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Fall Courses, 2004
Skip down the page to view the following courses offered during the Fall 2004 term:
ENGL 2050: Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life, Profs Lori Lipoma and John Sturgis
XIDS 2100-02: Photography and Short Stories, Prof. Patricia Reinhard
ENGL 2110: Survey of World Literature, Prof. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten
ENGL 2110-25H: World Literature, Prof. Chad Davidson
ENGL 2120-01 and ENGL 2120-02: British Literature, Prof. Fran Chalfant
ENGL 2120-03: British Literature, Prof. Peter E. Morgan
ENGL 2120-25H: British Literature, Prof. Lisa Crafton
ENGL 2120-26H: British Literature, Prof. Gregory Fraser
ENGL 2130-26H: American Literature, Prof. David Newton
ENGL 2130-25H: American Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
ENGL 2190-01 and ENGL 2190-02: Studies in Women's Literature, Prof. Amy Stackhouse
ENGL 2300-03: Practical Criticism, Prof. Nina Leacock
ENGL 3200-01: Creative Writing, Prof. Alison Umminger
ENGL 3200-03: Creative Writing, Prof. Tom Dvorske
ENGL 3400-01: Advanced Composition, Prof. Alison UmmingerENGL 3405-01W and 3405-02W: Professional and Technical Writing, Prof. Tiffany Armand
ENGL 4106-01W: Studies in Genre, Prof. Maria Doyle
ENGL 4106-02: Studies in Genre, Prof. Nina Leacock
ENGL 4110-01W: Medieval Literature, Prof. Micheal CraftonENGL 4384-01W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Maria Doyle
ENGL 4/5155-01W: Twentieth-Century British Literature, Prof. Robert Snyder
ENGL4/5165-01W: Contemporary Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
ENGL 4/5188-01W: Individual Authors, Prof. Lisa Crafton
ENGL 4384-01W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Micheal Crafton
ENGL 4/5385-01W: Special Topics, Prof. Robert Snyder
ENGL 6105-01: Seminar in British Literature I, Prof. Micheal Crafton
ENGL 6110-01: American Literature I Seminar, Prof. David Newton
ENGL 6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Gregory Fraser
ENGL 2050: Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life, Profs Lori Lipoma and John Sturgis
Section 01 (Lipoma): MWF 10:00-10:50; Section 02 (Lipoma): MWF 12:00-12:50; Section 04 (Sturgis): TR 9:30 - 10:45; Section 06 (Sturgis): TR 12:30-1:45Effective communicators are more productive, have enhanced career opportunities, enjoy more fulfilling relationships, earn more respect, and probably even 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.
XIDS 2100-02: Photography and Short Stories, Prof. Patricia Reinhard
TR 9:30-10:45, TLC 1116Description: 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. Welty's fiction and images, along with specific terms and concepts descriptive of both disciplines, provide the springboard to all that follows--dozens of photographic images, thirteen stories, and Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Texts: Susan Sontag's On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others; course packet of short stories, photographic images, and an essay 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.
ENGL 2110: Survey of World Literature, Prof. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten
Long, Strange Trips
MW 5:30-6:45, PAF 307
Required for English majors. May count for credit in Core Area C.Description: Since the beginning of literary history, writers have chronicled a variety of pilgrimages. Travel writer Alan Morinis defines pilgrimage as "a paradigmatic and paradoxical human quest, both outward and inward, a movement toward ideals known but not achieved at home. As such, pilgrimage is an image for the search for fulfillment of all people, inhabiting an imperfect world." In this survey of world literature course, we will explore a variety of "long, strange trips," some of which are overt pilgrimages and some of which are more subtle journeys within the mind. We'll follow memorable characters on their journeys into a variety of places, both geographic and mental, exterior and interior.
Some important questions to consider: in what ways are our lives shaped by the places we inhabit? What benefits are there in staying put versus hitting the road? What motivates us to journey away from familiar places? And what makes us stay home? What purpose does journeying hold in our cultures and our lives? What is the connection between travel and spirituality?
It is my goal that we understand the texts as both cultural/historical works as well as literary works. We will work on placing the texts within their cultural and literary moments, as well as placing the texts within genre and other formal considerations.
