Undergraduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2001

SUMMER

English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary

This course will examine the rhetorical strategies and ideological content within creative and critical texts that represent provocative and insightful meditations on varied aspects of the human condition. For example, students will study critical and creative texts appropriated and generated by womanist theology, a radical hermeneutics that interrogates and resists multiple oppressions, including sexism, racism, and classism. By reading and analyzing challenging and thoughtful texts, students will explore not only how rhetoric is under-girded by specific ideologies, but also how writers construct and present rhetoric in ways that influence and persuade their readers. Some of the writers students will read include Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delores Williams, Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Wright, Jane Tompkins, Gary Soto, Stephen Jay Gould, and Michiko Kakutani. Students will write several formal essays that ask them to reflect critically on fiction and non-fiction texts, as well as their own experience.

English 225:  Science Fiction                                           
Professor Wayne Berninger
see course website 
                           
Alien invasions and rocket ships! Runaway robots and malevolent computer programs! Clones and cyborgs! Virtual reality and mind control!  Time travel and ecological disaster!

For at least a century, fiction writers have dealt with subjects such as these as they attempt to answer the question of whether technology and scientific progress will save us or destroy us.  These writers have sought to complicate our understanding of the modern world by creating fiction in which human beings struggle to cope with the psychological, social, political, environmental, and spiritual implications of scientific advancement.

Often dismissed as merely a frivolous sub-genre of  “serious literature,” science fiction has become one of our culture’s most popular forms of literature (not to mention film).    It has become a popular pastime among science fiction fans to catalogue examples of science fiction's predictive impact on society, from the naming of the first NASA space shuttle after Star Trek's U. S. S. Enterprise, to cyberpunk's anticipation of the advent of artificial intelligence and the Internet.

Why is science fiction so popular?  What is its value?  Why do so many readers think science fiction  is so important to an understanding of modern culture?  Given science fiction's increasing popularity and its sometimes eerie, recursive influence on the culture at large, these are important questions for literary scholars and cultural critics, not to mention the general public, and it seems important for English majors to have at least a working knowledge of this strange branch of modern literature.

In this course, we will examine the historical and theoretical development of the genre of science fiction, from its early precursors in the late nineteenth century to the "space opera" of the 1920s and 1930s and the “Golden Age” of the late 1940s and 1950s, and from the  “New Wave” of the 1960s and 1970s to the “cyberpunk” of the modern day.  Through class discussion of key terms and concepts used in the critical discussion of science fiction,  we will develop an understanding of how it fits into the overall literary and intellectual tradition of the West.  We will investigate how science fiction evolved in response to rapid technological and scientific advancement (in both the hard and soft sciences) in Western culture, and how science fiction therefore provides us with a unique lens through which to critique that culture and to understand our lives in the modern world.

Readings will include:  E. E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson's Neuromancer.

FALL

English 101:  Introduction to English Studies
Professor Michael Bennett

This course is designed to introduce English majors and minors to their chosen field, focusing on three main topics:  the history of English studies, critical analysis of literature and culture, and career opportunities for students of the humanities.  Readings and written work emphasize the diversity and scope of English studies and introduce students to contemporary debates concerning such issues as the connection between reading and writing, the relationship between different interpretive strategies, and the nature of the literary canon.  We will study one canonized literary text—The Scarlet Letter—from a variety of critical perspectives.  We will then apply these perspectives to the analysis of other literatures and a contemporary cultural phenomena—the development and dissemination of rap music.  Outside speakers will occasionally address issues in the field and the range of career opportunities available to students who major in English. The course is designed to allow students to make informed choices about their programs of study and their careers.

English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary

This course will examine the rhetorical strategies and ideological content within creative and critical texts that represent provocative and insightful meditations on varied aspects of the human condition. For example, students will study critical and creative texts appropriated and generated by womanist theology, a radical hermeneutics that interrogates and resists multiple oppressions, including sexism, racism, and classism. By reading and analyzing challenging and thoughtful texts, students will explore not only how rhetoric is under-girded by specific ideologies, but also how writers construct and present rhetoric in ways that influence and persuade their readers. Some of the writers students will read include Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delores Williams, Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Wright, Jane Tompkins, Gary Soto, Stephen Jay Gould, and Michiko Kakutani. Students will write several formal essays that ask them to reflect critically on fiction and non-fiction texts, as well as their own experiences.

English 104: Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh

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 the preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. Work by Marguerite Duras, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Andre Breton and others will be discussed in class, and used as models, but much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing our own writing. A final portfolio of work will be required.

