Undergraduate Courses -- Fall 2015

Don't be late! Register now for Fall 2015!

There are no advanced English courses being offered in Summer 2015.

These course descriptions are provided by the professors teaching the courses.

For more information, write to them directly. Get English Department faculty contact info here.

ENG 126 News Writing (Course ID# 4894)
Professor Jennifer Rauch (Journalism Department)
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:30-2:55

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Please note that this course is cross-listed with JOU 119. Students who wish this course to count toward the English major (or minor) should be sure to register for ENG 126 — not JOU 119. Contact the Journalism Department for information about the content of this course.

ENG 128 Early British Literatures (Course ID# 5060): Monsters, Shape-shifters, and Outsiders in Early British Literatures

Professor Sealy Gilles

Mondays & Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 PM

This course is required in the Literature concentration.  It can satisfy a Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor.

Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of pre-modern England! In 1000 C.E. England was Europe’s far west frontier, an unsettled island of competing fiefdoms and migratory peoples. By 1600 London was the western world’s largest city and Queen Elizabeth I ruled over a colonial power soon to become the British Empire. The early literature of this island nation reflects the multiple identities of the English people, but it is also troubled by an often violent history and by the specter of strange beings, both benign and monstrous. This semester our cast of aliens stars Grendel, the swamp dwelling humanoid, a werewolf, and a giant Green Knight. Outsiders in human form include Chaucer’s gender-bending Pardoner and Shakespeare’s Moor. As we explore the alien in works ranging from Beowulf to Shakespeare’s Othello, you will be asked to write frequently, participate actively, and read closely.  You may expect that I will respect your ideas and respond quickly and fairly to your work.

ENG 158 Early Literatures of the U.S. (Course ID# 4099)

Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays 6-8:30 PM

This course is required in the Literature concentration.  It can satisfy a Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor.

In this course, we will explore American literature from the colonial period to the Civil War through the theme of freedom and oppression. Freedom from oppression has been at the heart of American cultural and political identity since at least the 17th Century, even though the colonial and early national economies relied, to varying degrees, on slave labor. This contradiction fueled the Protestant literature of the New England colonies, Revolutionary political discourse, the movement for women’s rights, and the movement to abolish slavery. We will explore how American writers and artists negotiated these contradictions as they formed new, distinctive American voices. Readings will include works by William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Handsome Lake, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

ENG 164 Explorations in Creative Writing (Course ID# 4945)

Professor Lewis Warsh
Wednesdays 6-8:30 PM

This course is required in the Creative Writing concentration.  It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Creative Writing requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Any student may take this course a second time for credit.

The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of “what is a poem” and “what is a work of fiction.” Are poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. We will also attempt to engage the present moment--the issues of our time, if any, that influence our writing. Is it possible to write in a vacuum while ignoring the rest of the world? What is the writer's responsibility? Can writing change the world? We will read as models the work of William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Frank O'Hara, Andre Breton, Lydia Davis, Gertrude Stein, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Wang Ping, Roberto Bolaño and Ernest Hemingway, among many others. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing each other's writing.

ENG 165 Poetry Workshop (Course ID# 4136): Spirit & Dream Autobiographies In Poetry (Who Were You Then, Who Are You Now?)

Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays 3-4:15 PM

This course will satisfy a Creative Writing elective requirement in the Creative Writing concentration.  It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Creative Writing requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. English majors concentrating in Creative Writing may take this course a second time for credit.

In this course we will begin to sculpt our poetic writings into the language of spirit and dream autobiographies. Humanity's attempt to understand itself throughout the ages has often resulted in a fringe of writing engaged in a poetry of quest, prophecy, vision, verbal experimentation, and meditative stories that express the changes of self in the world. In your own writing quest, your discoveries may tread between the realms of journey, dream, fictional autobiography, haiku, and traditional verse, while leading you to a deeper sense of awareness and awe of the secret depths of human character and verbal expression. Poetic autobiographies may include stories and poetic prose; indeed, language itself can only help guide and gauge a spiritual journey, but through language we discover and present the shifting and mysterious points of our identities and the worlds around us.

In this workshop we will have a chance to glimpse one another's strengths and weaknesses in writing and to offer suggestions as to how to improve and build on our true intentions in the work. We will touch upon the themes of parallel worlds and quantum leaps of imagination: who were you then, and who are you now? The readings will also include the study of Wabi Sabi (the beauty of imperfection). We will set out to understand the "strivings" of each piece of writing in order to determine the ways in which it can be structured and developed into a whole and, afterwards, offer constructive criticism and helpful suggestions to the author. There will be class discussions on what we mean when we talk about the autobiography as a gathering ground for material evolving out of the imagination's eye and the worlds it inhabits in dream as well as reality; concurrently, there will be readings and class discussions on the nature of memory, improvisation, and persona. We will scrutinize the craft of the pieces and explore how we might more effectively implement, extend, and develop the techniques and forms of these poems in our own evolving work. The goal of the course includes completion of a chapbook of writing and culminates in a group reading and party at semester’s end.

