafton
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, Humanities 205

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland (sholland@westga.edu). Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study. Not offered during summer session.

Description: As a prerequisite for upper-division English studies, this course provides an introduction to representative critical approaches to literature. As English majors, the methods we all use to frame our interpretation of any text make us practicing literary critics, whether we know it or not. This course enables students to develop and articulate interpretations from a variety of theoretical approaches; we will investigate the historical development and key assumptions and methodologies of a select group of theories, but more importantly in their application to texts. Our case study will be Shelley’s Frankenstein , to which almost every critical approach (new historicist, psychoanalytic, queer theory, feminist et al) has been applied! This study will allow students to write essays from 3 different critical perspectives on short selections from various genres (short fiction, nonfiction, poems, films) we have read together in class (at least one on Shelley). Students’ final work will be a documented research paper and an oral presentation on contemporary film, music, or art.

Texts: Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice , 4th ed.; Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms ; Shelley, Frankenstein , Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers; film excerpts Fight Club , select poems/stories on electronic reserve.

Requirements: reading quizzes, 3 critical essays, documented research paper (with proposal, annotated bibliography, drafts and peer reviews), oral report on critical approach to contemporary film/music.

ENGL 2300-o4: Practical Criticism: Research and Methodology, Prof. Randy Hendricks
TR 5:30pm-6:45pm, Humanities 206

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland (sholland@westga.edu). Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study. Not offered during summer session.

Description: A prerequisite for upper-division work for the English major, this course is an introduction to a variety of critical approaches in literary study. In addition to workshops on literary research, students will get plenty of practice reading and evaluating articles that examine literary works from different critical perspectives as well as writing about literature utilizing multiple reading strategies. We will use Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” as a primary text for the first part of the semester. When we have examined this short story from a variety of approaches, we will deepen our study by turning to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, considering a variety of critical interpretations of the novel and using it as a subject for research papers.

Texts: Charles Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice; Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (online); Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (must have Bedford-St. Martin’s Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism edition).

Requirements: 3 short papers, a research paper, final exam.

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ENGL 3200-01W: Creative Writing, Prof. Chad Davidson
MW 5:30pm-6:50pm, Humanities 208

No more than two [2] 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in English. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This class is devoted to the practice of writing as a creative act. Though 3200 is an introductory level course, expect to read an astonishing amount of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Count on engaging in critical discussions regarding various aesthetic approaches and offering your own writing for the betterment of the class. You must be willing to set aside time daily for writing and must also construct a comprehensive portfolio at the end of the semester. Ultimately, the aim of the course is to enable you to access your imagination through writing, to judge critically works of literature from the vantage point of an author, and to wrestle with both the beautiful and the sublime.

Texts: Lydia Davis, Break It Down; B. H. Fairchild, The Art of the Lathe; Sudden Fiction; The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry; plus various handouts to be distributed in class.

Requirements: Daily readings and exercises, participation, written contributions to the workshop, and a final portfolio of polished writing, including a critical preface.

ENGL 3200-02: Creative Writing, Prof. Amy Cuomo
Screenwriting
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, TLC 1204

No more than two [2] 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in English.

Description: An introduction to writing screenplays.

Texts: Fields, Syd. The Foundations of Screenwriting. Delta Press, 2005; Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle, Trans. Samuel Henry Butcher. Dodo Press, 2006.

Requirements: Students are required to attend and class, participate in discussions and complete writing exercises as assigned. Each student will also write a 15-20 page treatment for his or her screenplay and complete the first act of the screenplay.

ENGL 3200-03W: Creative Writing, Prof. Emily Hipchen
TR 3:30pm-4:45pm, TLC 1204

No more than two [2] 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in English. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills for writing creatively in at least three genres: in this course, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We’ll be looking at published texts in each genre and producing pieces weekly for workshops based on student writing.

Texts: Include short stories by Angela Carter, William Faulkner, and Tobias Wolff, among others; poetry by Chad Davidson, Wislawa Szymborska, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others; and creative nonfiction by Alex Haley, Richard Rodriguez, and John McPhee, among others.

Requirements: Required daily attendance and participation; willingness to participate in workshops and produce at least eighteen pages of typed responses to other students’ work in addition to one’s own creative texts; three reading tests; a writing/response journal; and a final portfolio with six original pieces and meta-text.

ENGL 3200-04: Creative Writing, Prof. Gregory Fraser
TR 5:30PM-6:45PM, TLC 1204

No more than two [2] 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in English. May be taken f to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This class is devoted to the practice of writing as a creative act. Though 3200 is an introductory level course, expect to read a good deal of poetry, fiction, and drama. Count on engaging in critical discussions regarding aesthetic principles and offering your own writing for the betterment of the class. You must be willing to set aside time daily for writing and must also construct a comprehensive portfolio at the end of the semester. Ultimately, the aim of the course is to enable you to access your imagination through writing, to judge critically works of literature from the vantage point of the author, and to come to terms with both the beautiful and the sublime.

Texts: The Best American Short Plays 2000-2001; Sudden Fiction; The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry; plus various handouts to be distributed in class.

Requirements: Daily readings and exercises, written contributions to the workshop, and a final portfolio of polished writing, including a critical preface.