English 128: British Literature I
Professor Sealy Gilles

In this course, we will explore the first seven hundred years of literature written in the British Isles–from the monster tale of Beowulf to the tragedy of the African prince, Oroonoko. Major texts also include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a Shakespeare play.  These selections range in genre from epic to romance, from comedy to tragedy. In these texts, and in shorter lyric poetry of the period, we will focus on the role of the stranger–the exile, the outsider, and the alien–in early British culture. How is strangeness defined? What kinds of demands does the stranger make upon the culture? What is the culture’s response to an alien presence? Students are expected to complete a research essay on a topic related to one of the assigned texts. In addition, there will be one short essay and a final examination. 

English 150:  African American Literature
Professor Louis Parascandola

This course will examine masterpieces of African American short fiction from early authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to contemporaries such as Thomas Glave. In between, we will look at classics by writers including Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, and Jamaica Kincaid. Student grades will be based, in part, on oral presentations and a research paper on one of the authors studied in class.  One or more of the authors discussed will give a reading from his or her work during class time.

English 158:  Literature of the United States I
Professor Amy Pratt

Even before land was sighted, the New World had captured the imagination of European men and women.  This course will examine America as a literary phenomenon, that is, something that was created, in part, through the words written about it.  We will explore the different and sometimes conflicting dreams and fantasies that men and women brought to America and trace what happened to them over two centuries.  Through our examination of the metaphors associated with America and the kinds of literary forms used to tell stories about the New World, we will question how certain ways of making meaning influenced relationships between Europeans, African Americans and Native Americans, and whether they still shape our thinking about what America is, or should be, today.

English 187:  The Bible as Literature
Professor William Burgos

The Bible is one of the fundamental texts of Western civilizations—a text that has deeply influenced how Westerners imagine the Divine and its relation to humankind. Yet it is also a text many people know little about: Who wrote it? How did it arrive at its present form? In addition to questions of authorship and canon formation, this course will focus on the art of biblical narrative (the distinctive ways of storytelling developed by biblical writers) and examine different approaches to translating biblical texts into English and how they affect the reader’s experience of the Bible. Readings will include selections from Hebrew Scripture (Genesis, Exodus, Job, Psalms, Songs of Songs, Isaiah) and Christian Scripture (The Gospels and The Book of Revelations).

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2001

SUMMER

English 580:  The Novella
Professor Harriet Malinowitz

In this course, we will read novellas—works of fiction characterized by the fact that they are longer than short stories but briefer than novels—and consider how and why the novella works as a prose form. Works by a range of authors will be covered and will be selected from among those by Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Gustave Flaubert, Nella Larsen, Rebecca Harding Davis, Joseph Conrad, Abraham Cahan, Doris Lessing, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, Bessie Head, Gertrude Stein, and Flannery O’Connor.

English 634: Modern Drama
Professor Joan Templeton

This course studies major playwrights of modern drama, including Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Williams, and Beckett. Through videos, performance and production of the texts will be emphasized as well as the texts themselves. 

FALL

English 528:  Creative Writing--Collage
Professor Kenneth Bernard

This course is an experimental workshop class with alternating weeks of writing discussion and collage exercises. The former consists of close reading of student writing with emphasis on grammar, logic, rhetoric, and effectiveness. The latter consists of formal exercises that attempt to parallel writing problems. One is a rigorous examination of all aspects of writing. The other is an open-ended exploration of creative process in which a student might feel less inhibited than with writing. No egos, no sissies, and no text.

English 574:  Twentieth Century English Novel
Professor Howard Silverstein

As the powerful tradition of Victorian fiction—moral, realistic, popular—began to die, something different and more complex came to emerge: the tradition of what we now name the “modern” novel. In place of the preoccupation of the Victorian novel with a detailed social world, early twentieth century fiction developed a more subjective view, a concern with the action of the mind and sometimes with the unconscious motivation of human behavior. As fiction turned inward in its subject matter, the novelists became more experimental in their handling of point of view, narrative structure and often formed a new view of time. The course will place special emphasis on the authors who shaped the modern British novel: Henry James (The Aspen Papers). Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes), Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier), D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers), James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man),and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway). During the semester, assigned readings will include the criticism of H. G. Wells, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, articles occasioned by the literary war over the modern novel.