We’ll be reading Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Andrew Juniper’s Wabi Sabi—The Japanese Art of Impermanence, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and a collection of writings ranging from Emily Dickinson to bell hooks.

ENG 169 Non-Western or Post-Colonial Literature (Course ID# 6060): The Black Atlantic

Professor Jonathan Haynes
Mondays & Wednesdays 3-4:15 PM

This course is required in the Literature concentration.  It can satisfy a Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor.

The African diaspora was not a simple matter of Africans being transported to the New World as slaves.  “The Black Atlantic” names the dense networks built up over the centuries as Black people crisscrossed the ocean in all directions, maintaining connections between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. This matrix gave birth to rich transnational cultures and to various conceptions of pan-Africanism.  We will consider the facts of the matter, the histories of slavery, black sailors, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and labor migrants.  We will follow African deities and symbols—Mami Wata, Elegba, the Sankofa bird—to the New World.  Film, the visual arts, and music will come into the story, but we will be principally concerned with how this inspiring if often painful history has been represented and interpreted by writers from Olaudah Equiano to Chimamanda Adichie.

ENG 170 Literary Periods & Movements (Course ID# 6059): Harlem Renaissance

Professor Carol Allen
Thursdays 6-8:30 PM

Due to under-enrollment, this course was converted to tutorial format (one-on-one with Professor Allen).

This course will satisfy the Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Any student may take ENG 140, 150, 170 or 180 a second time for credit.

This course will feature the major and minor voices of the Harlem Renaissance. We will study the philosophies of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey and Zora Neale Hurston and read works by them along with texts (novels, stories, poems, plays and hybrid works) from Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Marita Bonner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, and others. Attention will also be given to art and music from the period. Skills to be strengthened include: close reading, writing with revision, research, analysis, and using texts to spark your own creative output. Assignments will include a informal writing, in-class writing, leading class discussion, and a research paper or creative response with research and metatext.

ENG 171 Introduction to Classical Rhetoric (Course ID# 5513)

Professor John Killoran
Tuesdays 6-8:30 PM

Due to under-enrollment, this course was converted to tutorial format (one-on-one with Professor Killoran).

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Note: This course is designed not only for English majors and minors but also for students from disciplines such as Education, Business, Political Science, Journalism, and Media Arts who seek to develop their skills as critical readers, persuasive writers, and engaged citizens.

Students have been studying classical rhetoric for more than 2400 years, starting with the ancient Greeks, so why study it in 2015? Classical rhetoric offers us guidelines for how to be persuasive. In ancient times, rhetoric played a key role in the birth of our traditions of democratic politics and law. In modern times, classical rhetoric has been revived to guide us in analyzing the persuasive messages around us and to make our own writing more persuasive.

In this course, students will learn concepts from classical rhetoric and apply them to analyze contemporary writing, speaking, and multimedia communication in . . .

• politics and law;
• advertising, marketing, and public relations;
• traditional media and new digital media;
• our personal lives and communities. 

By the end of the course, students will better recognize how language persuades us of what we believe and whom we believe. Students will also have developed their sensitivity to the power in others’ use of language and will become more empowered in their own use of language.

ENG 174 Teaching Writing (Course ID# 6061)

Professor Donald McCrary
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 PM

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. English majors concentrating in Writing & Rhetoric may take this course a second time for credit.

The course will examine theories and practices of the teaching of writing for both college and high school instructors. The course will explore theoretical and pedagogical issues of writing instruction such as invention, process, curriculum design, literacy, conferencing, and development. Theories and practices regarding the integration of reading and writing in the writing classroom will be a significant focus. The course will discuss important contemporary issues such as ELL learners, multi-modal instruction and texts, the Common Core, and the academic essay. In the course, students will read and discuss the works of prominent composition and reading theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt, David Bartholomae, Lisa Delpit, and Cynthia L. Selfe.

FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (AND MINORS)
IN THE HONORS PROGRAM—

The following Honors electives (taught by members of the English Department faculty) may be applied to the English minor or major. Any of the following will satisfy the Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. Any of the following can  also satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. Any of the following could also be applied toward the English minor. Please discuss your situation with Wayne Berninger in the English Department before you register.

HHE 116 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6082)

Professor Louis Parascandola Mondays 6-8:30 PM

HHE 117 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6083)

Professor Srividhya Swaminathan Wednesdays 3-5:30 PM

HHE 118 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6084)

Professor John High Thursdays 6-8:30

HHE 119 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6085), Professor Andrea Libin Wednesdays 6-8:30 PM