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ENGL 3300-01W: Studies in American Culture, Prof. Patrick Erben
History, English, and the Making of “American Studies”
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm, Pafford 105

Prerequisite: ENGL 2130, HIST 2111 or 2112. Required for the minor in American Studies. Same as HIST 3300. No more than two [2] 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in English. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: What is American Studies? Since the emergence of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field, its practitioners have been continuously trying to define its subject, goal, and methodology. This course assumes that we cannot pursue interdisciplinary work without understanding the common and diverging premises, theories, and practices of the two disciplines that have traditionally furnished most American Studies scholars and students—History and English. The idea of “American culture” has served as the ground where scholars of English and History could join forces or battle over their disagreements and misunderstandings. With the widespread acceptance of “New Historicism” among English folks and the “linguistic turn” among historians, both disciplines have become increasingly alike. Or are they?

Appealing to students from both programs, this course will compare how each field has approached three seminal periods and issues in the development of “American culture:”

1) War, Captivity, and the Conquest of the New World;

2) Gender and Power in the Age of the American Revolution;

3) Race and Identity in the New Nation.

In each section, we will study primary materials (i.e. historical and literary documents) as well secondary works (i.e. literary criticism and historiography). While examining how each discipline selects and interprets evidence, we will ourselves assemble an on-line archive of documents, texts, data, and images that could potentially appeal to both. Throughout the semester, therefore, we will ponder two ways of being inter-disciplinary: the joining of distinct historical and literary methodologies on the one hand and the emergence of an entirely new field and critical language on the other hand. Who knows—maybe we will all get along?!

Texts: A) An on-line archive of documents, texts, and images assembled throughout the semester by all course participants; B) Assigned texts include: Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity ; Mary Rowlandson, Narrative; Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined (selections); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (selections); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes;” William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (selections); Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (selections); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno.”

Requirements: Active and informed class participation, reading quizzes, two methodological analyses, weekly online postings (contributing items to an online archive), a research project.

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ENGL 3400-01: Advanced Composition: Creative Nonfiction, Prof. Alison Umminger
Humor Writing – The Personal Essay and Beyond
MW 3:20pm-4:40pm, Humanities 206

May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: Remarque once famously said that not to laugh at the 20 th century was akin to suicide, and in this class we’re going to apply the same logic to life and modern living. Don’t run away if you think you’re not funny – you may not be Larry David by the end of the class, but you will write humor. We will read a number of contemporary pieces of non-fiction that use humor as a tool of social critique as well as to lighten pain. We will try different forms (to do lists, letters, film reviews), as well as completing two longer essays that use humor to illuminate their subject matter. Along the way, we will be discussing the line between fiction and non-fiction, and the various ways “reality” can be slanted for artistic means. One’s own life may be part of the text, but social satire is also acceptable – so long as the subject is “real.”

Texts: FLIGHT TO CANADA by Ishmael Reed, DRY by Augusten Burroughs, NAKED by David Sedaris, I’M THE ONE THAT I WANT by Margaret Cho, COMEDY WRITING SECRETS, and FIERCE PAJAMAS, an anthology of New Yorker humor.

Requirements: TBA

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ENGL 3405-01W: Professional/Technical Writing, Prof. Joseph Milford
MW 12:20pm-1:40pm, TLC 1112

May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This course focuses primarily on ways to write, format, design, and present technical and professional documents within a workshop environment. The class will discuss appropriate documentation and communication in formal settings, such as the workplace or the academic environment, and produce several types of documents required for functionality and success in these settings. These documents may include (but are not limited to) inter-office memos, job applications, formal thank you letters, letters of resignation, emails with proper protocol, news articles, professional portfolios, curriculum vitae, business letters, and other various documents which must be produced, drafted, revised, and exchanged within a professional or business environment established within the classroom. Students must be prepared to collaborate with others, be aware of the appropriate audience of every formal document, and be able to produce pristine copies of the required professional forms assigned.

Texts: Handbook of Technical Writing (Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu)

Requirements: Students will be required to compose their own business and professional documents as per assignment, to work well with others and produce collaborative group work assignments, and to make a presentation to the class overall in the form of a business proposal from one professional tier to another. Students will also be required to keep a weekly weblog regarding class readings, assignments, and discussions.

ENGL 3405-02W: Professional and Technical Writing, Prof. Tiffany Armand
TR 9:30am-10:45am, TLC 1110

May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: Professional careers require you to present and prove your skills before you can make significant advancements, and this is usually accomplished through written documentation. Therefore, even if you are not a professional writer, you will be a “professional who writes”. And professionals who can write well are usually more impressive than those who cannot.

This course will teach you how to write proper business letters, memos, email, and resumes. Then we will advance into proper summarization, document design, and instructional writing. Your final assignment will be a research project requiring you to write a proposal, a short report, and a long assessment/recommendation report.

Text: Technical Report Writing Today, Daniel G. Riordan

Requirements: This class requires you to be an already competent writer. Punctual submission of assignments is crucial; if you have trouble meeting deadlines, this is not the course for you.