English 580:  Postmodern American Fiction
Professor Michael Bennett

If earlier depictions of the Beautiful and the Sublime from Kant through the Modernists focused on Nature as the locus of feelings of overwhelming aesthetic power, contemporary depictions are more likely to focus on the domain of Technology. In an attempt to understand this development, Frederic Jameson and others have tried to provide a cognitive map of what they call the “technological sublime”:  the sense of awe that overtakes us when we try to comprehend the increasingly complex cultural and socio-economic manifestations of Postmodernism: the internet, hypertexts, international finance, global capitalism, and other technological developments of the Information Age that can hardly be grasped by the human mind. In his already-classic workPostmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson traces the development of the technological sublime in several areas: culture, ideology, video art, architecture, literature, economics, and film. Following Jameson’s lead, we will begin with one of his essays on each of these areas and look at each topic from a variety of perspectives, grounding our discussion with the critical analysis of a particular work of American fiction (including four novels, listed below, and various short stories and other types of writing).

Texts: Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive; Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Morrison, Toni. Beloved; Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49; Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo; Handouts.

Requirements: Your grade will be based on participation (including attendance, contributions to class discussion, and one or two class presentations) and one substantial class project ( a 15-20 page term paper, or an equivalent creative writing project, or other substantial cultural production—video, hypertext, etc.). There will also be a short response to the reading due at the beginning of each class.

English 625:  Nineteenth Century American Literature
Professor Kenneth Bernard

This course is a discussion of some standard American writers, including Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, James, Dickinson, Cooper, and Twain. The course isolates two distinct strains in American literature and culture, which continue to the present, and uses the metaphor/model/paradigm of Community/Territory as an aid to understanding them.

English 700: Teaching Composition
Professor Patricia Stephens

This course is designed to introduce teachers to the theory and practice of writing instruction in a variety of settings: college composition courses, high school English courses, and writing center tutorials. Intended as both a source of support and a forum for discussion for new teachers as well as teachers with some experience in the classroom, the course will explore the dynamic and often complicated relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of writing. Overall, the course aims to help students expand their repertoire of theoretical and pedagogical knowledge and become more thoughtful and self-reflective teachers. During the first half of the semester, we will concentrate on readings that explore theories and practices appropriate for various levels of teaching writing (college, high school, and one-to-one tutoring). Writing assignments for the course are intended to encourage teachers to respond to issues raised and problems posed both in the readings and in hands-on work with student writers. Around mid-term, students will select an area of focus for a final research project intended to explore in depth an area of interest in the teaching of writing for a particular setting. Students may choose to work independently or collaboratively on research projects. Possible texts include: The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook (4^th edition), edited by Tate, Corbett, and Meyers; In the Middle Way: New Understandings  about Writing, Reading, and Learning, by Atwell; and Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference,  by Harris. A course reader, distributed by the instructor, will excerpt work from key figures in composition studies.

English 707: Methods of Research and Criticism
Professor Patrick Horrigan

This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of literary criticism and research. Some of the readings in literary theory will be challenging. However, these readings will be balanced with literary texts that ground our discussions of criticism and give the class a common set of examples on which to test out and examine differing literary approaches. For example, we might read a text like Jane Eyre and examine its treatment over the course of time at the hands of various critics from the nineteenth century to today. In this way, the course is designed to give students an overview of the development of literary criticism as a field as well as the diversity of literary theory as it is practiced today. In addition, students will also be introduced to research skills and the practical knowledge needed to navigate the library. Ultimately, the goal of this course is to appreciate literary criticism not simply as a practice reserved for experts or done merely as a required exercise but as an engagement with literature that enriches us both as readers and teachers.

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2001

English 103: Advanced Writing
Professor Patricia Stephens

In this course, we will explore the craft of non-fiction writing: essays, memoirs, diaries, biographies, auto-ethnography, investigative reporting, and much more. Some common texts will be assigned to the entire class, but students will also have the opportunity to focus their reading and writing projects in areas they wish to further develop. Since the course will operate as a reading and writing "workshop," writers will be expected to share works-in-progress with all members of the class. As we work together as readers and writers of texts, we will focus on how to engage in constructive criticism as we examine issues of style and form. The primary goal of this course is to provide a supportive atmosphere in which students can discuss and explore both published and unpublished non-fiction writing as they simultaneously begin to make conscious choices about their own preferred forms and styles. 

English 104:  Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short-short fiction, using various forms and approaches.  A writer's notebook will be an ongoing project from which students will gather material for their assignments.  Part of each class period will be devoted to reading poems and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A final portfolio will include an evaluation of the student's learning along with revised poems and stories. Books for the class will include The Handbook of Poetic Forms and an anthology of short-short fiction. 

English 129: British Literature II
Professor Melissa Antinori

This course covers the period from 1800 to the present.  Students are introduced to various genres, although the emphasis is on narrative fiction, which flourished in this period.  Novels include Jane Austen’s Emma (supplemented by a viewing of the 1995 movie Clueless), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (the first detective novel and one of the most popular novels of its day), James Joyce’sDubliners, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and one novel by a current writer, which will be selected by class vote.  In addition, we’ll read selections from Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern poetry and at least one play, George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House.  Through writing, reading, and discussion, students will be introduced to various critical and  theoretical approaches, including colonialism, feminism, and Marxism.

