ENGL 113C-01 SPST: Literature and Diversity Dr

English Department Undergraduate Course Descriptions Spring 2009

For more information see Dr. Laura Engel, Director of Undergraduate Studies (x1425; [email protected]). English majors must meet with their English department faculty mentors in order to have their registration approved.

400 LEVEL REQUIREMENTS FOR LITERARY STUDIES TRACK British Literature Courses: 412W-01 Renaissance Literature and Politics; 418W-01 British Romantic Poetry; 424W-01 Modernist Women Writers; 450W-01 Pearl Poet; 450W-03 20th Century British Poetry and Beyond

American Literature Courses: 426W-01 American Autobiography; 424 W-01 Modernist Women Writers; 450W-02 Transatlantic American Writers

Literature and Diversity Courses: 424W-01 Modernist Women Writers; 426-01 American Autobiography; 450W-03 20th Century British Poetry and Beyond

Senior Seminars: 450-01 Pearl Poet; 450-02 Transatlantic American Writers; 450W-03 20th Century British Poetry and Beyond

300/400 LEVEL REQUIREMENTS FOR WRITING TRACK Creative writing: 301W-01, 301W-02 Fiction Writing Workshop I; 301W-03 Playwriting Workshop I; 400W-01 Fiction Writing Workshop II; 400W-02 Poetry Writing Workshop II; 404W-01 Fiction Writing Workshop III; 404W-02 Poetry Writing Workshop III

Critical and professional writing: 302W-01, 302W-03 Science Writing; 302W-02 Writing and War

Senior Seminars: 450-01 Pearl Poet; 450-02 Transatlantic American Writers; 450W-03 20th Century British Poetry and Beyond

300/400 LEVEL REQUIREMENTS FOR FILM STUDIES Filmmaking: 308-91 Pittsburgh Filmmakers Departmental Film: 205-61 Introduction to Film; 309W-61 British Film

Senior Seminars: 450-01 Pearl Poet; 450-02 Transatlantic American Writers; 450W-03 20th Century British Poetry and Beyond

*Some courses satisfy more than one requirement, but students must choose to meet each requirement with a different course *All English majors are required to complete English 300 and 3 American/British literature surveys EXCEPT Film Studies concentrators who can take Survey of Cinema to fulfill one of their survey requirements. *ENG 450, Senior Seminar is open only to English Majors (including English/Ed majors) in the senior or the second semester of junior year. YOU MUST HAVE SPECIAL PERMISSION TO REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE. See Gabrielle Rebottini in 637 College Hall for the form. * A course in both World Literature and Grammar/Linguistics are required for English Education Majors.

ENGL 101-01 Multi-Genre Creative Writing Professor Jolene McIlwain MWF 12:00-12:50 Multiple Genres found in one text? Not just poetry OR drama OR fiction? In a world of compartmentalization and categorizing, students find that some things just don’t fit easily into one box. Such is the case with Multiple Genre writings. This course will introduce students to the art of writing in multiple genres. This is both a study of culture and of art. Both art and culture provide us with a mix: a mix of people, ideas, ideologies, possibilities. By reading single and multiple genre works and attempting to write a collected piece of multiple genres, students will be offered a chance to understand those mixes by applying the skills needed to understand difference and synthesis writing. A study beginning with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, this course will focus on how authors have used multiple genres within one completed text to accomplish a particular reading adventure and experience that may not have been as compelling through the use of one single genre. This writing course is designed to teach students the techniques and practice of multi-genre writing through a workshop format of peer review and commentary. Students interested in creative non-fiction, prose fiction, poetry and writing for children will have opportunities to blend genres to create their own unique pieces while studying published authors’ successful attempts at this style. Students will research, write, revise their pieces and discuss the process of this unique style through group discussion and dialogic journals.

ENGL 113C-01 SPST: Literature and Diversity Dr. Laura Callanan MWF 12:00-12:50 In this course we will read a range of texts that deal with the relationship between storytelling, community, and identity. Designed as a complement to the Litterae Community Service Learning Project, we will look at how students’ experiences with individuals in that project inform readings of the texts. How do cultural forces, cultural frictions, and fractured narratives help to represent a particular kind of cross-cultural identity? How do we as readers look to story to help us to define and develop our own sense of individual self? How do we on a community level create common identity through the telling and retelling of particular tales? These are the kinds of issues we will look at throughout the semester. Students will be responsible for keeping a journal, writing several short papers and one longer paper. For Litterae Learning Community members only.