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English 4/5106-01W: Studies in Genre, Prof. Maria Doyle
Drama
MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, Humanities 209

Required for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy the Genre and Theory 1 or 2 (Major Area B1 or B2) requirement. May be repeated for credit as genre or topic varies. Students may enroll up to three semesters. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: Literally, a play is a piece of literature written in dialogue and meant for performance, but the larger question that this course will explore is the more important issue of why a writer might choose this particular form of expression: what’s the value of putting real actors in a room with a real audience, and how does this shape the way a writer presents his or her ideas? Rather than attempting a complete survey of a genre that has been around for well over two millennia, this course will organize its exploration around a set of archetypal Greek models -- the human fall of Oedipus, the rebellion of Antigone and the frenzied destruction of Euripides’s Bacchae -- using analysis of these plays to inform a reading of major developments in modern theater, from Tennessee Williams’s modern gothic to Harold Pinter’s “comedy of menace” and August Wilson’s stage chronicle of African-American experience. Discussions will provide students with a vocabulary for reading British, American and world drama as literature –its connection to larger literary, political and social movements – and as theater – its relation to performance conventions and stage spaces. Students will attend a production in Atlanta as part of their course material.

Texts: Robert Corrigan, ed., Classical Tragedy: Greek and Roman, William Shakespeare, King Lear, J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Harold Pinter, Old Times, Brian Friel, Translations, Vaclav Havel, Largo Desolato, August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Margaret Edson, Wit

Requirements: For undergraduates, two short papers, oral presentation, periodic quizzes and final exam, final research project. Graduate students will complete additional secondary reading and a longer research project including a substantial annotated bibliography.

ENGL 4/5106-02W: Studies in Genre, Prof. Emily Hipchen
Autobiography
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm, Pafford 307

Required for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy the Genre and Theory 1 or 2 (Major Area B1 or B2) requirement. May be repeated for credit as genre or topic varies. Students may enroll up to three semesters. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: What exactly is a life in writing? And how does what we think our lives are (or what we think our lives do or ought to do) transfer into language, onto paper, into books that seem to, that may or may not, really represent our lives in any objective sense? How do we identify ourselves in public, to others? What is the purpose of an autobiography, anyway? And why are we, now, in this country, so taken with this genre? Why are we so angry when life writers falsify themselves, hide deliberately or not from our view? We’ll be looking at the widest possible range of self-life-writing, trying to think about the questions studying the genre raises about self, about life, and about writing.

Texts: We’ll be reading several book-length autobiographies, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley), Patrimony (Roth); Zami (Lorde); Maus I, II (Spiegelman); and The Woman Warrior (Hong-Kingston), among others. We’ll also read critical articles in order to contextualize the primary texts and to point up questions about them we might have missed in our discussion.

Requirements: Required daily attendance and participation, three reading tests, five two-page response papers, annotated bibliography with twenty entries and final 12-15-page research project.

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ENGL 4/5109-o1W: Film as Literature, Prof. Margaret E. Mitchell
Filming the Victorians
TR 2:00pm-3:15pm, Humanities 209

May be taken to satisfy the Genre and Theory 1 or 2 (Major Area B1 or B2) requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: The nineteenth-century novel has provided rich and complex material for twentieth-century filmmakers.  This course will consider how representations of gender in 19 th-century British fiction have been appropriated and revised through the medium of film.  We will focus on several major British novels and multiple incarnations of those novels in both classic and contemporary films. We will also venture into the twentieth century, looking at the way novelists like Jean Rhys and Daphne Du Maurier continued to resist and reclaim the Victorians and to attract film makers to their visions. We will examine the strategies and politics of adaptation, exploring what happens when 19th-century representations of gender are filtered through a twentieth-century lens.

Texts: Novels: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca. Short critical readings will be made available online. Films will include adaptations -- sometimes multiple -- of all of the novels listed above; copies will be available in the library, and you will be expected to view them outside of class. 

Requirements: Active participation in class, quizzes, oral presentations, film journal, short paper, research paper.

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ENGL 4/5110-01W: Medieval Literature, Prof. Micheal Crafton
MW 1:50pm-3:10pm, Humanities 206

May be taken to satisfy the British Literature I (Major Area A1) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Tristan and Isolde, Beowulf, jousting knights and courtly lovers, these terms continue to appear in contemporary discourse. These medieval subjects, not to mention such things as Gothic art and architecture, tapestries, illuminated books, games like Dungeons and Dragons, and lay groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism, speak to the enduring appeal of the medieval world, but the "medieval worlds" represented by these various forms of popular art are very different from each other and differ even more radically from scholarly representations of that epoch, if it can even be called an epoch. In this course, we will compare these popular versions with the literature that the medieval people themselves wrote and with the scholarly interpretations of the same in order to see for ourselves how much, say, The Thirteenth Warrior is more about the modern world than the medieval world. We shall survey Beowulf and some shorter Anglo-Saxon literature, Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes (Chrétien's Perceval and Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan are simply too good and too important not to include in any survey of medieval literature) to represent the early romance and the Anglo-Norman period, and finally Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, some mystical texts, and a few plays (well, at least one play) of the fourteenth and fifteenth century to finish up the course.

Texts: Donoghue, Daniel Ed., Norton Critical Edition of Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney; Burgess, Glynn, trans., Lais of Marie de France; Loomis, Roger, ed., Medieval Romances

Langland, William, Piers Plowman; Chaucer, Geoffrey, Troilus and Criseyde; Beadle, Richard, ed., York Mystery Plays

Requirements: Active and informed participation in seminar discussions, short response essays (usually 1), oral presentations (1-2), and 8-10-page documented essay.

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ENGL 4/5130-01W: Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Prof. Debra Bourdeau
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, Humanities 206

May be taken to satisfy the British Literature I (Major Area A1) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This course will examine eighteenth-century British literature with a special focus on the connection between the verbal and visual cultures of the period. In addition to the more refined discussion of aesthetic theory, we will crawl through the sludge of London’s underbelly to inspect the period’s growing obsession with crime and criminals.