English 137: Shakespeare
Professor Joan Templeton

This course is an introduction to the poems and plays of the greatest writer in the English language, including the love sonnets, A Midsummer's Night Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Theatrical as well as thematic aspects of the plays will be stressed, and we will see videos, films, and go to a live performance. Non-English majors are very welcome to register for the course.

English 150: Latino-American Literature
Professor William Burgos

Americans of Latino descent form a substantial part of the United States population and have long contributed to the diverse culture of this country. In this course, we will be reading literary texts by Latino-Americans, analyzing the different ways they define Latino identity and their portrayals of contemporary Latino communities. The readings will reflect the cultural diversity of these communities (Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Mexican and Central and South American) and will include texts by Junot Diaz, Ana Lydia Vega, Loida Maritza Perez, Christina Garcia, Gloria Anzaldua, and Ernesto Quinonez.

English 159: Literature of the United States II
Professor Carol Allen

This course will take the form of a general overview of American literature from the Civil War to the present, divided into three major sections: late nineteenth century, Modernism/Harlem Renaissance, and contemporary American literature.  The primary theme of the course will be the struggle over representation. Authors studied may include: Chesnutt, Twain, Jewett, Hemingway, Anderson, Toomer, Larsen, Wright, Walker, Ginsberg, and Nabokov.

Graduate Courses, Spring 2001

English 520
Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick

This course is a nonfiction writing workshop that gives students the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their own writing in a workshop format. The focus this semester will be on the personal and informal essay, although students interested in pursuing other forms of nonfiction writing will be able to do so. The course is intended to provide writers with new approaches to nonfiction writing, such as the use of autobiography to anchor criticism and of literary techniques like dialogue and point of view to write about real places, people, and events. Students will benefit from a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of their work, and constructive criticism.

At the beginning of the semester, we will read a variety of personal, informal, and autocritical writing. A tentative reading list includes essays by Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Sara Suleri, Richard Rodriguez, Adrienne Rich, Phillip Lopate, Vivian Gornick, Alice Walker, Peggy Phelan, Michael Dorris, and Barbara Kingsolver. The emphasis, however, will be on students' own writing, which will be discussed each week in workshops. Students will keep a course journal on the readings and their own writing process, and produce three short (4-6 page) essays and one longer (15-20 page) essay or the equivalent.

English 524: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh

This workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction writing. Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate on the conventions of fiction—description, dialogue, and characterization—as well as more experimental possibilities such as fragmentation and shifting point of view. Focus will be on the ways autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. Among the models we will look at are the stories and novels by Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis and James Ellroy. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing student work.

English 579: Jane Austen Seminar
Professor David Toise

This course will focus on one of the most popular figures in the English literary canon, Jane Austen. Her audiences have taken pleasure in prose such as the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of wife." As this sentence suggests, readers are attracted to Austen both for likeable heroines who make happy marriages and because of a strategic humor that asks us to question the seemingly conventional pleasures that her novels provide. The course will focus on Lady Susan, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion but may include some of Austen's other writings. In addition, we will screen film adaptations of Austen's works, from Clueless, an updated version ofEmma set in a Beverly Hills High School, to Persuasion, a faithful rendering of the original novel set in its original period. As we read, we will also examine our own responses and a diverse set of questions raised by Austen scholars addressing Austen's relation to: politics and colonialism; contemporary feminism; sexuality; irony and wit; social class and the role of money; and the history of the novel. 

English 620:  Theories of Teaching Writing/Rhetorical Theory
Professor David Tietge

Throughout the course of the twentieth century, rhetoric has undergone some sweeping and pioneering changes. Whereas the traditional view of rhetoric was based primarily on the writings of figures like Aristotle and Cicero, who both saw rhetoric as a technique for public persuasion and ethical discourse in the larger framework of the city-state---the "good man speaking well"---modern rhetorical theorists realized that rhetoric was far more encompassing as a descriptive apparatus in all spheres of human communication.  As a field of metadiscourse (language used to talk about language), modern rhetoric acknowledges that we are, in the words of Kenneth Burke, "symbol using and misusing animals," which raises this question: When are we, as communicative beings, using rhetoric? What assumptions, preconditions, and expectations does our rhetoric reflect? What are the connections between rhetoric, power, and influence? When is language a-rhetorical?  Can it be? These are questions we will explore in this course using rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and Claim Perelman, to name a few.