Texts: The Odyssey, The Eclogues, Lysistrata, The Tao te Ching, The Inferno, Blazing World, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Candide, Notes from the Underground, Cry the Beloved Country, Ceremony, as well as selections from the Old and New Testament of the Bible
Requirements: Assignments will include 10 one-page reading responses, two exams, one presentation, and one critical essay.
ENGL 2110-25H: World Literature, Prof. Chad Davidson
TR 3:30-4:45, TLC 1204
For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit in Core Area C.Description: This course will focus on the ways texts and the cultures from which they spring have dealt with myths of the underworld and how those myths inform the way we think about life, death, and the all-important afterlife. Using Dante's Inferno as a pivotal text, we will look at classical and contemporary representations of the underworld as they appear in both European and non-European literatures. Central to our exploration will be the concepts of the hero's journey, the quest for spiritual enlightenment, the fascination with sin, and the notion of justice (both the divine and the figuratively medieval).
Text: Dante, The Divine Comedy (Inferno only); Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude; Maynard Mack, ed., The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (single volume edition).
Requirements: Daily responses, two short papers, group oral presentation, midterm, and final.
ENGL 2120-01 and ENGL 2120-02: British Literature, Prof. Fran Chalfant
The Uses of the Past
TR 12:30-1:45, HUM 206 (section 01)
TR 3:30-4:45, HUM 206 (section 02)
Required for English majors. May count for credit in Core Area C.Description: A survey of important works of British literature. This course will slightly revise Winston Churchill's comment, "Those who do not know history will repeat its mistakes," as "Writers who can draw from past models with respect to genres, poetic form, and character types often strongly enrich their own work." This course will reveal how the classical heroic epic, pastoral elegy, and tragedy; the Angelo-Saxon heroic poem; the medieval romance and ballad; Shakespearean tragedy and metaphysical poem all were utilized by later poets and prose writers, a process in this course culminating with the late 20th-century poet Stevie Smith's utilization of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."
Texts: Anderson, et. al., The Literature of England; Hardy, The Return of the Native.
Requirements: Active participation in class; four tests, including a midterm and final (all writing-based); plus paper.
ENGL 2120-03: British Literature, Prof. Peter E. Morgan
What's Love Got to Do with It?
TR 2:00-3:15, HUM 206
Required for English majors. May count for credit in Core Area CDescription: What's love but a second-hand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? These and other questions of romantic and social significance will be discussed as we skip through an eclectic collection of love stories from the pure to the purely adulterous, the spiritual to the really rather earthy, the subtle to the graphic, the obsessive to the casual. This course will ruminate on the highest sentiments of courtly love and romp through the picaresque narratives of love on the road. We will examine love denied and accepted, bestowed and betrayed, admired and prosecuted. We will juxtapose Chaucer's Knight and Miller, ask what Sir Gawain thought he was doing with the host's wife in any case, ponder on the destructive nature of a love like Othello's, reflect on the maid that would have been convinced by Marvell's worms, wonder what Rochester's lad really had that made him such a peach, recoil from the moving skeleton Orabella is forced to marry, rage with Oroonoko at the treatment he received at sundry hands, sympathize with Behn in her disappointment, free Finch from her fetters, peel back the mask that allows Swift's figures to appear flawless beauties as long as the light is dim, languish with Eloisa when her lover is castrated, suffer with Clarissa as she frets like a bird while Lovelace stalks around her cage, and close the curtains on Tom so that his pursuit of Molly-or Molly's pursuit of him-does not become too public for good taste to bear. Finally, we will ask with Astell when it may be that the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, when the tyrannous domination will end, and for all of the above, what's love got to do with it?
Texts: Seamus Heaney (trans.), Beowulf; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (trans. Nevill Coghill); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; William Shakespeare, Othello; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and other Works (ed. Janet Todd); Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, James Joyce, Dubliners; Selected poetry.
Requirements: Two short papers (5 pages each); midterm and final examinations; frequent quizzes; active participation in class discussion and activities. The syllabus and course details will be online at www.westga.edu/~pmorgan.
