Department of English
300-level courses
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302 - Second Language Acquisition
302-01 MWF 12:00-12:50 - E. Doman
303 - Critical Approaches to the Study of Literature
303SI-01 - TR 8:00-9:15 - C. Moraru
The course provides an introduction to literature study, interpretation, and research. This class will familiarize you with the fundamentals of literary criticism: its basic notions, methods, research tools, and resources. It revolves around certain approaches to literature, from the traditional to the more innovative ones, which come about in the wake of the “linguistic revolution” and its focus on language and textuality. We will use both primary and secondary materials to see how critics from late 19th-century historism to the most recent trends in identity studies interpret literature and its relations to culture.
This English 303 section is a speaking intensive class. The course combines opening lectures by the instructor and discussion, with emphasis on the latter. It also requires group work and research of various kinds. In this class, student will present orally, individually and groups, and will receive training in effective public speaking, formal presentation, audience analysis, and related activities. The tests, the final presentation (also to be submitted in written form), and the course requirements generally will reflect the emphasis on speaking and speech delivery skills, in the context of our class’s learning goals.
303SI-02 - TR 9:30-10:45 - C. Moraru
The course provides an introduction to literature study, interpretation, and research. This class will familiarize you with the fundamentals of literary criticism: its basic notions, methods, research tools, and resources. It revolves around certain approaches to literature, from the traditional to the more innovative ones, which come about in the wake of the “linguistic revolution” and its focus on language and textuality. We will use both primary and secondary materials to see how critics from late 19th-century historism to the most recent trends in identity studies interpret literature and its relations to culture.
This English 303 section is a speaking intensive class. The course combines opening lectures by the instructor and discussion, with emphasis on the latter. It also requires group work and research of various kinds. In this class, student will present orally, individually and groups, and will receive training in effective public speaking, formal presentation, audience analysis, and related activities. The tests, the final presentation (also to be submitted in written form), and the course requirements generally will reflect the emphasis on speaking and speech delivery skills, in the context of our class’s learning goals.
303WI-03 TR 14:00-15:15 - S. Yarbrough
315 - Postcolonial Literatures
315-01 TR 11:00-12:15 - A. Schultheis
318 - Journalism IV: Advanced Reporting and Writing
318-01 R 18:00-20:50 - T. Steadman
319 - Journalism II: Editing The Newspaper
319-01 M 18:00-20:50 - N. Cline
321 - Linguistics for Teachers
321-01 W 17:00-19:50 - J. Reynolds
321-02 TR 14:00-15:15 - W. Beale
322 - The Teaching of Writing
322-01 T 13:30- 16:20 - J. Reynolds
323 - Literary Nonfiction
323-01 W 15:00-17:50 - E. Chiseri-Strater
325 - Writing Fiction: Intermediate
325-01 W 15:30-18:20 - TBA
326 - Writing Poetry: Intermediate
Pr. 221 or permission of instructor.
326-01 MW 14:00-15:15 - T. Kennedy
An intensive course in the structure and strategy of poetry writing.
327 - Writing in the Professions
327-81DWI - B. Yarbrough
329 - International Human Rights in Literature and Film
329-01 TR 12:30-13:45 - A. Schultheis
International human rights have been called a “discourse” that conveys dynamics of power and of knowledge, a “tool” that protects the individual from abuses by the state, a “metric” for measuring the global standing of nation-states, and a distinctive form of transnational “politics.” In this seminar, we will examine the intersection of literature, film, and international human rights in order to investigate the mutually transformative relationships between cultural and political responses to egregious human rights violations. We will look at how international human rights define individuals in local and global contexts; how cultural forms such as the novel, memoir, documentary, or poem attempt to respond to human rights violations across borders; and, how those expressions may work in ways international human rights policies cannot. Through the literary and cinematic texts, we address questions of narrative and political representation, the nature of truth and memory, and the problem of empathy which regularly confront international human rights policy workers as well as the general public. On the broadest level, this course asks: What are international human rights? What stories do they recognize, produce, or ignore? How can literature expand the scope of human rights narratives? How can we see literature and film as, at once, artistic, ethical, and political expressions? How are we -- as global citizens, readers, and viewers -- implicated in human rights crises?
331 - Women in Literature
331-01 MWF 11:00-11:50 - A. Van
Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
An in-depth foray into novels by nineteenth-century women writers. In an era dominated by separate spheres ideology, how did female authors participate in public, national debates? Is there such a thing as feminine writing? What rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques were most effective for these authors and why? Authors include Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Gaskell, Braddon and Woolf. A lot of reading of lengthy novels.
ENG 332 - English Women Writers before 1800
332-01 TR 14:00-15:15 - J. Keith
We will study texts composed by women from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, including those by Marie de France, Mary Wroth, Amelia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Readings will range widely: romance, feminist polemic, sonnets, libertine poetry, amatory fiction, and feminist utopias. We will consider how women viewed themselves as writers, their literary innovations, and their exploration of the nature and rights of women. The class will be conducted as a discussion except for brief background lectures.
333 - Southern Writers
333-01 TR 15:30-16:45 - S. Romine
336 - Introduction to Chaucer
336-01 MW 15:30-16:45 - A. Vines
340 - Shakespeare: Later Plays
All 340 sections meet General Education Core Requirements
for Literature (GLT) and AULER/CLER (BL/CBL).
English Major: Before 1800
340-01 TR 9:30-10:45 - M. Dowd
We will read seven or eight plays from the latter half of Shakespeare’s career. Readings will include several of the major tragedies and late romances. Particular attention will be paid to the structure and the language of the plays, and to the ways in which these texts engage with the theatrical, historical, and social tensions of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Class will consist of a combination of lecture and discussion. Assignments: one reading quiz per play, two short papers, and two exams.