Texts: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth; Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; and the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1C, The Restoration and the Eighteenth-Century

Requirements: Active participation, two essays (one a longer, research-based paper) and a final exam. Quizzes may be given as needed. Graduate students will be expected to do additional critical readings, write a longer research paper, and take a leading role in class discussions.

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ENGL 4/5150-01W: American Realism and Naturalism, Prof. Debra MacComb
The Civil Wars
TR 11:00am-12:15pm, Humanities 131

May be taken to satisfy the American Lit I (Major Area A3) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: The end of the American Civil War marks the beginning of the realist period in the United States. Not surprisingly, the war becomes a prime subject for period writers and serves as a major aesthetic influence, yet it also provides a dominant theme to express the radical social, political, economic and scientific changes that marked post-bellum America. This course will examine literature representing the various civil wars which characterized the life in United States between 1865 and 1910: the rise of the middle class, the growth of the city, the unrest of the working class, the increasing segregation of the races, the rise of regional identities, the burgeoning consumer culture, the influence of Darwinian theories of survival and determinism, reform movements in education, business and the workplace, and the emergence of the “New Woman.”

Texts: Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; James, The Portrait of a Lady; Twain, Great Short Works; Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Wharton, The House of Mirth; Sinclair, The Jungle.

Requirements for 4150: Active and informed participation in class discussions, brief weekly writing assignments; two short essays (3 pages each); final exam; research prospectus and documented essay (8-10 pages).
Requirements for 5150: Active and informed participation in class discussions, brief weekly writing assignments; two short essays (3 pages each); final exam; research prospectus and documented essay (15-18 pages).

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ENGL 4/5165-01W: Contemporary British and American Literature, Prof. Joshua Masters
TR 3:30pm-4:45pm, Humanities 209

May be taken to satisfy the British Lit II (Major Area A2) or American Lit II (Major Area A4) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: This course examines literature produced in the U.S. and British Isles during the last thirty years, primarily focusing on that slippery entity known as “The Postmodern Novel.” Rather than basing the readings on a single unifying theme or overarching concern, the course is broken into four interdependent sections that reflect some of the prevailing concerns of contemporary authors writing in the “postmodern” era. Each section will include a pairing of fictional texts, several relevant poems, and a film. These works demonstrate a wide a range of perspectives—black and white, male and female, British and American—and collectively they suggest new ways to imagine the status of the individual, the boundaries of nationhood, and the meaning of such categories as race, ethnicity, class, and gender. The required texts are listed beneath their subject heading.

Texts: “The Post-Nuclear Family” Selected Raymond Carver stories. The History of Luminous Motion, Scott Bradfield (copies provided by instructor); White Teeth, Zadie Smith; film: Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. “The Intra-Textual Novel” Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively; Erasure, Percival Everett; film: Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. “History, War, and Memory” Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy; Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis; film: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. “Imagining Apocalypse” Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler; film: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.

Requirements: Students are expected to complete the day’s reading assignment in advance and come to class prepared to participate in discussion. Students must maintain a passing reading-quiz average, write two short essays, and a ten-page research paper.

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ENGL 4/5180-01W: Studies in Regional Literature, Prof. Randy Hendricks
Southern Literature
TR 12:30pm-1:15pm, Humanities 208

May be taken to satisfy the American Lit II (Major Area A4) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: Organizing texts in pairs or clusters, we’ll examine the literary side of the long and contentious debate over Southern history and culture. For example, we’ll contrast the Old Dominion romance of Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” with the stories of African-American writer Charles Chesnutt for the issues they raise about the ownership and authorship of Southern history (as well as the diversity of tone and genre they provide as we move from romance to folk material). We’ll follow the twisting extension of this debate through such framing concepts as The New South, The New Negro, Progressivism, and Agrarian conservatism, reading works by Sidney Lanier, H. L. Menken, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright. For the era of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement, we will pair the writing of two major social and literary figures of the twentieth century--Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren—using selected writings and speeches by King, an interview Warren conducted with King for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? and Warren’s 1964 novel, Flood: A Romance of Our Time.

We’ll examine issues of Southern family and community through Tennessee William’s play The Glass Menagerie, Eudora Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter, and Gail Godwin’s novel Father Melancholy’s Daughter. Our last cluster will be devoted to representations of the rural south through Maggie Greenwald’s film Songcatcher and fiction by George Washington Harris, Erskine Caldwell, Lee Smith, and Alice Walker. The pairings and clusters will provide focus and, one trusts, coherence to the course, but they are not finally to be taken as solid divisions of knowledge. Lectures and discussions will range over the entire scope of our subject throughout the semester. In fact, we’ll use another pair of texts to bookend the course, beginning with Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 romance, Gone with the Wind, and ending with William Faulkner’s 1936 romance of a different color, Absalom, Absalom!

Texts: Mitchell, Gone with the Wind; Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter; Godwin, Father Melancholy’s Daughter; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Caldwell, Tobacco Road; Smith, Oral History; Warren, Flood: A Romance of Our Time; Christian/Walker “Everyday Use” (Note: Students must have this edition); and a course packet.

Requirements: 2 short analytical papers, research paper, midterm and final exams. Graduate students with write a more extensive research paper with an annotated bibliography in lieu of the final exam.