ENGL 2120-25H: British Literature, Prof. Lisa Crafton
MW 2:00-3:15, TLC 2237
For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit in Core Area C.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 selected texts, medieval to contemporary, with an emphasis on the dynamic between individuals and communities (familial, social, 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: The Tempest, Dr. Faustus, Mrs. Dalloway, English Romantic Verse, Frankenstein, Endgame, and a course pack of excerpts from Julian of Norwich, Pearl Poet, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Browning, Rosetti, Woolf, Heaney, Gordimer, et al.
Requirements: Active discussion, group oral report, brief response essays, midterm and final.
ENGL 2120-26H: British Literature, Prof. Gregory Fraser
TR 11:00-12:15, HUM 209
For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit in coreDescription: This course introduces students to representative works of British literature from the Anglo-Saxon age to the twentieth century. In addition to exploring questions of genre, literary periodization, and historical context, we will be concerned with the stories literature has told, over time, about the "self"-whether that involves the person writing the text, the people imagined in the text, or the larger culture surrounding the text. We will also examine ways in which texts mediate the relationship between "self" and "culture" in both reactionary and revolutionary ways.
Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Majors Authors, 7th edition, packaged with CD-ROM.
Requirements: Two analytical essays (at least five pages each), one group oral presentation, midterm exam, final researched essay (at least eight pages), final exam.
ENGL 2130-26H: American Literature, Prof. David Newton
TR 2:00-3:15, TLC 1204
For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May be counted for credit in Core Area C.Description: This course will introduce you to some of the writers and literary works that have made significant contributions to the development of literature in America. The works we will read encompass a historical period that covers almost four centuries, beginning with the earliest years of European exploration and settlement of the Americas and concluding with the contemporary era. However, our investigation will push us well beyond a survey of these different literary works and toward a more sophisticated awareness of their textual, cultural, and historical interrelationships. Specifically, we will examine how American literature is related to the historical and cultural development of America as a nation. We will also explore how different writers have struggled to understand and attempted to define through their writing what America is and what it means to be an American. Consequently, our reading will be guided by a series of critical questions: How have Americans defined individual, cultural or national identity at different moments in our history as a nation? Does a national and/or individual identity that is uniquely "American" exist? What qualities or characteristics constitute individual and/or national identity? What roles do the historical past, personal experiences, and social environments or conditions play in defining who we are? To what extent has the American landscape as a geographic or symbolic space contributed to the formation of American identity? As we examine these questions, we will focus on the various ways that language-especially writing-has been used to shape or construct individual and national identity in America. As we will discover, language is an essential resource for defining others and ourselves. We will also explore the question of identity from the perspectives of race, gender, and social class and examine how such categories have been used in the formation of identity in America.
Texts: Baym and others, eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th Edition, 2003; Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country. New York: Harper, 1993; Other shorter works will be assigned from electronic (online) editions or placed on reserve in the library. We will also view (outside of class) several films related to the study of American literature and culture.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active and informed participation in class discussion, daily reading quizzes, midterm and final examinations, class presentations, and two critical response papers.
ENGL 2130-25H: American Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
MWF 1:00-1:50, TLC 2237
For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May be counted for credit in Core Area C.Description: Through examining texts representative of American literature, we will explore how our nation's story of itself, as recorded in its literature, has both reflected and shaped us as a people. We will consider issues of genre and of history as they influence that story during specific eras in our literary development, and we will seek to understand how race, class, and gender affect representations of American lives.
Texts: Russell Banks, Continental Drift; Ann Beattie, The Burning House; David Bottoms, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. In addition to these written texts, we will also study three films: The Last of the Mohicans, Avalon, and Forrest Gump.
Requirements: In addition to regular attendance, active class participation, and regular reading quizzes, students will do several short response papers as well as midterm and final essays, all written out of class, and at least two presentations to the class.
ENGL 2190-01 and ENGL 2190-02: Studies in Women's Literature, Prof. Amy Stackhouse
MWF 12:00-12:50, PAF 307 (section 1)
MWF 1:00-1:50, PAF 307 (section 2)
May count for credit in Core Area C.Description: For centuries in English literature, childbirth has been a common trope for writing books. The author is frequently represented as giving birth to his books, sometimes with the help of his midwife publisher or female muse. Despite this commonplace, few women were included in the literary canon. Over the past forty years, feminist scholarship has uncovered the writing of numerous women, thus revealing a broader literary tradition than had previously been imagined. In this course, we will study a variety of genres by women writers to discover how these writers imagined themselves as authors and how they viewed creativity.
