Fall 2012 English Course Offerings

Visit the Registrar’s webpage for additional information

PLEASE NOTE THAT COURSE AVAILABILITY AND TIMES CHANGE FREQUENTLY. CHECK BACK OFTEN FOR UPDATES.

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Eng 100: Literary Representations of Childhood, Andrea Hibbard
MWF 12:40-1:40PM.

This course traces the development of Anglo-American literary conceptions of the child from William Blake to the present.  Although much of our focus will be on the years leading up to and including the so-called “golden age” of children’s literature (from about 1860 to 1920), we will begin the semester by considering how and why so many important Romantic poets idealized childhood.  We will go on to explore the significance of Victorian fictional and non-fictional writings about exploited child workers, lonely orphans, and dying invalids.  How did Victorian authors use these children to challenge the social and economic status quo and to satisfy the sentimental tastes of adult readers?  We will also examine popular child heroes of adventure narratives, ghost stories, and fairytales.  What is the allure of texts that figure the child as the uncivilized or wild “other”?  How did these fictions both teach and transgress gender roles?  The semester will end with a selection of recent works that seek to express the perspective of children caught in the crossfire of adult struggles over race, religion, and land.  Authors include William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maurice Sendak, Opal Whiteley, Henry James, Dinah Craik, Toni Morrison, Mariane Satrapi, and Dave Eggers.
Prerequisite: None

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Eng 100:  Filma Adapting Fiction,  Michael Mirabile
TTH 1:50-3:20PM

This course will concentrate on major novels of the twentieth century and their adaptation of transference to the medium of the cinema. Reading fictions and watching films, moving from page to screen, we will ask the comparative question of how the specific conditions of each art form determine the meanings and cultural resonances of individual adaptations. We will consider how influential theories of literature and film, along with general frameworks of modernism and postmodernism, offer diverse perspectives on our course and materials. Authors will include some of the following: Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, James Dickey, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick, Nathanael West, and Ken Kesey.
Prerequisite: None 

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Eng 100: Experimental Fiction, Kristin Fujie
 MWF 8:00AM-9:00AM

This course focuses on 20th- and 21st-century British and American fiction that employs innovative formal techniques. By studying our writers’ use of devices such as frame narratives, unreliable and non-traditional narrators, stream-of-consciousness style, non-linear plot, collage, and pastiche, we will explore how literature since 1900 bends, stretches, breaks, and otherwise manipulates linguistic and narrative conventions in order to create new experiences for its readers. Writers may include Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Prerequisites: None.

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Eng 200:01 Intro to Short Story, Pauls Toutonghi
 TTH 9:40AM-11:10AM

Eng 200:02 Intro to Short Story, John Callahan
 TTH 1:50-3:20

Elements of fiction such as plot, character development, descriptive language, and voice. Emphasis on craft-based exercise. Extensive reading of short stories, culminating in the writing and revision of a final story.
Prerequisites: None.

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Eng 201: Intro to Poetry Writing, Mary Szybist
 TTH 1:50-3:20PM

Elements of poetry such as imagery, rhythm, tone. Practice in the craft. Frequent references to earlier poets.
Prerequisite: None 

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Eng 205-01: Major Periods and Issues in English Literature, Will Pritchard
 MWF 10:20AM-11:20AM

Eng 205-02: Major Periods and Issues in English Literature, Jerry Harp
MWF 12:40PM-1:40PM

Eng 205-03: Major Periods and Issues in English Literature, Lyell Asher
TTH 9:40AM-11:10AM

Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature.  Middle Ages to end of 17th century.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or consent of instructor

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Eng 300: Fiction Writing,  Pauls Toutonghi
TTH 11:30AM-1:00PM

Discussion and small-group workshop.  Required reading aloud from an anthology, with student-led discussion of authors’ texts.  Daily exercises in various elements of short fiction, graduating to full-length stories; emphasis on revision.  All students write evaluations of peers’ work and participate in oral critique.
Prerequisite: English 200 and junior standing or consent of instructor; 4 semester credits.

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Eng 301: Poetry Writing, Mary Szybist
M 3:00PM-4:30PM / TH 3:30PM-5:00PM

Discussion of student work with occasional reference to work by earlier poets. Students develop skills as writers and readers of poetry.

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Eng 312: Early English Novel, Will Pritchard
MWF 12:40PM-1:40PM

The process by which, over the course of the 18th century, the novel became Britain’s preeminent genre. Topics include the relation of novel to romance, debates over the morality of fiction, claims of novels not to be novels, women as readers and writers, and the period’s various subgenres (e.g., epistolary novel, gothic novel, sentimental novel). Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Stern, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, Jane Austen.
Junior standing or consent required. 

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Eng 315: The Victorians, Andrea Hibbard
MWF 9:10AM-10:10AM

Major Victorian writers and their responses to social and economic conditions. May include the Brontes, Eliot, Dickens, Nightingale, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, Gaskell, Mayhew, Gissing.
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Eng 317: 20th-Century British Lit, Post-WWII, Rishona Zimring
TTH 9:40AM-11:10AM

Survey of British fiction after the Second World War, covering such topics as fictional form (realism, fantasy, metafiction); class relations; national identity and multiculturalism; narratives of sexual identity; the politics of country/city representations; writers and social responsibility; youth, age, generations; subcultures; postwar British cinema. Authors include Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson.
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Eng 320: Early American Lit, Rachel Cole
TTH 11:30AM-1:00PM

American literature in English from exploration and colonization through the beginning of the 19th century. Texts include autobiographies, sermons, captivity narratives, essays, poems, and novels. Topics include contemporary literary definitions of America (as land, a set of colonies, a nation, a culture, an ideology); the definition of American literature (What are our criteria of inclusion? How are those criteria conditioned by the structure of academic discourse?); how literature of the period imagines the relationships between European and indigenous populations; how it imagines the relationship of America to Europe; how it reflects variant ideologies (both religious and secular) within the colonies and later the republic; the significance of the tensions between these ideologies for concepts that remain current in American discourse today (the individual, new world, freedom, agency, the frontier).
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Eng 323: Modern American Lit, 1900-WWII, Kristin Fujie
MWF 12:40PM-1:40PM

American literature in the first half of the 20th century as it is shaped by American writers’ growing familiarity with European modernism, with the failure of Victorian values exposed by World War I, and with the increasing presence of women
and minority writers. Anderson, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hurston, LeSueur, Stein, Steinbeck, Toomer, West, Wright.
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Eng 326: African American Lit, John Callahan
 TTH 11:30AM-1:00PM

The African American literary tradition from the late 19th century to the present. Points of contact with, and departure from, the rest of American literary history with emphasis on the black oral tradition, particularly the pattern of call-and-response as writers adapt it to the literary forms of fiction and poetry from spirituals, work songs, blues, jazz, and storytelling. May include Baldwin, Baraka, Brooks, Brown, Chesnutt, Dove, DuBois, Dunbar, Ellison, Gaines, Harper, Hayden, Hughes, Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Knight, Morrison, Toomer, Walker, Williams, Wilson, Wright.
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Eng 333-02: Major Figures: Milton, Jerry Harp
 MWF 1:50PM-2:50PM

Detailed examination of writers introduced in other courses. Figures have included Austen, Blake, the Brontes, Ellison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf.  May be repeated for credit with a change of topic, however registration for subsequent sections must be done via the Registrar’s Office.
Junior standing or consent required.  

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Please view the Senior Seminar page on this website for Fall 2012 Eng 450 course offerings and registration information .