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ENGL 4/5185-01W: Studies in Literature by Women, Prof. Lisa Crafton
British
TR 9:30am-10:45am, Humanities 208

May be taken to satisfy the British Lit II (Major Area A2) requirement. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: The contemporary novel and film The Hours reclaims and renews Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (originally titled The Hours). The novel about three women searching for meaning and connection at three different places and times blurs the lines between life and literature; if we are all really as interconnected as he (and Woolf ) would have us believe, are we really so neatly separated from the fictional characters we resemble or create? These questions will help shape our study of British women writers in their historical contexts. This course explores a diversity of literature by British women writers, from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (who offers the maternal female body as analogy to God) to Mary Shelley (whose characters grapple with “body” of any material sort) to Nadine Gordimer (who represents the female body as a site of conflict including race, class, and gender in relations in South Africa). Course readings will require us to consider allegorical, spiritual renderings of the body as in Julian or the conflict between spiritual and sexual in the poetry of Rosetti; we will explore the intersection of the female body with social/political/cultural norms in Behn, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Austen, and Gordimer. Finally, we will read Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway in the context of the contemporary text The Hours and the question of a “tradition” of women writers.

Texts: Behn, The Rover; Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; Shelley, Frankenstein; Austen, Northanger Abbey; Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham,The Hours; coursepack including works by Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Amelia Lanier, Christina Rosetti, and selected critical readings.

Requirements: Active participation in class; brief response essays; midterm and final exams; 8 page documented paper.

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ENGL 4/5188-01W: Individual Authors, Prof. Maria Doyle
James Joyce
MW 12:20pm-1:40pm, Humanities 208

May be taken to satisfy the British Lit II (Major Area A2) requirement. Fulfills the Individual Authors requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: Every summer in Dublin, fans of Joyce's Ulysses descend on the city to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the novel’s central characters, whose modernist odyssey from seaside to hearth (with some pub stops in between) was banned on its initial publication. These contemporary “odysseys,” however, attest to the human expansiveness, technical virtuosity and comic inventiveness of Joyce’s masterpiece. This course will allow students to explore Joyce's major writings, beginning with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and continuing on with an extended, thoughtful plunge into Ulysses itself. We will also dabble in other Joyceana, seeking all the while to contextualize the author as a pillar of the British literary tradition, as a particularly Irish writer and as an experimental modernist intent on circulating with and speaking to a world audience. At the end of the course, students will also examine Joyce’s continuing influence as it shapes the work of more recent writers such as Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie and Seamus Heaney. Ultimately the goal of this course will be to provide students with an appreciation for Joyce's mature style and a clear understanding of the historical and cultural context in which--and frequently against which--he moved.

Texts: The Portable James Joyce; Ulysses; Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated; selected commentaries on Joyce; Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape

Requirements: For undergraduates, two short response papers, oral presentation, midterm and final exams, final research project. Graduate students will complete additional secondary reading and a longer research project including a substantial annotated bibliography.

ENGL 4/5188-02W: Individual Authors, Prof. David Newton
Edgar Allan Poe
TR 2:00-3:15 pm; TLC 1116 

May be taken to satisfy the American Lit I (Major Area A3) requirement. Fulfills the Individual Authors requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: Much like the haunted landscapes and figures found in his poems and tales, Edgar Allan Poe lurks at the margins of the American literary imagination. While critical debates about the literary value of his poems and stories persist, many writers—both European and American—have publicly acknowledged Poe as a seminal literary and theoretical influence. Along with his innovative contributions to poetic theory, to the short story, and to the gothic, Poe is an early contributor to many important contemporary fields of genre fiction, such as detective fiction, horror, science fiction and fantasy. Poe's influence also extends to literary theory; for example, his short story, “The Purloined Letter,” has been the focus of theoretical readings by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others. However, Poe is one of the few American writers whose significant extends beyond the academy and into popular culture. References to Poe or adaptations of his stories frequently appear on television in crime, detective, and science-fiction shows. Dramatic readings and parodies of his works are popular fare at Halloween and have even been featured on The Simpsons. Sports teams, restaurants, beer, and even professional wrestlers bear names that reflect his continuing influence.

In this course, we will trace the development of Poe’s career as a writer, primarily through a series of critical readings of his poems, short stories, and one longer prose work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. We will also read Poe’s most important works on poetic and literary composition, as well as his reviews of other writers, to gain a better appreciation for his contributions as a literary critic and as an editor of several important nineteenth-century magazines and journals. While we will situate Poe within the historical context of the nineteenth century, we will also explore why Poe’s influence extends to contemporary literary and popular culture. Since so many of Poe’s literary works have been read through highly inaccurate biographical and psychological interpretations of his life, we also will read—along with his poems and stories—a recent critical biography of Poe that provides a more accurate appraisal of the relationship between his life and works.

Texts: Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Quinn and Thompson, eds. (Library of America Edition, 1984); James M. Hutchisson, Poe ( University of Mississippi Press, 2005); and John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Other works will be available online as electronic texts. We will also read some contemporary genre fiction and/or view some science fiction and horror films to analyze Poe’s continuing influence on American culture.