We will also explore how barriers between spoken and written forms of rhetoric have been largely broken down. Whereas rhetoric was once viewed as a function of verbal interchange, we now extend many of its lessons to the written word. We will be especially interested in studying and applying contemporary rhetorical theories to composition classrooms so that students might gain a deeper understanding of the richness and dangers of language in their own written expression.

English 634:  Modern Drama
Professor Joan Templeton

This course studies major playwrights of modern drama, including Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Williams, and Beckett. Videos, performance and production of the texts will be emphasized as well as the texts themselves.

English 636: Postcolonial Literature & Theory
Professor Huma Ibrahim

This seminar on postcolonial literature and theory will be an examination of the crucial years of the changes that took place on the imperialistic map of Africa and Asia and the issues that related to this dynamic change.  These changes occurred because of nationalist movements that demanded the ouster of imperialist governments, mainly British and French, but also some Portuguese, Italian and Spanish. The people and the movements that represented them wanted autonomy and self-government in these geographical areas. In large part they were successful in this endeavor. However with the new sorts of world economics, Africa and Asia continued to be, as Walter Rodney would say, "underdeveloped."

The literature and theory we are going to read roughly covers the last fifty years of the last century. This course will deal with theories that postcolonial scholars have fostered and developed in order to understand the whole experience of colonialism and its aftermath as well as the literature that engages with those problems. We will read literature specifically from Africa, Western and Southern Africa in particular, as well as literature from Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka and simultaneously look at the theory that engages with that literature as well as larger problems of the developing world. For the theory I will probably assign one of a few postcolonial readers in existence and the literature will cover the geographic areas already mentioned.      

English 650: Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature
Professor Sealy Gilles

This seminar explores the formation of masculine and feminine identities in the literature of the Middle Ages. The focus is on Western Europe and England, with brief forays into the Arabic tradition. All texts will be read in modern translations; the course is designed for the non-specialist. Medieval romances, folk tales, and love lyrics have shaped our ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman and our attitudes towards sexuality. The course examines those notions about who we are and how we relate to others as they are embodied in texts from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. We shall look closely at bonds between men (brotherhood, king and vassal, father and son) and between women (sisterhood, mother and daughter, the hag and the young woman), as well as at the nature of love and sexual passion. The cultural construction of male heroism and of the lady will be particular topics of concern, but we will also be reading texts in which men are the objects of desire and women the aggressors, as well as poems that express same-sex desire. Texts include Tristan and Isolde, the laisof Marie de France, Dante's Vita nuova, the Romance of the Rose (excerpts), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (excerpts), and a wide selection of lyric poetry.

Undergraduate Courses, Summer (none) & Fall 2000

English 101: Introduction to English Studies

Professor David Toise

In this course, (designed for English majors and minors), students will further develop their abilities to read and analyze literature, examine recent developments in the field of literary analysis, and learn the importance of these skills as the basis for future careers. We will work on becoming literate in the basics of English studies: reading and analyzing the structures of poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as developing our own writing and editing techniques. Our course will, in some sense, come together in our reading of Charles Dickens·s l861 novel Great Expectations. Dickens·s novel raises questions about what it means to read correctly, how language works, and how reading and interpretation play a role in our own sense of self. The questions Dickens raises about the connection between interpretation, reading, and identity will help us examine both traditional and more recent critical approaches in literary studies. Our readings of the novel, then, will be supplemented by essays covering a variety of approaches within contemporary literary criticism. Whether or not we desire, like the hero of Dickens·s novel, to become ·a gentleman,· we will also discuss our own career goals and, thus, through guest speakers and our own readings, examine the significance these interpretive skills hold for careers in such diverse fields as publishing, law, advertising, education, politics, social services, and entertainment.

English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing

Professor Donald McCrary

In this advanced course in nonfiction writing, students will expand their facility with rhetoric by analyzing professional writing, including critical essays in diverse fields, magazine articles, book reviews, and sermons. Utilizing the rhetorical strategies and forms revealed through analysis of professional writings, students will write several formal essays. Writers to be studied may include Jane Tompkins, Ishmael Reed, Stanley Fish, Stanley Crouch, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martin Duberman, and Patricia Williams.

English 104: Creative Writing

Professor Lewis Warsh

This course will be a writing workshop. Students will read, study, and write poetry and short fiction using a variety of forms and approaches. Students will discuss the works of published writers as well as provide feedback to the works of their classmates. Students will learn how to critique and revise their own work. A final portfolio of work will be required.