ENGL 201-01 SPST: Introduction to Fiction Professor Beth Buhot TR 9:25-10:40 Students will read and discuss two novels and many pieces of short fiction. The course will emphasize twentieth-century fiction and will examine writers’ contributions to social and political debates as well as their use and transformation of the building-blocks of fiction. This is a discussion-based course and regular class participation is required.

ENGL 201-02 SPST: Introduction to Fiction Professor Gina Bessetti MWF 1:00-1:50 This course will provide an introduction to fiction through the exploration of the short story and the novel and will enhance students’ skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing about literature. The class will examine how fiction negotiates issues of class, gender, war, identity, and the environment. Written reflections and class discussion will challenge us to consider how a text represents the human experience through elements of plot, voice, character, setting, style, and point of view, along with the difficulties of attempting to represent reality and experience artistically.

ENGL 202-01 SPST: Introduction to Poetry Professor Michelle Gaffey MW 3:00-4:15 This Introduction to Poetry course will introduce students to ways to approach, read, and interpret twentieth century American poetry, with an emphasis on the general theme: ―Poetry, Class, and Culture.‖ We will consider the poems as both works of art and as documents that shape and have been shaped by their moment in time. Further, we will consider how a poem or a book of poems defines ―art,‖ records history, takes stands, and inspires action. To demonstrate their understanding, students will focus on close reading with attention to a number of formal matters in a note-card journal, present critical and theoretical works on the poetry in question, write two short papers, and take an exam or two, though these assignments are tentative at this point. Some poets we will likely discuss are Lola Ridge, Campbell McGrath, Langston Hughes, Chris Llewellyn, Etheridge Knight, Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, Jim Daniels, Denise Levertov, Sonia Sanchez, and Sherman Alexie. Anyone with an interest in poetry, poetics, class, history, social justice, or the power of the written or spoken word is encouraged to take this class.

ENGL 203-01 SPST: Introduction to Drama Professor Shayne Confer MWF 9:00-9:50 This course, designed for the general student, will survey the history of the drama from the classical age to the present. We will examine the plays as literature, but there will be a large emphasis on plays as performance; thus, we will watch film adaptations, stage scenes in class, and always read with an eye to how the play could be interpreted on stage. We will explore representative drama from several different eras and pay close attention to historical and societal factors that have influenced the development of the drama across centuries.

ENGL 204-01 SPST: Images of Race in Film and Literature Dr. Kathy Glass TR 1:40-2:55 This course will consider how literature engages and revises notions of race and gender embedded in American culture. Using the film Crash as our point of departure, we will first examine how images of race and gender structure contemporary culture. Then, we will consider traditional images of race and gender in such films as Gone with the Wind and Imitation of Life. These filmic images will serve as a backdrop against which we will examine how literature from the nineteenth century to the present has reinforced, and/or re-imagined conventional concepts of race and gender for political ends. The reading list will include works by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Zitkala Sa, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Paul Beatty.

ENGL 205-61 Introduction to Film Dr. Dorothy Spangler T 5:00-8:40 Students will learn basic film terminology and be introduced to production techniques through a combination of textbook readings, movie viewings, and classroom discussions. Students will become conversant about the production process and the roles of various key artists and craftspeople on a film. In addition, through work outside class, students will be introduced to many of the most critically acclaimed films in cinema history. Fulfills Film studies concentration requirement.

ENGL 214W-01 Survey of Non-Western Literature Dr. Agnes Vardy TR 12:15-1:30 This course examines representative translations and original works (both fiction and non-fiction) by non-western authors from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia. The course stresses in-depth reading and concentrates on the interrelationships of literature and the social and cultural values and beliefs as reflected in literature. The course is organized thematically on topics such as Family and Cultural Ties, Coming of Age, Culture and Gender Roles, Work and Identity, Class and Caste, The Individual in Society, Exile, Customs and Rituals and The Spiritual Dimension. This course satisfies the World Literature requirement for English Education students.

ENGL 217W-01 Survey of British Literature I Fr. John Geary TR 3:05-4:20 In this course we will read works of British literature from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century that are significant for their literary merit as well as for their cultural value. We will read in four genres: poetry, drama, non- fiction prose, and the novel. Course discussion and lecture will stress close readings of texts and promote the development of an understanding of the literary and historical/cultural context in which the texts occurred. Fulfills English major survey requirement. Survey of British Literature I is required of all English-Education students.