Texts: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Requirements: Active and informed class participation, reading quizzes, two short papers, a midterm, and a final.
ENGL 2300-03: Practical Criticism, Prof. Nina Leacock
Research and Methodology
TR 5:30-6:45, HUM 225
Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study. Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during summer session.Description: This course will investigate critical approaches to literature associated with various contemporary or recent "schools of thought" (Marxism, New Historicism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, post-colonial studies, New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.). While we will read some very short excerpts from seminal texts associated with these schools (Marx, de Beauvoir, Derrida, etc.), our primary critical texts will be recent essays on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. By choosing representative essays, we thus will be able to evaluate, if not the schools themselves, at least how well the approaches they inspire illuminate Shelley's novel.
Our shared work on Frankenstein in the first part of the semester will aim at helping each student assemble an individual "toolbox" of approaches he or she finds sympathetic and illuminating. In the second part of the semester, students will try out their "tools" in individual research projects on Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Texts: Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction; Rice and Waugh, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader; Shelley, Frankenstein with a casebook or packet of critical essays; Stoker, Dracula; MLA Handbook.
Requirements: Reading quizzes, three short papers, oral presentation, final exam, a research project (including proposal, required drafts, editing workshops, a formal annotated bibliography, and a final documented research paper).
ENGL 3200-01: Creative Writing, Prof. Alison Umminger
MWF 10:00-10:50, HUM 225Description: This course provides an introduction to poetry and fiction writing, with attention to craft and revision. Using contemporary fiction and poetry anthologies, students will gain some basic familiarity with poets and short-story writers currently practicing their art. This should serve as an inspiration and springboard for their own writing, as good writers must also be good readers. The course will cover the building blocks of fiction and poetry: concrete language, dramatic situation, voice, meter, imagery, characterization, conflict, showing vs. telling, etc. Students will be writing and revising their own work weekly and should expect to produce a portfolio of work for review at the end of the semester.
Texts: Bowman, Catherine, ed. Word of Mouth, Cassill, Oates, ed., The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Addonizio, Laux, The Poet's Companion. Leguin, Ursula, Steering the Craft.
Requirements: Each student will write 5-6 poems and revise them for the poetry section. For the fiction section, students will do a number of short exercises and write and revise one longer story (10-12 pages). There will also be a short paper and presentation on one of the poets in the Word of Mouth anthology. All students are required to be active participants in workshops.
ENGL 3200-03: Creative Writing, Prof. Tom Dvorske
TR 3:30-4:45
This introductory course is a writing workshop in which we explore the process and craft of creative writing. We will focus on the elements poetry, short fiction, and drama (with an eye toward screenplays), while studying ways writers use craft as opportunities for discovery and expression. Students will write a great deal of creative work, from exercises that hone skills applicable to all genres, to work in specific genres and styles. In addition to daily assignments, students will write three short craft essays, keep a directed reading journal, and compile a portfolio of their own creative work along with an introduction discussing their development and concerns as a writer.Texts: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979; B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems; Ann Charters, The Story and Its Writer (6th Shorter Ed.); course packet of materials on library reserve.
Requirements: In addition to in-class exercises, workshop participation and class discussion, you will write short critical responses, write and revise creative material, and construct a portfolio of polished pieces with an introduction discussing your work with relation to texts and ideas we've bandied about in this course.
ENGL 3400-01: Advanced Composition, Prof. Alison Umminger
Creative Nonfiction
MWF 11:00-11:50, HUM 225
May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education.Description: This course will provide a basic introduction to creative nonfiction: the art of the personal essay. Students will not only learn to write aspects of their own lives and experience, but also to use the world around them as a trigger for measured observation. The course will begin with a "self-narrative" and move into a number of short exercises designed to mirror the readings we will be doing in class. Student work will be workshopped for revision, and students should expect to participate actively in helping each other with their writing.
Texts: Bly, Carol, Beyond the Writer's Workshop. Levertov, Denise, Tesserae. Lopate, Phillip, The Art of the Personal Essay.
Requirements: Students will write and revise four (4) five-to-seven-page pieces of work, write one longer self-narrative, and do a number of shorter, written assignments.