English 128: British Literature I

Professor Sealy Gilles

In this course, we will explore the first seven hundred years of literature written in the British Isles·from the monster tale of Beowulf to the tragedy of the African prince, Oroonoko. Major texts also include Chaucer·s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a Shakespeare play. These selections range in genre from epic to romance, from comedy to tragedy . In these texts, and in shorter lyric poetry of the period, we will focus on the role of the stranger·the exile, the outsider, and the alien·in early British culture. How is strangeness defined? What kinds of demands does the stranger make upon the culture? What is the culture·s response to an alien presence? Students are expected to complete a research essay on a topic related to one of the assigned texts. In addition, there will be one short essay and a final examination.

English 158: Literature of the United States I

Professor Amy Pratt

Even before land was sighted, the New World had captured the imagination of European men and women. This course will examine America as a literary phenomenon; that is, something that was created, in part, through the words written about it. We will explore the different and sometimes conflicting dreams and fantasies that men and women brought to America and trace what happened to them over two centuries. Through our examination of the metaphors associated with America and the kinds of literary forms used to tell stories about the New World, we will question how certain ways of making meaning influenced relationships between Europeans, African Americans and Native Americans, and whether they still shape our thinking about what America is, or should be, today.

English 170: Post-Colonial Literature

Professor Huma Ibrahim

In this course we will be reading what has been termed ·postcolonial literature.· This includes literature from Africa, Asia and diaspora. We will be reading authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bessie Head and many others. What we will try to do in this class is look at this literature in the context of the socio-political milieu out of which it emerges. We will examine the texts and do some close readings. Since this is not a sociology but rather a literature class, we will do some of the things one does in literature classes such as discuss the plot, characters, images and the kind of writing we see in each work. We will also examine the western languages in which these works were written·and the complicated relationships of the writers to this language. For instance, do they do violence to the English language as it is used in England, or do they simply imitate it? Lastly, we will write essays on themes that engage the writers whom we are reading, such as the idea of nationalism, identity, gender and the postcolonial condition which is sometimes manifested in the immigrant experience. 

English 187: The Bible as Literature

Professor William Burgos

The Bible is an anthology of sacred literature·texts which attempt to define the relationship between the divine and the human. In this course we will study the various ways in which biblical authors use language and story-telling to evoke for their readers the experience of the sacred and to explore its role in human existence. Selections from Jewish and Christian Scripture will include: Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Psalms, the Gospels and Revelation.

English 224: Caribbean Women Writers

Professor Carol Allen

An introduction to contemporary Caribbean Women writers, this course features texts that are written in or have been translated into English. Nationalism, regionalism and the role that women play in rapidly decolonizing countries are the major themes that we will explore over the semester. In particular, we will pay close attention to the fact that some of the texts are clear allegories for national independence, but others are more, combining both a figurative reading of the nation·as it comes into being·with the moment when the female subject also emerges. The semester will be divided into three units: reading the slave/colonial past, Caribbean bildungsroman and intersecting history, myth and space.

Graduate Courses, Summer & Fall 2000

SUMMER 2000

English 624:  The American Self
Professor Howard Silverstein

For this course in the reinvention of the self in American culture, we will explore, in selected fiction and film, the subject of the American who wants to rise above the drab circumstances and achieve an upwardly mobile, socially glamorous lifestyle.

The course will open with Willa Cather’s short story, “Paul’s Case” and proceed to Henry James The Ambassadors, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Patricia Highsmith’s thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Following the same theme in film, the class will view Hitchcock’s classic “Vertigo”, the gender-bender “Tootsie”, the feminist “Working Girl”, and the adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, “A Place in the Sun.”  Providing it is available on video, we will also examine the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Students will be responsible for an oral presentation and several short critical papers.

FALL 2000

English 524: Poetry Writing Workshop
Professor Barbara Henning

In this workshop, we will read modern and contemporary poetry, as well as statements and essays on poetics. We will examine and practice writing poetry using different forms and approaches. The weekly workshop is meant to be a place where you can present drafts of your work for helpful response. The course requirements include writing a poem for each workshop, making a presentation, and submitting a final folder with your revised work and an essay, reflecting on your process of writing.