ENGL 217W-02 Survey of British Literature I Professor Rebecca Cepek MWF 9:00-9:50 This course will examine both canonical and non-canonical texts, in various forms and genres, from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. We will investigate how the survey course creates a history and explore what is necessarily left out of that history. Students will analyze literature both in class discussions and in written form, which will promote the development of an understanding of the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of these texts. Requirements include reading quizzes, two exams, oral presentations, an annotated bibliography, and a course paper. Fulfills English major survey requirement. Survey of British Literature I is required of all English-Education students.

ENGL 218W-01 Survey of British Literature II Professor Amy Phillips MWF 2:00-2:50 In this course, we will read and critically reflect upon a representative sampling of British Literature in the major genres (poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose, and drama) from the late 18th century to the present. More specifically, we will focus on prominent issues in the cultural and historical contexts of British literature during these periods, including identity, class, race, religion, gender, and politics. Students will enhance skills in critical analysis through reading, writing, and discussion of texts and of writers’ conversations and disagreements over social, political, and cultural issues and pose answers to questions such as: What defines a literary period? What is the relationship between individual authors and their literary and cultural contexts? How do courses like ours construct a particular history of British literature? How is British literature of the past relevant to our twenty-first century cultural experience? Fulfills English major survey requirement.

ENGL 218W-02 Survey of British Literature II Dr. Daniel Watkins TR 10:50-12:05 The principal aim of this course is to introduce students to the main literary texts and currents of thought in Britain from the late eighteenth century through the mid twentieth century. While the main focus will be on canonical writers (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, among others), attention will also be given to lesser-known authors, such as Baillie, Landon, and Hemans. The course is designed for majors, but non-majors are welcome. No previous knowledge of the field is required. Text: Norton Anthology of British Literature II. Requirements: Mid-term and final exams; short paper of 5 - 8 pages. Fulfills English major survey requirement.

ENGL 219W-01 Survey of American Literature I Dr. Tom Kinnahan TR 1:40-2:55 In this course, we will survey some of the major texts, authors, and themes animating American literature from the early age of European exploration to the Civil War. We will trace aesthetic and thematic developments in American literature during these periods, while also examining the historical contexts in which the works under discussion were written and read. We will be especially attentive to relationships between literature and visual culture, using early American paintings, illustrations, and photographs to illuminate and contextualize our readings. Class discussions will be supplemented with occasional film clips from the documentary series American Visions: The History of American Art and Architecture, as well as a number of brief slide presentations. Fulfills English major survey requirement.

ENGL 220W-01 Survey of American Literature II Dr. Frederick Newberry MWF 11:00-11:50 This course is a survey of American literature since 1865 that will introduce students to the variety and diversity of American literature. We will pay particular attention to the construction of modern American identities, aesthetics, and ethics in our analyses of the texts. We will also consider both how the historical context has shaped the texts and how the variety of texts has interacted with history. Among others, our reading will touch on works by Emily Dickinson, Henry James, W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, & Gloria Anzaldúa. Fulfills English major survey requirement.

ENGL 220W-02 Survey of American Literature II Professor Justin Kishbaugh TR 9:25-10:40 In this course, we will follow the development of American literature from 1865 to the present. Students will read selections from both canonical and non-canonical writers from this time period and, in so doing, will become familiar with the different artistic theories, techniques, ideologies, and movements that define their literature. Among the authors we will cover are Mark Twain, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Jack Kerouac, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon. In-class discussion and writing assignments will allow students to investigate and develop their opinions, analytic and writing skills, as well as their individual relationships with the texts. Fulfills English major survey requirement.

ENGL 224W-01 World Literature II: Renaissance to Romanticism Dr. Bernard Beranek MWF 10:00-10:50 The conventional division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods implies that the modern age begins where the middle ages end, but many of the attempts to understand our own times (and most of those that lament the times) find the origins of modernity in the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment. This course is a survey of texts, mostly acknowledged literary masterpieces, that mark the changes from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. Because the curriculum provides many opportunities for the study of English and American literature, this course will give particular prominence to continental European authors, but the indispensable English and American works will not be neglected. Among the authors to be studied: Molière, Racine, Madame de Lafayette, Rousseau, Voltaire, Novalis, Leopardi, Goethe, Lermontov , Dostoyevsky. Cross listed with WDLI 202. Fulfills World Literature requirement for English Education majors.

