To assist students and advisers in selecting English courses, this listing describes the courses to be offered by the Department of English during the spring semester 2010. English courses at the 500 level require graduate standing or permission of the instructor; courses at the 600 level require graduate standing. To determine the hours at which courses are offered, please consult the Office of Registration and Records.
In accordance with English Department policy and consistent with course objectives, teachers of any English course should take as a responsibility the inclusion of minority and female authors and the treatment of gender and ethnic issues.
All courses will carry three (3) hours of credit unless otherwise specified.
Thomas and Gross
This team-taught course bridges the Norman Conquest to bring together outstanding literary works in Old and Middle English. We will start with a review of the history of English and then move on to literary selections from fourteenth-century England, including but not limited to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and the "shewings" or spiritual visions of the mystic, Julian of Norwich. The second half of the semester will be devoted to literary and linguistic study of the elegiac epic Beowulf, a mirror of Anglo-Saxon society. We will begin with a linguistic survey of Old English. Then, as we read portions of Beowulf in the original Old English, we will study the language, poetry, and heroic culture of pre-Conquest England.
No prior knowledge of Old or Middle English needed; interest in early literature and the history of the English language a necessity! Attention to the art of translation. Required work includes two papers, a midterm, a final, a presentation, and short language quizzes.
Anson
ENG 511 provides an introduction to foundational theories and research in the field of composition studies. During the semester, we will focus on the dynamic and sometimes competing nature of these theories, keeping in mind the historical and political contexts in which they emerged. The goal of the course is to examine assumptions underlying current theory and research and to explore implications for the teaching and practice of writing. Conducted as a seminar, the course is designed to help new members of the field to:
Note: this course is a prerequisite for those who are assigned to teach ENG 101 in the First-Year Writing Program.
Covington
Preq: for undergraduates: ENG 314 or 317; for graduates: permission of instructor.
ENG 517 Advanced Technical Writing and Editing invites students to explore the writing, editing, and designing skills employed by professional technical writers in their work. The course offers students study in the theory and practice of information design -- that is, in the production of documents that are persuasive, informative, and easy to comprehend. For Spring 2010, we will focus on web design. Assignments include one major website project and shorter assignments in web page design and site navigation (HTML/CSS; Dreamweaver/Fireworks), web animation (Flash), and the design of dynamic web pages (mySQL/PHP). Class time will be devoted to computer activities. The course is aimed particularly at those who wish to pursue careers as technical communicators.
Dicks
Preq: ENG 517
Advanced study of publication and team management issues such as staffing, scheduling, cost-reduction and subcontracting. For students planning careers as technical communicators.
Swarts
This course introduces you to the practice of evaluating and designing online information. The main conceptual goal is to help you learn to make informed decisions about representing information, in different modal forms, to users who are embedded in a variety of work and social contexts. The main production goal is to help you become proficient information architects and to demonstrate those skills by designing a complex website, a portfolio of your work.
Dodsworth
Thomas
Young
English 530 will consist of an intensive study of the poetry of John Donne, of Ben Jonson and the Cavaliers, and of George Herbert and the meditative poets, with some notice of the prose of Donne and Hobbes. The emphasis will be on reading and understanding these very rich and complex texts and then placing them in their historical context. Grades will be based on a take-home midterm, a take-final examination, an in-class report, and a term paper of about 15 pages.
Bolonyai
Kellner
ENG 539 will examine literature about ancient Rome in order to study fictional historical representation and narrative poetics. In addition to a variety of novels, there will be background readings in history, philosophy, and related genres. Readings will include proto-modern fiction (Flaubert, Salammbo), experimental narrative (Wilder, The Ides of March), romance (Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis), and the philosophical novel (Pater, Marius the Epicurean), among others. Also readings about the historical novel (Lukacs, from The Historical Novel) and narrative theory (Rimon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction).
Smith McKoy
When W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the "real" question about race in America is "What does it mean to be a problem?", he was articulating a discomfort about race that had long been a central component of African American literature. This course focuses on this "problem" of race and identity. How have African American writers approached the shifting definitions of race in American culture? How have they articulated the shifting identities implicit in being a racialized American? How do African American writers counter the discourse of racial mythologies in American culture? This course is designed to offer students an opportunity to study American culture from the perspective of African American writers whose works focus on revising and reconstructing the American aporia of race. Although there is an emphasis on novels, students will explore other genres including the neo-slave narrative, poetry, short story, autobiography, and fabulist fiction.
Stein
We'll explore that rather amorphous movement known as Romanticism (and its peculiarly American manifestations) as reflected in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. There will be an eight-page paper, a twelve to fifteen-page paper, a midterm exam and a final exam. The classroom format will combine lecture and class discussion.
Morillo
We will read 7-8 complete novels by a mix of men and women, including Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Heywood, Fielding, Sterne, and Burney. We will pair this with primary criticism from the 18th-century as collected in the Broadview Anthology "Novel Definitions" in order to develop your understanding of what the novel was, how it changed, and what cultural work it undertook and achieved from 1688-1788. Your work will include short papers, oral presentation, and final research paper.