English 579: Woman as Hero
Professor Harriet Malinowitz

The concept of the “heroic” traditionally contains the assumption that the hero is male. Heroism is a public act, requiring agency in the public world, while the concept of the “heroine” is a diminutive one, in that the heroine exists only by virtue of her relationship to the hero. Unlike a “heroine,” a female “hero” (or, as Maya Angelou has put it, “shero”) is often unrecognizable within the conventions of patriarchal ideology upon which heroic idealism is based. This course will suggest alternative ways of reading classic texts and will also consider more contemporary texts as we attempt to identify and explore female heroism in myth, fiction, memoir, and film.  From the myth of Amor and Psyche to Thelma and Louise, we will examine archetypes of the woman hero who embarks on a journey (either literal or figurative), challenges the established order, and creates new possibilities of community, wholeness, and selfhood. An alternative to the conventional archetypes of angel in the house, witch, hag, harpy, bitch, and madwoman in the attic, the woman hero must challenge patriarchal authority and ideology and thus the terms within which her society makes sense of itself. We will begin by reading classic theories of the male heroic, including work by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Dorothy Norman, and theories of female identity, including work by Sigmund Freud, Erich Neumann, and Adrienne Rich. We will then go on to read fictional works and memoirs by writers such as Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rita Mae Brown, Agnes Smedley, and Audre Lorde, and to screen several films. As a class, we will attempt to figure out what the definition(s) of the female heroic may be.

English 624: West Indians in the Harlem Renaissance
Professor Louis Parascandola

Anglophone Caribbean immigrants played a vital, if often neglected, role during the Harlem Renaissance, an important literary and cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s.  There were, in fact, over 36,000 foreign born Blacks, mostly West Indians, in Harlem in 1920.  These immigrants, despite often facing severe discrimination, had a significant effect on American culture and politics. We will discuss Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, particularly paying attention to the “Back to Africa” movement and Garvey’s role as a facilitator of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to the work of Garvey, we will examine the radical political writings of W. A. Domingo, Hubert H. Harrison, and Cyril Briggs. We will also read fiction and poetry by Claude McKay, one of the seminal figures in the Harlem Renaissance, short stories by Eric Walrond, poetry by George Margetson, fiction/essays by J. A.. Rogers and Amy Jacques Garvey, and drama by Eulalie Spence. Finally, we will consider the views of leading African Americans such as W. E. B.. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes on Garvey and the West Indian Community.

English 626: Twentieth Century American Literature
Professor Kenneth Bernard

This course is a discussion of some thematic aspects of American literature and American culture. It is continuous with the previous course, English 625.  We will examine specific texts by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Pynchon, Faulkner, Ismael Reed, West, Henry Miller, and Kerouac. There might be additions. The major theme developed is the contrast/conflict between the values of the “community” and the values of the “territory” and reflections of that contrast/conflict in our cultural and political life. It is helpful but not necessary to have taken English 625 and to have some familiarity with writers like Emerson and Hawthorne.

English 700: Practicum in the Teaching of Composition
Professor Thomas Kerr

This course is designed to introduce teachers to the theory and practice of writing instruction at various levels in a multi-cultural society.  Intended as both a source of support and a forum for discussion for new teachers/tutors as well as teachers with some experience in the classroom, the course will explore the dynamic and frequently problematic relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of writing. Reading assignments include treatments of various pedagogical approaches and the theoretical assumptions about language, culture, and writing that inform these approaches.  Writing assignments and other work for the course will allow teachers to respond directly to issues raised and problems posed in the reading. Assignments will also create opportunities for students to explore their own teaching/tutoring practices. Taken together, the reading, writing, and other work in this course should help us better understand what we are doing in today’s writing classrooms, how to do it, and why we think we are doing it. The principal aim of this course is to help students become rhetorically savvy, self-reflective teachers. Texts:  Scenarios for Teaching Writing: Contexts for Discussion and Reflective Practice by Anson, Grahm, et.al; In the Middle Way: New Understandings about Writing, Reading and Learning by Atwell; Evaluating Writing by Cooper and Odell; The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook (4^th edition) edited by Tate, Corbett, and Meyers; and a course reader that will excerpt work from other major figures in composition studies.

English 707:  Methods of Research and Criticism
Professor David Toise

This course will introduce graduate students to a range of critical approaches, literary texts, and research tools that they can make use of as both teachers and scholars. Within the field of British and American literature, I have chosen a small number of literary texts that, despite being few in number, will allow us to try out our ideas on works that represent different approaches, backgrounds, and genres. Writings by E. M. Forster, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare will serve as our focus. We will want to look at each text in depth, and to this end, we’ll be dealing with a number of critical approaches (historical, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstruction, post-colonial, genre theory, and queer studies). In addition, I hope to discuss how these literary texts have shaped approaches to literature more widely, examining how specific works may have served as touchstones for particular literary approaches. We’ll also be looking at theoretical texts that stand on their own and then discussing connections between the theory and literature we read.  We will engage theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon, for example, and seek to understand their applicability to literary texts. Most of all, I hope that as a group we can raise the possibilities of what literary studies can doe, helping us to explore, develop, and articulate our position as individual readers.