ENGL 300W-01 Critical Issues in Literary Studies Dr. Linda Kinnahan MWF 9:00-9:50 This course introduces students to the activity of literary criticism: what is it? Why do it? How to pursue it? During the semester, we will consider these larger questions through focusing on four authors and texts from different periods of history in American and British literature. For each text, will spend time talking about it as a class and then reading a range of critical essays about the text, paying careful attention to how and why different arguments, points of view, materials, and rhetorical strategies shape a critic’s reading. Students will be expected to read carefully and discuss enthusiastically. Not only will we be reading literature and literary criticism, we will also be learning to write literary criticism through various essay and research assignments. Tentative authors and texts for the course include: Anne Bradstreet, selected poems (17th c. American); Mark Twain, Puddin’head Wilson (19th c. American); T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (20th c. American & British); and Grace Nichols, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (contemporary Anglo- Caribbean). Fulfills English major requirement.

ENGL-300W-02 Critical Issues in Literary Studies Dr. Timothy Vincent MW 3:00-4:15 This course is designed to involve students in the work of literary studies by combining close textual analysis of primary texts with the examination of scholarly essays that approach these texts from various critical contexts. Primary texts will include James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Nella Larson, Quicksand and Passing; and Don Delillo, Underworld. Class activities will include literary discussions, interaction with secondary sources, bibliography work, and the production of a 10-15 page essay that draws on all of these activities. Fulfills English major requirement.

ENGL 300W-03 Critical Issues in Literary Studies Dr. Daniel Watkins TR 3:05-4:20 English 300 is the gateway course to the major in English. As such, its objective is to teach students how to read, think, and write critically about literary texts. It also introduces students to the standard research methods in the field, including the proper means of quoting and citing primary and secondary texts. The course is designed for majors, but under special circumstances non-majors may be admitted. Texts: Shakespeare, Othello; Shelley, Frankenstein; Rossetti, "Goblin Market" and Other Poems; Langston Hughes, Complete Poems. Requirements: four papers of moderate length (3 - 5 pp.); final exam. Fulfills English major requirement.

ENGL 301W-01 SPST: Fiction Workshop I Prof. John Fried TR 1:40-2:55 This course is a workshop for students interested in fiction writing. In order to develop their creative writing potential, students in this course must be committed to careful reading, extensive writing, active participation in class, and regular attendance. The course aims to develop the students’ reading as well as writing skills, for in reading well one learns much about writing. Through reading the writing of their classmates carefully and responding to them thoughtfully, students will contribute significantly to their classmates’ improvement while also learning something about the craft of good writing. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 301W-02 SPST: Poetry Workshop I Ava Cipri MWF 11:00-11:50 Part I: Welcome! In joining the conversation, simply through the act of showing up, we claim our seat, a space at the table, and align our voices with the ongoing discourse of the poetry workshop forum. Part II: The work begins; you will read poems from published poets with an emphasis on particular literary devices or forms: line, stanza, form, image, rhythm, music, lyric, genre, elliptical, etc. With the acquisition of this vocabulary, you will challenge the work of published poets, your peers, and yourselves. The course requires you not only be attentive to language, but music and art; a willingness to investigate a variety of mediums, and how they inform one another is crucial. You will compose 1-2 poems weekly, participate in workshop, and submit a final portfolio of poems. A variety of books of poetry, including contemporary literary journals (many online) will be assigned. Fulfills a creative writing requirement for the English writing concentration.

ENGL 301W-03 SPST: Playwriting Workshop I Professor Robert Isenberg TR 12:15-1:30 This course will introduce students to dramatic writing for the stage. Students write scenes and monologues, exploring realistic dialogue, conflict, motivation and themes. Inspiration will be mined from stage literature, live performances, and in-class readings. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 301W-04 SPST: Fiction Writing Workshop I Dr. Magali Cornier Michael MW 3:00-4:15 This course is a workshop for students interested in fiction writing. In order to develop students’ creative writing potential, students in this course must be committed to careful reading, extensive writing, active participation in class, and extremely regular attendance. Although a certain degree of talent helps, much good fiction writing is the product of labor and practice—in the processes of both writing and reading. Much of the class time will be spent discussing one another’s writing; therefore, as a workshop, the class depends upon each and every individual’s active engagement in all processes of the workshop (writing, reading, critique, revision, etc.). For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 302W-01 SPST: Science Writing Professor Gerra Bosco TR 8:00-9:15 This class will give students practical, hands-on experience with the types of writing that professionals in the sciences are expected to produce: grant applications, lab reports, journal articles, and proposals. In addition, students will learn to write about science for a non-specialist audience. The class is aimed both at advanced students in the sciences who wish to improve their writing skills and at English, Communications, and Journalism majors who are interested in writing about science in their careers. For the writing track in the English major, this course fulfills a Critical and Professional Writing requirement.