Requirements: For undergraduates, active participation in class discussions, daily reading quizzes, several short response papers, 2 critical essays, in-class presentations and a 8 page research paper (with prospectus). For graduate students, all of the requirements listed above as well as an annotated bibliography (10 sources), and a more extensive 12 page research paper. NOTE: Your response papers and presentation assignments involve writing-to-learn activities in which you will be using the writing exercise itself to come to terms with the material we have read. Your responses will be used to generate class discussion as well as to help you gain confidence in your abilities to read and write about what you have learned. They will be evaluated in terms of these expectations. The final research project may grow out of the initial work you've done on the response papers. ALL of these written assignments should conform to the standards of college-level, academic writing.

ENGL 4188-03:  Individual Authors, Prof. Stacy Boyd
Langston Hughes
MW 12:20pm-1:40pm, Humanities 209

May be taken to satisfy the American Lit II (Major Area A4) requirement. Fulfills the Individual Authors requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: Described as the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” and “ Harlem’s Shakespeare,” Langston Hughes is one of the most important African-American writers in the twentieth century.  Although he is perhaps best known for his use of black vernacular traditions in his blues-inspired poetry, Hughes also produced notable works of fiction and drama.  In this seminar, we will have a close look at his major poems, short stories, and essays, paying particular attention to the context of the various phases in Hughes' artistic career.  A prime focus will be on the period of the Harlem Renaissance in which Hughes emerged as an influential innovator of significant trends in twentieth-century African-American literature and culture.  We will pay particular attention to the idea of black pride as it relates to personal and political liberty, equality, and art.                      

Texts: The Ways of White Folks, Short Stories; The Best of Simple; and Not Without Laughter all by Langston Hughes.  Also Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, with Christopher C. DeSantis, and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad.

Requirements: Usually short response papers, reading quizzes, oral presentation, 8-10 page research paper (with proposal), active participation in discussions.

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ENGL 4/5210-o1W: Advanced Creative Writing, Prof. Chad Davidson
Poetry
MW 3:20pm-4:40pm, Humanities 208

Prerequisite: ENGL 3200. May be taken to satisfy the Writing and Language (Major Area C) requirement. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: This class will focus on the generation of poetic material through intensive, process-oriented strategies. More than merely creating works of art, we will be interested in designing and implementing a sustainable writing practice. Additionally we will study intimately a host of contemporary poets—including Robert Hass, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Yusef Komunyakaa, Henrik Norbrandt, Ruth Stone, and Adam Zagajewski—and contemporary poetics—including new confessionalism, neosurrealists, new formalists, and many others. Chief among the various student projects in the course will be weekly audio/visual assignments, extensive journal prompts, and a finished portfolio of poetry (including a critical preface and statement of aesthetics).

Texts: Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry; Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry; B. H. Fairchild, The Art of the Lathe; and two poetry collections of the student’s choosing.

Requirements: Daily workshop responses and participation; memorization and recitation of fifty lines of poetry; reading journal; and final portfolio with critical preface.

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ENGL 4/5300-01: Studies in the English Language, Prof. Teresa Jones
Grammar
TR 5:30pm-6:45pm, Pafford 308

Required for certification in Secondary English Education. May be taken to satisfy the Writing and Language (Major Area C) requirement. May be repeated for credit as topic varies.

Description: In this course we will explore the structure or grammar of the English language and work toward understanding the principles or rules that make it work.  This course is primarily designed for English majors who seek to improve the grammatical proficiency of their writing and for future teachers at the secondary and college level. However, this course also has applications for students entering business and industry, science and medical fields, law and politics, media and public relations, or anyone who recognizes the essential human value of language and who understands how the ability to use language contributes to personal and professional success in life.  After all, when you are talking to friends, asking someone out on a date, debating sports or politics, buying clothes at the mall, or writing a paper, you are using the structures and principles of English grammar, even when your sentences are not grammatical! However, knowing a language and knowing about the language are different kinds of knowledge. Even the ability to speak grammatically correct sentences in no way guarantees that a speaker knows enough about English to explain what makes those sentences grammatical. This course is designed to help you achieve that knowledge. We will refer frequently to Standard English, and, certainly, one of the benefits of this course is that it will help you refine your written and verbal language skills. However, this is not simply a course about grammatical correctness; instead, this course is designed to help you understand how the English language functions, what structures and rules are behind the sentence constructions that you and others create every day.  To accomplish this task, we will learn some basic linguistic and grammatical concepts, and we will learn how to analyze (and diagram) different sentence constructions.  We will also learn how elements of the language (verbs, nouns, sentence structure, pronouns, etc.) emerged and changed over time to create the language we use today.

Text: Calderonello, Martin, and Blair. Grammar for Language Arts Teachers. Longman, 2003.

Requirements:Daily reading assignments and grammar exercises; three exams.

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English 4384-01W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Alison Umminger
Bodies and Boundaries – Reading the Body/Challenging Culture
MW 5:30pm-6:50pm, TLC 2237

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland ( sholland@westga.edu). Required for all English majors. Cannot be taken until ENGL 1101, 1102, and core area F have been completed with a minimum passing grade of C. A minimum of 18 hours of upper-level English courses must also have been completed with no grade lower than C. Not offered during summer session. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description and Texts: This senior seminar will (I hope) take some of the critical tools you’ve already acquired and tweak them slightly to look at bodies which challenge culturally determined definitions of “normal.” Starting with the movie “Freaks” (which literalizes the idea that a “freak” is never born, but always made), we will look at the sort of bodies that challenge “normalcy” as it is constructed at any given time. We will also look at the texts Geek Love, The Member of the Wedding, Caucasia, and Autobiography of a Face with an eye towards which bodies are most challenging (and/or threatening) to dominant ideologies, and how bodies that occupy liminal spaces challenge easy binaries (black or white, male or female, etc.). Students will (again, I hope) see how some of the race, gender, disability, and other criticism they have encountered can be tweaked to look at a group of texts through a slightly different lens. We will be using Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s collection of essays, Freakery, as a supplemental critical text.