ENGL 3405-01W and 3405-02W: Professional and Technical Writing, Prof. Tiffany Armand
TR 11:00-12:15 (section 01w)
W 5:30-8:15 (section 02w)
May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education.
Required for the BS in Computer Science. May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement. May be taken for certification in Secondary Education English.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.
This class requires you to be an already competent writer.
Text: Successful Writing at Work, Philip C. Kolin., occasional library reserve materials.
Requirements: The documents described above, three tests, and some small daily assignments. Punctual submission of assignments is crucial; if you have trouble meeting deadlines, this is not the course for you.
ENGL 4106-01W: Studies in Genre, Prof. Maria Doyle
Drama
TR 9:30-10:45, HUM 312
May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education. May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: This course will illuminate how theater texts function both as "drama"-as literary contributions to the evolution of ideas-and as "theater"-as living stage pieces that grow and transform through performance. Beginning with an exploration of the development of theatrical form-the historical evolution of the traditional "poles" of tragedy and comedy from classical Greece to the nineteenth century-the course will move on to examine a variety of modern and contemporary plays by writers like Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, August Wilson, Margaret Edson and Bertolt Brecht. Not only will these discussions introduce students to significant modern schools of drama (Theater of the Absurd, expressionism), but they will also highlight ways of thinking about how theater means by asking questions about performance spaces, audience expectations, and the value of gesture and staging in relation to language.
Text: The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama.
Requirements: Normally, 2-3 short response essays, 8-10-page research paper, oral presentation, midterm and final exams.
ENGL 4106-02: Studies in Genre, Prof. Nina Leacock
Fiction
M 5:30-8:15, HUM 212
May be taken for certification in Secondary English Education.Description: Genre identifications come with implicit instructions for reading. Arguably, we will read differently if we have already decided that what we are reading is "fiction"-in other words, just a story, not the "truth." In this course, we will investigate standard "reading instructions" or expectations associated with the major fiction genres, the short story and the longer novel. But we will also ask more general-perhaps even anthropological-questions about fictions or stories and their role in cultures. Are there cultural functions that might be better served by stories than by true accounts? And can taking this anthropological view help us define novels or shorter prose genres more precisely as modern forms, distinct from earlier story-telling traditions?
Texts: Carlos Fuentes, The Orange Tree (translated by Alfred Mac Adam); Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Alice Munro, Open Secrets; Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family; José Saer, The Witness (translated by Margaret Jull Costa); Leslie Silko, Ceremony; Gary Snyder / Maria Johns, "The Woman Who Married a Bear"; Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar; and short course packets of critical texts about fiction genres.
Requirements: Regular reading quizzes and informal homework assignments, active participation in class discussion, three formal essays, final exam.
ENGL 4110-01W: Medieval Literature, Prof. Micheal Crafton
TR 2:00-3:15, HUM 209
May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: The Thirteenth Warrior, Excalibur, Joan of Arc, The Name of the Rose, Camelot, The Lion in Winter-these titles of successful popular movies on 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 medievals themselves wrote and with the scholarly interpretations of 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 Chretien de Troyes (Chretien'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: J. B Trapp, Douglas Gray and Julia Boffey, eds. Medieval English Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002; William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman. The Medieval World View: An Introduction 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Requirements: Active and informed participation in seminar discussions, short response essays (usually 2), oral presentations (1), and 8-10-page documented essay.
ENGL 4384-01W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Maria Doyle
Ritual Realities: Patterns of Performed Living
TR 12:30-1:45, TLC 2237
Requires permission of department chair. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC Requirement.Description: Simply defined, ritual is a patterned action endowed with meaning, yet from what source does that meaning derive? This course will explore how literary texts have conceptualized the relationship between the pattern and its interpretation in various ritual contexts, both formal events, like religious services, and informal processes, like the guest-host dynamics of a party. Students will explore ritual "stagecraft"-the differing roles of participant and spectator, how objects and spaces generate ritual meaning-as well as the link between ritual action and personal/cultural memory and the ability of the ritual process to insulate from, and provide access to, various levels of "real" experience.