Thompson
From the early twentieth century until the present day, American poetry has widely been recognized as one the most innovative, revolutionary and transformative poetic traditions in world literature. This course will examine the "continual revolution" that has been American poetry in the twentieth century by examining its most influential traditions and writers: Imagism (William Carlos Williams/Ezra Pound), Modernism (Wallace Stevens/Marianne Moore) Objectivism (George Oppen), New York School (Frank O'Hara/Ted Berrigan/John Ashbery), Confessional (Robert Lowell/John Berryman), Projectivism/Black Mountain (Charles Olson/Robert Creeley), Beat (Ginsberg/Amiri Baraka) and Language Poetry (Susan Howe). We will end by reading the poetry of three late twentieth-century poets whose work draws on, and extends, these rich traditions: CD Wright, August Kleinzahler and Peter Gizzi. Rather than use an anthology, we will mainly be reading collections of poems by these poets. Key questions for the course: What assumptions regarding the writer, the reader and the text get transformed by these various traditions? How do these various traditions reference or represent the world? What do these poems want to do? What is poetic value? Short manifestos and critical essays will also be part of the reading.
Grimwood
Narrative and expository prose in the United States between the Age of Edison and the Age of iPod--from America's acquisition of a colonial empire, through three world wars and an economic depression, to the temporary global triumph (and tragedy?) of U.S. consumer capitalism. Large themes: reactions against Victorianism; germination and multiple fruition of Modernism; various rejections and transformations of Modernism. Writing assignments: emphasis on placement of short stories in contemporary cultural contexts. Cast of thousands includes Cather, Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Hurston, Welty, O'Connor, Kerouac, Barth, Carver, DeLillo, etc. Average velocity of course (21.5 minutes per year) not uniformly maintained. A shorter research paper and a longer research paper, a midterm exam and a final exam.
Baker
In this course we will read and discuss eight to nine novels published in the U.S. between the end of the eighteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth. Major topics to be addressed over the course of the semester will include the development of an American national identity, the split between highbrow and lowbrow or popular culture that emerges during this period, and the way novels reflect controversies over changing gender roles in nineteenth-century culture. Works to be studied may include: Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple; James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville; Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; and Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.
Balaban
Dicks
Miller, C.
Genres can be understood as ways of acting together. They constrain and enable human symbolic action, linking together in systems and ecologies that help constitute our social identities, institutions, and cultures. The new media, which have created new opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres, raise questions about the emergence and identification of new genres. This special topics offering will cast a wide net, to discern and analyze new genres as well as familiar genres when they were new. We will explore their sources in tradition, technology, and social conditions, with an eye on the balance between stability and change and between agency and power. Since genre is a concept that cuts across disciplines and media, this course should be of interest to students in literature, film, linguistics, creative writing, rhetoric, communication, composition, and visual design. Readings will be selected based on student interests. Master's students should register for 583, doctoral students for 798.
Orgeron, M.
Perhaps more than any other genre, war films explicitly engage with the ideas that uphold a nation's notions of itself, its allies, and its enemies. Representing national interests in terms of battle, war films--in all of their myriad guises--articulate any number of national pressure points at various historic moments, whether the films in question depict contemporary, historic, or (in the case of science fiction) future wars. This course will look at films that represent American wars starting with the Civil War and going through the Iraq War, from Birth of a Nation to Standard Operating Procedure. We will look at any array of different kinds of war films: battle films, coming home films, documentaries, romances, adventure films, and even comedies. Students will complete an archival research assignment, a seminar paper, and a final examination.
McCorkle
Entrance by permission only.
A graduate-level fiction workshop that will focus on the study of the short story. Students will submit a minimum of three short stories with class emphasis on the revision work of these pieces.
Laux
Admission by MFA status or by portfolio. See John Balaban if you have questions.
Poetry Workshop will offer individual practice in the craft of poetry. An ancillary goal will be the development of critical awareness of poetry. Each student will be required to write a minimum of 150 lines in addition to several formal exercises such as translating a poem from a foreign language or writing one in an arbitrarily chosen form. Class meetings will be devoted to student work as well as to discussions of essays on poetry or poetry from our texts. 589 is the graduate course intended for MFA students or others who are advanced enough in their poetry.
Barnhardt
Gelley
Gomez
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Penrose
A seminar and workshop for graduate students in empirical research fields working on grant proposals, theses and dissertations, papers for professional journals, conference proposals, and other significant research texts. Intensive practice and feedback on writing, grounded in an introduction to theory and research on writing processes, products, and contexts. Requirements include 3-4 major writing projects designed by the student, review and discussion of drafts written by other workshop members, analysis and presentation of discipline-specific communication patterns and practices.
Covington
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Miller, C.
Genres can be understood as ways of acting together. They constrain and enable human symbolic action, linking together in systems and ecologies that help constitute our social identities, institutions, and cultures. The new media, which have created new opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres, raise questions about the emergence and identification of new genres. This special topics offering will cast a wide net, to discern and analyze new genres as well as familiar genres when they were new. We will explore their sources in tradition, technology, and social conditions, with an eye on the balance between stability and change and between agency and power. Since genre is a concept that cuts across disciplines and media, this course should be of interest to students in literature, film, linguistics, creative writing, rhetoric, communication, composition, and visual design. Readings will be selected based on student interests. Master's students should register for 583, doctoral students for 798.