ENGL 302W-02 SPST: Writing and War Professor Rita Allison Kondrath TR 12:15-1:30 As a calamitous event, war inherently resists representation. This course examines the writings of men and women who employ writing as a tool to convey the experience of war and its impact on their lives and worldview. We will consider representations of war across the genres of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, from World War I to the present. As our discussions lead to contemporary accounts of the War in Iraq, we will consider how ―newer‖ genres such as email and other forms of web media shape the experience of war for those on the frontlines as well as on the home front. Accordingly, writing assignments in this course will assume a variety of forms including: reflective responses to assigned texts, explorations of documentary-style writing, and an essay that utilizes research to forward a focused argument about a specific facet of war and writing. For the writing track in the English major, this course fulfills a Critical and Professional Writing requirement.

ENGL 302W-03 SPST: Science Writing Professor Gerra Bosco TR 9:25-10:40 This class will give students practical, hands-on experience with the types of writing that professionals in the sciences are expected to produce: grant applications, lab reports, journal articles, and proposals. In addition, students will learn to write about science for a non-specialist audience. The class is aimed both at advanced students in the sciences who wish to improve their writing skills and at English, Communications, and Journalism majors who are interested in writing about science in their careers. For the writing track in the English major, this course fulfills a Critical and Professional Writing requirement.

ENGL 305W-01 SPST: Literature of Crime and Detection Dr. Susan K. Howard TR 12:15-1:30 This course is an introduction to crime and detective literature. It begins with British and American nineteenth-century writers of crime and detective novels and short stories, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and moves into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with such writers of fiction as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Walter Mosley, Kathy Reichs, Jasper Fforde, Hakan Nesser and non-fiction writers such as Ann Rule. The aim of the course is to demonstrate the great breadth of the genre–including police procedurals, cozies, hard-boiled detective fiction, locked-room mysteries, true crime, stories featuring amateur detectives, both male and female--, as well as its depth, and to allow us to discuss in an informed and precise way the fiction many of us have enjoyed informally. Requirements include class participation, oral presentation, midterm and final, quizzes/position papers, and one 5-7 pg. critical paper.

ENGL 306W-01 SPST: Political Drama Anne Brannen TR 3:05-4:20 In this class, we propose to examine the question of what makes a dramatic text ―political.‖ We will therefore read texts which are political in both clear and obscure ways; we will discuss the ways in which these plays involve audiences or alienate them; we will consider the uses to which drama, both ―political‖ and ―non-political,‖ have been put. We’ll be reading various playwrights; Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, McGuinness, Kushner, Shakespeare, Gambaro, Riggs, among others. Requirements include 3 papers, two of them research papers and one on a play you see this semester; a midterm; a final.

ENGL 306W-02 SPST: Nobel Prize Literature Dr. Timothy Ruppert MWF 12:00-12:50 Since 1901, the Nobel Academy in Stockholm has honored 104 writers from across the world with the prestigious (and lucrative) Nobel Prize for Literature. Focusing principally on authors who won the award after the Second World War, this course looks at several laureates whose poetry, drama, fiction, and essays stand as landmarks of art and humanity in an age of great conflict and change. With a special emphasis on the national and international dynamics of the times in which they wrote, we shall read and discuss laureates such as T. S. Eliot, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Albert Camus, Salvatore Quasimodo, Odysseus Elytis, Gabriel García Márquez, Jaroslav Seifert, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Gao Xingjian, and Doris Lessing. Requirements include three shorter essays (5-7 pages), a presentation, a mid-term examination, and a final examination. (WDLI 306W) Fulfills World Literature requirement for English Education majors.

ENGL 308-91 SPTP: Pittsburgh Filmmakers See Dr. Laura Engel for Pittsburgh Filmmakers course descriptions. Fulfills Film Studies Concentration Production requirement.