The first half of the course will introduce students to select theories of ritual-including Victor Turner's examination of the links between social rituals and theater, Rene Girard's discussion of violent ritual and social cohesion, Mircea Eliade's sense of ritual as a means of enacting myth-and will allow students to test these theories against a series of very different primary texts. These broad discussions will give students an ample base to draw upon as they work in the second half of the term to define their own responses to the course topic through individual seminar projects.
Texts: Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Margaret Edson, Wit, Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, select poems and short stories and excerpts from additional theoretical readings
Requirements: Series of brief reading responses, 2 short papers, oral presentation, 15-page seminar paper (preceded by a proposal, multiple drafts and editing workshops).
ENGL 4/5155-01W: Twentieth-Century British Literature, Prof. Robert Snyder
TR 9:30-10:45, HUM 209
May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: In or about the year 1910, novelist Virginia Woolf famously quipped, human nature changed in some fundamental way. What she may have meant by that observation will be the question addressed by this course. Emphasizing the High Modernist phase of twentieth-century British literature, our study during the first ten weeks will revolve around the following authors/texts: David Bradshaw (ed.), A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (1934) and Four Quartets (1943); Thomas Hardy, selected poems; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927); and William Butler Yeats, selected poems. Over the last five weeks we then will be considering how High Modernism begins to transmogrify into postmodernism via Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1954), Philip Larkin's Collected Poems (1988), and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). Independent research projects will complement this coverage by focusing on other contemporaneous literature.
Texts: Paperback editions of all texts indicated above, plus handouts of selected poems by Hardy and Yeats.
Requirements: Several writing-to-learn responses (ungraded), oral synopsis of a chapter from the Bradshaw anthology, two analytical essays (3-4 pages), research-based paper (10-12 pages), active participation in discussions, mid-term and final exams. Requirements for graduate credit will involve a longer research-based paper (15-18 pages) and leadership of a class session.
ENGL 4/5165-01W: Contemporary Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
MW 2:00-3:15, HUM 225
May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: We will read and analyze major literary works from the United States and Great Britain written during the past thirty years--the literature of our own time. Our goal will be to understand how these present-day texts extend the traditions of American and British literature and how they find themselves at odds with those traditions. In addition, we will focus on the question of form--in terms of genre differences and of the ways in which form and content have interacted during this era. Finally, we will explore the ways in which literature created during these decades has been influenced by the dominant discourses of theory and visual culture, specifically how literature has appropriated these discourses to its own ends and how those discourses have, in return, appropriated literature, as traditionally defined, for their ends. Students will, inevitably, also become familiar with the ways in which critical analysis of contemporary texts differs from other kinds of critical writing that literary scholars do.
Texts: Martin Amis, Time's Arrow; Ann Beattie, Falling in Place; Russell Banks, Continental Drift; Raymond Carver, Cathedral; Don DeLillo, Mao II; Joan Didion, The White Album, Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger; Toni Morrison, Jazz; and Carol Shields, Unless; and a course packet of poems. In addition to these written texts, students will be expected to watch several films outside class.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in all class discussions, reading quizzes, short in-class responses, out-of-class responses, midterm and final essays, and a documented paper. Graduate students will be expected to play a leadership role in class discussion and to do a longer documented paper based on more sophisticated research.
ENGL 4/5188-01W: Individual Authors, Prof. Lisa Crafton
William Blake
MW 3:30-4:45, HUM 209
May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: "I must Create a system or be Enslav'd by another man's," writes William Blake in an assertion of individual freedom. Blake's revolutionary poetry engages the reader in defiant rejection of the forces of political, cultural, and sexual oppression. Yet Blake's visionary writings assert that full liberation must include regeneration of "the doors of perception," and study of his work encompasses philosophy, psychology, theology as well as cultural critique. Blake's works offer a panorama of virtually all of the sometimes contradictory traits we label as "Romantic," from philosophical and theological revolution (All Religions Are One, Everlasting Gospel) to revolutionary political vision (The French Revolution, America) to radical critique of cultural oppression, especially restrictions on sexuality (Songs of Innocence and Experience, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) to visionary prophecy (Europe, Urizen, Los, Milton). A powerful influence on radical and visionary art, Blake speaks through music (such Romantic artists as Van Morrison and U2) and film (he inspired the 1995 Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man where Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake who journeys west to a town called Machine but instead finds Native-American spirituality a liberating force). In this course, we will share an intensive study of Blake's poetry and visual art (using outstanding Web archives) as we study his texts in relation to his own revolutionary context as well as contemporary revisions of Blake in music and film, seeking the connection Blake makes between "revolution" and "revelation."
