300-level courses
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303 - Critical Approaches to the Study of Literature
303-01WI MWF 1100- B. Clarke
This course explores some of the major ideas and theories that have shaped critical practice from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an introduction to fields such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and post-colonialism, and examines some of the ways in which these have informed the response to art and, in particular literature. In so doing, raises questions about the definition of literature, its function, and the purpose of literary studies.
303-02WI MWF 1000- G. Lim
What are some of the assumptions that inform how we analyze texts? Did we always read as we do today? Is there a difference in reading a text for pleasure and studying it for college credit? Why will two English professors have vastly different interpretations of the same poem? What defines English as a discipline? By studying several major areas of literary and critical theory we will begin to formulate answers to these questions. We will consider four broad approaches to the study of literature: formalism, reader-response theory, psycho-analytical, gender and queer theory, and cultural-historical approaches. While we will spend a good deal of the course considering these theories in their own right, we will also study scholarly articles with an eye to exploring how they are applied to spark literary insight and develop arguments about interpretation.
303-03WI MWF 1200- G. Lim
What are some of the assumptions that inform how we analyze texts? Did we always read as we do today? Is there a difference in reading a text for pleasure and studying it for college credit? Why will two English professors have vastly different interpretations of the same poem? What defines English as a discipline? By studying several major areas of literary and critical theory we will begin to formulate answers to these questions. We will consider four broad approaches to the study of literature: formalism, reader-response theory, psycho-analytical, gender and queer theory, and cultural-historical approaches. While we will spend a good deal of the course considering these theories in their own right, we will also study scholarly articles with an eye to exploring how they are applied to spark literary insight and develop arguments about interpretation.
303-04WI MWF 1300- G. Lim
What are some of the assumptions that inform how we analyze texts? Did we always read as we do today? Is there a difference in reading a text for pleasure and studying it for college credit? Why will two English professors have vastly different interpretations of the same poem? What defines English as a discipline? By studying several major areas of literary and critical theory we will begin to formulate answers to these questions. We will consider four broad approaches to the study of literature: formalism, reader-response theory, psycho-analytical, gender and queer theory, and cultural-historical approaches. While we will spend a good deal of the course considering these theories in their own right, we will also study scholarly articles with an eye to exploring how they are applied to spark literary insight and develop arguments about interpretation.
305 - Introduction to Rhetoric
305-03 TR 1230- S. Yarbrough
310 - Young Adult Literature
310-01 TR 200- J. Reynolds
321 - Linguistics for Teachers
321-01 MW 1530- W. Beale
English linguistics is about the principles and methods of studying language in general, and about the English language in particular—its structure, vocabulary, history, and its geographical and social varieties. This course is designed for English majors and future teachers of English, and consequently its focus is upon connections between the science of language and the arts of language—specifically, literature, composition, rhetoric, and critical thinking. A major goal of the course is to examine ways in which the formal study of language can help us to understand the values, goals, and methods of language arts teaching.
323 - Literary Nonfiction
323-01 MW 1400- E. Chiseri-Strater
324 - Teaching Writing in Elementary and Middle Grades
324-01 - J. Reynolds
Principles of written discourse with a survey of techniques of teaching composition in the elementary and middle grades English Language Arts classroom. Instruction in composing, editing, and criticizing written discourse.
335 - Dante in English
335-01 - MWF 1000 T. Cuda
This course will introduce students to Dante Alighieri's epic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, a harrowing three-part journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven set in the year 1300. Students will also examine and interpret Dante’s minor works; study the historical, political, and religious contexts of his writings; and investigate his literary antecedents and contemporaries. Texts will be studied in English translation, so no understanding of Latin or Italian is necessary. The course will conclude with works by English-language authors influenced by Dante, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney.
339 - Shakespeare: Early Plays and Sonnets
340-01 MWF 900- J. Feather
This course will focus on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, especially the histories, comedies, and poems, reading and discussing six to seven plays in depth. We will pay particular attention to how Shakespeare uses specific language to represent his social context and how the afterlife of these texts has influenced both Shakespeare’s culture and our own. Your in-class participation will be a vital part of the class. Assignments will include informal speaking and writing assignments, a short paper, and several exams.
349 - English Novel from Defoe to Hardy
349-01 TR 1100- J. Evans
You will read and discuss six novels as you explore key aspects of this genre in the 18th and 19th centuries. We will emphasize close reading of these novels in their cultural contexts, including such topics as gender and class. The six novels are Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Frances Burney’s Evelina,Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. You will take two exams, as well as reading quizzes on the novels, and you will write one critical essay.
343 - Topics in Pre-1800 Literature
343-01 TR 1230- J. Evans
“Comic Heroines from Shakespeare to Austen” will be the topic as we examine female protagonists in comedy, a form that licenses them, at least temporarily, to resist in words and actions their patriarchal worlds. We’ll read six comic plays—Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, William Congreve’s The Way of the World, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals—and two comic novels by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Emma. We will view excerpts from films of each. Student responsibilities will include exams, essays, and discussion. This course satisfies the major requirement for a course in literature before 1800.
372 - Early American Literature
372-01 MW 1530- M. Sanchez
374 - Early African American Writers
374-01 TR 930- N. Morrissette
This upper-level course provides a survey of African American literature from its inception through the 1920s. Readings for the course consist of poetry, slave narratives, novels, essays, and short stories. Texts will be read through major historical periods of African American experiences and literary responses to them, with particular attention paid to responses to: 1.) slavery and Reconstruction—the evolution from slave narratives to autobiography to fictions; 2.) oral traditions and their incorporation into printed literature; and 3.) the Great Migration, the Great War, and the New Negro literary renaissances of the early twentieth century. Visual art, film and sound recordings will accompany the introduction of texts as contextual enrichment and to place the past in dialogue with our present-day views of history and culture.
375 - Topics in Native American Writing
375-01 MW 1530- M. Rifkin
Native American Writing Before 1934
Native peoples have been producing texts in English since at least the mid-eighteenth century. In this course, we will read and discuss various kinds of writings -- including petitions, autobiographies, and fiction -- from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While exploring these texts from a number of different angles, we will periodically return to a core set of questions. In what ways do these writings respond to the pressures, rhetoric, and violence of U.S. policy? How do they address Native tradition(s)? When do they attempt to speak for a given people and on what basis do they do so? When do they offer pan-tribal visions of Native identity and why? How do they engage with issues of race, class, and gender? How do they envision and work toward the continued survival of Native peoples? 1934 will be our end date, because the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in that year brought to an end the policy of allotment which had guided Indian affairs for the previous fifty years and inaugurated a new period in U.S.-Native relations. Authors may include William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Black Hawk, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, John Joseph Matthews, D'arcy McNickle, and Ella Deloria. No prior knowledge about Native American histories, politics, and cultures is necessary.376 - African American Writers after the 1920s
376-01WI MW 1400- S. Ferguson
378 - American Life-Writing
378-01 - R. Applegarth
This course examines nonfiction narratives based on personal experience but written for public audiences, asking how writers use genre conventions and formal strategies to make claims about history, memory, politics, and identity. This section will focus on personal essays and book-length memoirs by recent American writers such as Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Patricia Hampl, bell hooks, Lucy Grealy, Mary Karr, David Sedaris, and John Edgar Wideman, although selections from earlier writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain may also be included. Assignments include active participation in seminar-style discussion, attentive reading of all assigned texts, two oral presentations, and extensive writing and revision of two research-based analytical essays.