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2000

English 104:  Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning

In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write poetry and short-short fiction, using various forms and approaches.  A writer's notebook will be an ongoing project from which students will gather material for their assignments.  Part of each class period will be devoted to reading poems and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A final portfolio will include an evaluation of the student's learning along with revised poems and stories. Books for the class will include The Handbook of Poetic Forms, and an anthology of short-short fiction. 

English 129:  British Literature II
Professor Howard Silverstein

This course focuses on the theme of the individual and society as illustrated in selected works from the 19^th and early 20^th century. The semester will be divided into the following topics: (1) The spirit of Romanticism: poems by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson, (2) The revolt against Victorianism: Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, (3) The Irish Rebellion: plays by Synge, Shaw, and O'Casey. Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and (4) The Poet's Reaction to the Modern World: poetry by Yeats, Housman, Hardy, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, and Auden. 

English 159:  Literature of the United States II
Professor Michael Bennett 

This course will examine works of literature written in the United States after 1865. We will be going in search of the Great American Novels published from just after the Civil War to the present. Ours will be a multicultural exploration as we range between European, African, Native, and Latino literary traditions within the United States. As we undertake the search for the Great American Novel, we will also interrogate each of the terms of our quest. What is a novel? How do we determine whether or not a novel is great? What do we mean when we say "American?" Rather than providing any final answers, we will see if the questions themselves provide us with some understanding of the complex and convoluted terrain of American literary history.
     Requirements: class participation and presentations, daily reading quizzes, sixteen pages of writing, and a final exam. Texts: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; William Faulkner, Light In August; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima; Maxine Hong Kinston, The Woman Warrior; N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; and Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference.

English 200:  Domesticity in American Literature and Culture
Professor Leah Dilworth

This upper division undergraduate course will examine representations of "home" in American culture. We will consider primarily literary representations, such as Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Thoreau's Walden, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Yesierka's The Bread Givers, and Morrison's Beloved, but we will also look at visual representations such as nineteenth century genre paintings and films, such as The Stepford Wives and Crooklyn.  In addition, we will read excerpts from contemporary advice and household reform literature, as well as selected cultural criticism.  Of central concern will be the ways that "home" has been constructed as a gendered space and how conceptions of race and class have also come to bear on that space.  Students will be required to write a research paper related to the theme of the course as well as several short, informal papers responding to the readings.

English 200:  African Women Writers
Professor Huma Ibrahim

This course is going to examine three of the most prominent Anglophone African Women Writers of the 20th century: Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo.  These three writers have contributed definitively to the dialogue on female identity in the postcolonial context.  Their texts range from precolonial times to more modern postcolonial times. Their characters, mainly female, grapple with issues of nationality and gender in an increasingly turbulent socio-political milieu while continuing a dialogue with their male counterparts. We will read the body of Head, Aidoo, and Emecheta's writing doing exposition of the texts and stipulating the struggle of African Feminists, a title which critics have given to all three writers. In addition,  we will examine each writer's relationship to the English language which started as the colonials' language and later became their own, often through violent confrontation.  This course is for people who are really interested in the development of Anglophone African writing and the particular contribution of women in this field. Students will be required to write two theoretical papers.

Graduate Courses, Spring 2000

English 624:  African American Literature
Professor Carol Allen

This is a survey that covers African American Literature from the eighteenth century to the present.  The course will provide general information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to African American Letters.  In addition to literary texts, assignments include criticism from noted scholars such as Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, and others. Fiction writers to be studied are Douglass, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Brooks, Ellison, Walker, Morrison, and more. The aim is to provide not only a sense of the African-American literary tradition but also of where it stands in relation to Western humanities. Required texts: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates, ed. al. eds.; Black Literature and Literary Theory, Henry Louis Gates, ed.; and course handouts.    

English 641:  Literacy & Basic Writing
Professor David Tietge

This is a graduate course that will examine the theoretical and practical questions surrounding the development of literacy, particularly in relation to basic writing, multicultural contexts, and the urban student writer. It is designed for advanced students who are interested in developing strategies for teaching the basic writer, but it will also provide a theoretical backdrop for understanding and applying those strategies. We will begin by examining the history of composition instruction in order to understand where and how it is situated in the academy, and will quickly move to studying some of the leading thinkers in fields such as composition, education, rhetoric and linguistics. Though we will attempt to master a considerable amount of theory in this course, it will not be at the expense of the practical concerns of teaching writing; there will be a good deal of "hands-on" experience as well.  Therefore, this course is especially important for those who currently are, or who someday hope to be, teachers of writing. The course will be useful not only to English instructors, but to any teachers who intend to use writing as a primary learning tool in their classrooms.