Texts: The Complete Works of William Blake, ed. David Erdman; selected critical articles; film Dead Man; selected music including "Wake Up Dead Man" (U2) and "Let The Slave" (Morrison).
Requirements: Active engagement in class discussion, two response essays, midterm and take-home final, research paper.
ENGL 4384-01W: Senior Seminar, Prof. Micheal Crafton
The Holy Grail
TR 3:30-4:45, TLC 2237
Required for the major in English. Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during summer session. May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: The recent publishing phenomenon of Dan Brown's The Da Vince Code is only the latest evidence of the depth of interest in the Holy Grail. This class will explore the origins (prehistoric, ancient, medieval) of this legend or myth and look at some contemporary representations. We will then employ all our theoretical skills in making sense of the connections between the two. One overarching view of this subject will be how it manifests itself in all manner of different subtle ways, such as Jacques Lacan's theory of the "other," and not so subtle ways, such as Harry Potter's sorcerer's stone. Students will be able to write about a "holy grail" that they see in their area of specialty.
Texts: Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code; Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief; Chretien de Troyes, Perceval; essays by Jung, Richard Loomis, Joseph Campbell, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others.
Requirements: Active and informed participation in seminar discussions, short response essays, oral presentations, peer critiques, prospectus and 12-15 page documented essay that will form part of the group's senior seminar anthology.
ENGL 4/5385-01W: Special Topics, Prof. Robert Snyder
Editing and Publishing
TR 5:30-6:45, HUM 209
May be used to satisfy the WAC requirement.Description: This course is a writing-intensive introduction to editing and publishing practices. Our framework during the first nine weeks will be scholarly journals and literary periodicals; during the last six weeks it will shift to books and monographs. In addition to becoming thoroughly familiar with Amy Einsohn's engaging manual titled The Copyeditor's Handbook, a standard text in Arizona State University's Scholarly Publishing Program and elsewhere, students will strengthen their facility as editors by working with actual manuscripts submitted to the journal Christianity and Literature. Drawing on photocopied segments from other sources, we then will consider the parallel but distinctive practices that obtain in the sphere of book publishing. Several guest speakers will be invited to discuss their particular areas of expertise in relation to our coverage. Here a caveat is in order: this course is not intended as a "how-to" in getting your own writing published; instead, it is designed to cultivate those skills essential to professional opportunities in editing and publishing.
Texts: Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor's Handbook (U of California P, 2000); William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (Pearson Higher Education, 2000).
Requirements: Active participation in class, several writing-to-learn exercises (ungraded), three editorial critiques of manuscripts, research-based paper (10-12 pages), midterm and final exams. Requirements for graduate credit will involve a longer research-based paper (15-18 pages) and an oral presentation.
ENGL 6105-01: Seminar in British Literature I, Prof. Micheal Crafton
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Pilgrims and Their Critics
M 5:30-8:15, TLC 2237Description: The critical reception of Chaucer is perhaps one of the longest running in all of English literature, since Anglo-Saxon or Old English literature was generally ignored until the seventeenth century and even then did not become much of an item until the Romantic period. But with the fifteenth-century manuscripts of Chaucer, the illustrations, and especially William Caxton's early printed editions, the critical tradition can be said to begin and now in the twenty-first century, the Chaucer industry is stronger than it has ever been with an expanding population of scholars and critics and recent popular culture expressions such as Columbia Tristar's film A Knight's Tale and most recently the BBC modernized production of The Canterbury Tales.
This class will survey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and its vast and diverse representation of different genres--tools for literary study--themes and issues that remain central in literary studies of all types and all ages. However, we will also focus on the major schools of critics who have greatly influenced the way the CT has been read. Some of those schools are the following: human drama school, New Criticism, Patristic and Allegorical Schools, historicism (both old and new), psychological criticism, and the "post" schools (poststructural, postmodern, postcolonial). As you might imagine, we will analyze these schools in terms not only of the readings of Chaucer they generate but also in terms of the theories (literary and philosophical) that informed them.