Requirements: Class discussion, individual and group oral reports, two response essays, substantive research project, including prospectus, abstract, and annotated bibliography, and colloquia presentation.

ENGL 4384-02W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Robert Snyder
Espionage/Surveillance/Agency
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm, TLC 2237

Registration requires permission of Susan Holland ( sholland@westga.edu). Required for all English majors. Cannot be taken until ENGL 1101, 1102, and core area F have been completed with a minimum passing grade of C. A minimum of 18 hours of upper-level English courses must also have been completed with no grade lower than C. Not offered during summer session. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: Ever since Rudyard Kipling, defending British imperialism, referred to espionage as the “Great Game” in Kim (1900), a new genre emerged from the nineteenth-century adventure tale and detective story that challenged its precursors in terms of commercial popularity. Although sometimes deprecated by literary purists on the grounds of their allegedly “formulaic” quality, à la Ian Fleming’s overexposed potboilers about James Bond, “spy” novels and films have highlighted two intertwined issues in contemporary Western culture—surveillance and agency. This course will be devoted to exploring that twofold preoccupation. Why do so many twentieth-century novelists and filmmakers dramatize the imperiled plight of the individual, and usually isolated, subject? How are they raising questions about post-Enlightenment precepts of autonomy and self-determination? Does it make sense any longer, given the panoptic gaze of “the Other” through surveillance, to postulate the notion of independent, untrammeled, and free agency? What are we to make of the “scopic drive” in what has been called the “Age of Clandestinity”? Drawing heavily on Michel Foucault’s thinking, we will examine five novels and five films, most produced during the thirty-year period following World War II, while undertaking extensive projects on primary texts that engage the seminar’s critical issues.

Texts: Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (1952); Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911); Graham Greene, The Third Man (1949); Adam Hall, The Quiller Memorandum (1965); John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963). Films: Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up (1966); Francis Ford Coppola, The Conversation (1974); Sidney J. Furie, The Ipcress File (1965); Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954); Joseph Sargent, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Requirements: Active participation in class discussions; oral presentation; three response essays (3-4 pages each); research-based paper (15-20 pages), including a preliminary prospectus and bibliography, for publication in a course anthology.

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ENGL 4/5385-01W: Special Topics, Prof. Patrick Erben
The Un-Virtuous Republic: Tropes of Transgression in the Early American Novel
TR 3:30pm-4:45pm, Pafford 105

May be taken to satisfy the American Lit I (Major Area A3) requirement. Requires permission of the department chair to repeat. May be taken to satisfy 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description: Licentious lovers, sentimental women, rebellious daughters, devious ventriloquists, tragic mulattoes, and sadistic priests: the stuff of early American fiction but hardly material for a republic built on the classical ideal of a virtuous citizenry. Education, literature, and political culture in the early nation were supposed to produce individuals able to curb their private passions and contribute to the public good. While John Adams proclaimed republican virtue as the foundation of a successful political system, James Madison and other members of the Constitutional convention already looked for ways to create safeguards against impulses threatening to undermine the nation. Yet the foremost hazard to public virtue was established by the founders themselves: by disenfranchising not only ethnic minorities and landless laborers but all women regardless of class or race, the early Republic created masses of discontented individuals ready to channel their passions into revolutionary action.

This course examines the novel as the literary form best suited to test, critique, and transgress the cultural, moral, and political ideals of the early republic. Through readings and discussions, we will attempt to understand how writers and readers of early American novels negotiated the difficult terrain between affirmation and transgression. By carefully considering socio-cultural contexts, market forces, reading habits, and literary techniques, we will evaluate the ways in which early American novels confronted readers with the most difficult question in republican citizenship: how to make personal and critical choices in the face of overwhelming complexities.

Texts: Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter; Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein, The Mysteries of New Orleans; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America.

Requirements: Active and informed class participation, reading quizzes, secondary source review, weekly online postings, short analytical essay; early American fiction project.

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ENGL 6105-01: Seminar in British Literature I, Prof. Meg Pearson
Shakespearean Spectacle
W 5:30pm-8pm, TLC 1204

Registration requires permission of Director of Graduate Studies.

Description: Shakespeare’s plays are described by numerous critics as exemplars of rhetorical mastery: they are poems as much as they are plays. Unlike the work of lesser known playwrights, whose productions typically rely more heavily upon staging and effect, Shakespeare’s dramatic canon allegedly employs only language to move and entertain an audience. As Hamlet would say, these plays “have that within which passeth show.”

This seminar will interrogate this commonplace using a thorough examination of several works selected from each phase of Shakespeare’s professional career. Shakespeare used stage machinery and special effects in plays ranging in time from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, but how did his usage evolve from the 1580s to the 1610s? How do spectacles like severed heads, witches, fairies, or ghosts function within a “Shakespearean play”? Additionally, how do they function in the plays of his peers?

More broadly, the seminar will address the critical discomfort with spectacularity in dramatic literature—a queasiness that has its origins in Aristotelian definitions of tragedy and antitheatrical fears about the corrupting power of spectacle and sight.