341 - Themes in Literature
341-01 MW 14:00-15:15 - C. Hodgkins
Renaissance Theater and Antitheatricalism
Major Requirement: Pre-1800 Literature
In this experimental approach to Renaissance drama we will consider a strange paradox: that the most brilliant theatrical era in English history—the era of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Beaumont, Webster and Ford—also produced the most sustained, violent, and successful attacks upon the public stage. Stranger still is the surprising link between the antitheatricalists and the playwrights themselves, as the greatest Renaissance dramatists reveal a lively sense of the stage’s potential for spiritual deceit and moral corruption. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus squanders his ill-bought time on crude slapstick farce and finally loses his soul to a demonic impersonation of Helen; Shakespeare’s Richard III steals the English throne with dazzling theatrics, and his Jaques and Macbeth find their most memorable metaphors for human absurdity in the passing vanity of players; while Jonson eventually abandoned what he came to call the “loathèd stage” in disgust, cursing its moral and artistic decay little more than a decade before 1642 when Parliament, notoriously, locked the stage door.
We will read a range of early modern plays, including Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Jonson’s The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. We’ll also read short excerpts from a variety of Shakespeare’s plays that reflect on the good and evil power of the stage, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. And we’ll consider selected passages from Renaissance texts both attacking and defending poetry and the playhouse, many from rare books in the British Library.
One reading quiz per play, two examinations (midterm and final), one shorter paper (scene analysis), one critical annotation, and one longer research essay.
Required Texts: David Bevington, ed. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology; MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers; anti- and pro-theatrical prose texts on e-reserve; and David Bevington, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (or any other well-edited collection of Shakespeare’s complete works—Riverside, Pelican, Norton).
341-02WI TR 14:00-15:15 - M. Rifkin
Contemporary Native American Literature
Native Americans often are cast as gone or as on the verge of extinction, an anachronistic remnant of the U.S.’s frontier past. As against this imperial story of disappearance, the texts we will read in this class illustrate the continuing survival and vitality of Native peoples as they struggle with the ongoing legacy of U.S. violence and work toward building a future for themselves. Some questions to which we will keep returning are the following: How do these writers connect the past, present, and future? How is tradition envisioned in these texts? How do they address issues of sovereignty – the status of Native peoples as autonomous polities? How do they represent Native Americans’ status as U.S. citizens? How do they grapple with differences within Native populations, including along lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality? The class does not assume prior knowledge of Native American writing and/or politics. Authors may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Blaeser, Linda Hogan, Ray A. Young Bear, LeAnne Howe, and Qwo-Li Driskill. Assignments will include electronic postings, a short close-reading assignment, and two critical essays with one mandatory revision.
342 - The Seventeenth Century
342-01 MWF 10:00-10:50 - C. Hodgkins
Major Requirement: Pre-1800 Literature
A survey of major authors and works from 1600 through Milton and Bunyan. The course will emphasize the often competing schools of "metaphysical" and "cavalier" poetry--Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Traherne, on the one hand; Jonson, Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Waller, and Cowley, on the other. Substantial attention also will be paid to Marvell and Milton. Important excursions into prose developments (Bacon, Milton, Hobbes, Brown, Bunyan), and a side trip into Jacobean drama (Webster), as well. Classes will combine discussion and lecture, with an emphasis on textual explication. Two papers will be required, one (2-3 pages) explicating a lyric poem, the other (5-6 pages) about some aspect of Paradise Lost. Exams will consist of a midterm and final, each covering one half of the course. Occasional reading quizzes. Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th edition, volume 1.
348 - Contemporary British Literature and Culture
348-01 MWF 10:00-10:50 - B. Clarke
358 - Modern Poetry
358-01 TR 11:00-12:15 - A. Cuda
This course will introduce students to the poetry and poetic theories of the major poets writing in America, England, and Ireland during the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Poets typically use verbal style to create the effect of a feeling, thinking “self” uttering the lines of the poem. We will explore how modern poets thought about the psychological make-up of this projected self (especially its emotional life), how their stylistic experiments fit into the history of lyric poetry, and how the different “schools” of poetry helped to set the stage for contemporary poetic practice. By the end of the semester, students should be able to (1) identify the unique styles of the poets whom we will study, (2) write clearly about those poets’ styles and thematic concerns, and (3) discuss the broader issues and theoretical questions associated with poetry as an art form in the modern period.
359 - Contemporary Poetry
359-01 TR 9:30-10:45 - J. Grotz
372 - Early American Literature
372-01 TR 11:00-12:15 - M. Sanchez
374 - Early African American Writers
374-01 MW 15:30-16:45 - 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.
376 - African American Writers after 1920s
376WI-01 MW 14:00-15:15 - S. Ferguson
A survey of African American literature from the mid-late Harlem Renaissance to the present, focusing on such writers as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Students will also keep a journal, of responses to course readings, write two 5-page essays, take mid-term and final exams.
379 - American Women's Writing
379-01 MW 14:00-15:15 - K. Weyler
In this course, we will examine a wide variety of textual productions by American women writers, while also putting American writers into conversation with some of their British and Continental contemporaries with regard to the developing discourse of women's rights. We'll look at both manuscript and printed sources, and we'll explore how, why, and when women first entered into print in British North America. Of particular interest to us will be women's participation in the conversations surrounding the American Revolution and the formation of the new nation. The genres we'll study include poetry, fiction, drama, personal letters, essays, captivity narratives, and travel narratives. Course requirements include a mid-term and a final examination, a short paper, a research essay, a group presentation, class participation, and a group research project.
382 - Modern British & American Drama
382-01 TR 9:30-10:45 - K. Cushman
390 - Writing Center Theory & Practice
390-01 MWF 10:00-10:50 - S. Littlejohn