Texts: Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (Norton Critical Edition); Robert Miller, ed., Backgrounds and Sources; Helen Cooper, Oxford Guide to the Canterbury Tales.
Requirements: Two short papers (4 pages), Group oral report, Individual Oral Report, Research paper (15 pages).
ENGL 6110-01: American Literature I Seminar, Prof. David Newton
Dialogues of Difference: Identity, Ideology, and Regional Difference in Nineteenth Century American Literature, 1830-1865
R 5:30-8:15, TLC 2237Description: In Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, David Reynolds argues that the literature of the American Renaissance during the mid-nineteenth century "was generated by a highly complex environment in which competing language and value systems, openly at war on the level of popular culture, provided rich material which certain responsive authors adopted and transformed into dense literary texts." While scholars have focused primarily on the writers of the American Renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson), this era also produced an astonishing wealth of popular literature by writers from the North and South that is rarely considered in contemporary studies of the era. However, as Reynolds notes, these writers have an intriguing relationship to the major writers of this era, and the analysis of these popular works reveals how they function in the development of more aesthetically sophisticated literary works, a process that continues even in the contemporary era. In many instances, literary texts during this era were written in response to other texts as a means of challenging specific regional and/or ideological assumptions. For example, Hariet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in response to earlier sympathetic accounts of the Plantation South, such as John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. Stowe's novel in turn, produced a number of passionate literary responses from both supporters of Southern succession (such as Augusta Jane Evans' Macaria) and from African-American writers (such as Martin Delaney's Blake; or, The Huts of America) who challenged her stereotypical representations of Southern slaves. Such differences during the nineteenth century influenced how writers addressed such issues as national and regional identity, the construction of the American historical past, the pastoral tradition, as well as representations of race and gender. Through our dialogic reading of these popular literary works, we will discover how popular modes of writing (sentimental fiction, racial and gender stereotypes, slave/captivity narratives, humorous sketches, campaign autobiographies, the pastoral, and the gothic) become sites of ideological conflict as they are incorporated, revised, and reincorporated into a variety of popular and canonical literary works.
Texts: John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; Or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832); E.D.E.N. Southworth, Hidden Hand (1859); Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859); Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes (1835); Augusta Jane Evans, Macaria: Or Altars of Sacrifice (1863); Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). In addition to these primary texts, we will read selections from canonical authors of the era, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Douglass, Whitman, and Dickinson. Other secondary scholarly works will be placed on reserve in the library.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active and informed participation in class discussions; 2 class presentations; book review; critical essay (4-5 pages); annotated bibliography (8-10 secondary sources); prospectus and final seminar research essay (minimum 15 pages).
ENGL 6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Gregory Fraser
Contemporary Autobiography
T 5:30-8:15, TLC 2237Description: What constitutes a "self"? What does it mean to "know" yourself, "act" yourself, be "true" to yourself, or even just to "be" yourself? This graduate seminar will tackle the complex questions of selfhood and life-writing through focused readings of several contemporary autobiographies. As we read each writer's presentation of his or her life, we will consider the importance of nationality and ethnicity, race and class, gender and sexual orientation, and ideological and political oppression, as these shape personality and inflect each writer's motives for composing a life story. We will discuss the phenomenon of writing "oneself"-the impulse to do so, the pleasure of the act, and the slippery way in which the person we read about in an autobiography is never exactly synonymous with the person who does the writing. And perhaps more subtly, we will question the notion of "truth" as it pertains to autobiography, asking what it means to embellish and even "lie" about oneself and one's experience. Our literary readings will be supplemented by critical articles that explore both the nature of autobiography and the question of selfhood from various theoretical perspectives.
Texts: Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face; Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother; Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes; Anchee Min, Red Azalea; N. Scott Momaday, The Names; William Styron, Darkness Visible; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life.
Requirements: Periodic "quests" (a quest is a cross between a quiz and a test); short response papers of two single-spaced pages each (these will alternate between critical interpretations of the week's reading and assigned "mini-autobiographies," where you will imitate the dominant themes and/or strategies of a text under discussion); final research paper; final portfolio with critical introduction.
Last updated April 17, 2004