Texts: Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Shakespeare plays to include Titus Andronicus, the Second Part ofHenry VI, The Winter’s Tale, and more. Secondary readings will include early modern antitheatrical tracts as well as current performance criticism.

Requirements: TBA

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ENGL 6110-01: Seminar in American Literature I, Prof. David Newton
Nineteenth Century American Poetry
T 5:30pm-8:00pm, TLC 2237

Registration requires permission of Director of Graduate Studies.

Description: The emergence of modernist and later post-modernist poetics in the twentieth century has for all practical purposes obscured our awareness of the essential role that poetry played in the literary and cultural life of the American nation throughout much of the nineteenth century. Seizing upon Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (with an occasional glance at Edgar Allan Poe) as the only poets worthy of serious study, the academy by and large relegated the rest of nineteenth-century poetry to the literary dust-heap of the American past, regarding it as either too conventional, too sentimental and pietistic, or too closely allied with the prevailing cultural and political ideologies of the day to be of any critical or intellectual value. As a result, our understanding of poetic genres and literary modes of production in the nineteenth century has been profoundly altered, leaving us with an incomplete idea of the central role that poetry played in American life.

The seminar will reconsider these dual histories: it will attempt to repopulate (poetically) the century through constructing a more historically accurate narrative of nineteenth-century poetry, and it will examine the history of its erasure at the hands of later critical and theoretical approaches that failed to understand its cultural significance or its ideological and generic complexity. Consequently, we will focus on a series of critical problems that will inform our reading of specific poets: the attempt to formulate a specifically and distinctively American poetic tradition; the relationship of poetry to popular culture, entertainment, and other written and verbal forms of expression (such as sermons and hymns, popular ballads, political speeches, and the American vernacular itself); the nature of cultural diversity in nineteenth-century America and its influence on creating multiple American poetries; and the relationship between poetry and ideology (for example, the central role that poetry plays in how Americans debated and/or sought to understand such national crises as slavery and the Civil War).

The seminar will begin by reassessing the cultural value of early nineteenth-poets like Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier who at one point occupied prominent positions in the American poetic canon and who established poetic modes that influenced later nineteenth-century poets. We also will read poets who became popular cultural icons during nineteenth century but who have since vanished from the historical record. These poets include children (such as Dora Read and Ellen Goodale), women (such as Lydia Sigourney, Helen Hunt Jackson, Pearl Rivers, and Sarah Piatt), and African-Americans (such as Frances E.W. Harper). Other poets—such as Emerson, Poe, and Simms—will help us to appreciate how poetic theories informed the practice of many American poets. We will read extensively from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as well. However, while we will look at some of the major critical and theoretical perspectives that have informed interpretations of Whitman and Dickinson in the twentieth century, we will be primarily concerned with situating both poets within the historical and cultural contexts of the nineteenth century. For example, rather than viewing Dickinson as the only female poet of value in nineteenth-century America, we will read her poetry in the context of other female poets from the era to see how she draws upon a shared imaginative reservoir of poetic themes and conventions.

Texts: Paula Bennett, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets . Blackwell Publishing, 1998. (ISBN: 0631203990); John Hollander, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (one-volume edition). Library of America College Edition , 1996. (ISBN: 1883011361); Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. James Miller, ed. Houghton Mifflin Company (Riverside Edition), 1959. ( ISBN: 0395051320); Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems. Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Back Bay Books, 1976. (ISBN: 0316184136); William Gilmore Simms. Poetry and the Practical. Edited with an Introduction by James Everett Kibler, Jr. University of Arkansas Press, 1996. (ISBN: 1557284350). We will also use a course packet which will include some poems and essays not included in the list above. Secondary material—including recent historical and theoretical studies of nineteenth-century American poetry—will be placed on reserve in the library.

Requirements: Discussion leader (at least one 30-minute session); presentations on secondary reading assignments (oral presentation and written components); poetry presentations; one critical response essay; final research essay (15 pages minimum). A prospectus and an annotated bibliography required as part of the research essay.

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ENGL 6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Barbara Brickman
Gender and Genre in American Film
M 5:30pm-8:15pm, TLC 1204

Registration requires permission of Director of Graduate Studies.

Description: This seminar will examine the connection between certain film genres and the production and destabilization of gender. One of the most influential genre critics, Thomas Schatz, describes genre films, such as Westerns or film noir, as a “familiar formula of interrelated narrative and cinematic components that serves to continually re-examine some basic cultural conflict.” By focusing in on film noir, horror, and the woman’s picture or melodrama, this course steers that examination toward the “basic cultural conflict” of establishing, reaffirming, and contesting gender norms in American popular film. From the “crisis of masculinity” represented in postwar film noir to the “monstrous feminine” of 1970s horror films, genre films offer both a historical and social context for conflicts related to changes in gender norms and a formulaic narrative that lends itself also to examination of the film form.

Texts: The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film , Ed. Barry Keith Grant; Women in Film Noir , Ed. E. Ann Kaplan; Genre Reader III , Ed. Barry Keith Grant; Selected electronic readings on WebCT.

Selected Films (screened before class): Alien (Scott, 1979); Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992); The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946); Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935); Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944); Garden State (Braff, 2004); Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959); Klute (Pakula, 1971); The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947); A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984); Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960); Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940); Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Romero, 1974);

Requirements: One oral presentation, weekly responses, and a research paper (including proposal, conference, presentation of research, and annotated bibliography).

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