ENGL 309W-61 SPST: British Film Dr. Judy Suh R 4:30-8:40 In this course, we will encounter important issues of twentieth-century British culture by tracking its national cinema. Class hierarchy, changing gender roles, and the incorporation of regional and colonial settings find their way into the films we will screen and discuss. From documentary to expressive films, from pre-World War II to contemporary cinema, our focus will center both on style and history. Likely directors include Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, Lean, Grierson, Jordan, Leigh, and Frears. Requirements include regular class participation, quizzes, exams, and essays of various lengths. Fulfills Film studies concentration requirement.

ENGL 400W-01 SPST: Fiction Writing Workshop II Professor John Fried TR 3:05-4:20 This course is designed as a workshop for advanced students in fiction writing, in which students will work to develop their imaginative writing and critical skills beyond the introductory level. Students taking this course must be committed to extensive writing, careful reading, active participation in class, and extremely regular attendance. Much of the class time will be spent discussing one another’s writing; as a workshop focused on writing as a process, substantial writing, revision, and group critique will be expected. In addition, students will be reading and discussing published fiction, since in learning to read well one learns much about writing. Required prerequisite for the course is ENG 301W, SPST: Fiction Writing I or a comparable course, or permission from the English Department. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 400W-02 SPST: Poetry Workshop II Dr. Linda Kinnahan MWF 11:00-11:50 This course is a workshop for students who have already had significant experience in reading, writing, and discussing poetry, and who are ready to work on a more advanced level in developing their poetry.* The course will run as a workshop, involving small and large group sessions, individualized conferences, and regular assignments in reading and writing poetry. Students will explore numerous elements of poetry, both through the reading of poetry and the writing and discussion of poems by classmates and published poets. Class assignments will encourage students to develop a range of different writing strategies, focusing upon different stages of the writing process, including the collection of material, drafting, and revision. Skills in oral and written critique will be enhanced through workshop sessions, as well as heightened understandings of language, form, and content in poetry. Over the course of the semester, students will explore differing poetics through their writing and reading, from the traditional to the radically experimental. All students will also experience the processes involved in putting together a final manuscript of poems, including editing, selecting, and redrafting works. Required prerequisite for the course is ENG 301W, SPST: Poetry Writing I or a comparable course, or permission from the English Department. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement

ENGL 400W-03 SPST: Playwriting Workshop II Professor Robert Isenberg TR 12:15-1:30 Expanding on Playwriting I, this course takes on more sophisticated plays and themes. Playwrights compose longer works and are encouraged to experiment with style. Required prerequisites for the course are Playwriting Workshop I, or a comparable course, or permission from the English department. For the writing track in the English Major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 404W-01 SPST: Fiction Writing Workshop III Professor John Fried TR 3:05-4:20 This course is designed as a workshop for advanced students in fiction writing, in which students will work to further develop their imaginative writing and critical skills. Students taking this course must be committed to extensive writing, careful reading, active participation in class, and extremely regular attendance. Much of the class time will be spent discussing one another’s writing; as a workshop focused on writing as a process, substantial writing, revision, and group critique will be expected. Required prerequisites for the course are ENGL 301W, Fiction Writing I AND ENGL 400W, Fiction Writing II. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 404W-02 SPST: Poetry Workshop III Dr. Linda Kinnahan MWF 11:00-11:50 This course is a workshop for students who have already had significant experience in reading, writing, and discussing poetry, and who are ready to work on a more advanced level in developing their poetry.* The course will run as a workshop, involving small and large group sessions, individualized conferences, and regular assignments in reading and writing poetry. Students will explore numerous elements of poetry, both through the reading of poetry and the writing and discussion of poems by classmates and published poets. Class assignments will encourage students to develop a range of different writing strategies, focusing upon different stages of the writing process, including the collection of material, drafting, and revision. Skills in oral and written critique will be enhanced through workshop sessions, as well as heightened understandings of language, form, and content in poetry. Over the course of the semester, students will explore differing poetics through their writing and reading, from the traditional to the radically experimental. All students will also experience the processes involved in putting together a final manuscript of poems, including editing, selecting, and redrafting works. Required prerequisites for the course are ENGL 301W, Poetry Writing I AND ENGL 400W, Poetry Writing II. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a creative writing requirement.

ENGL 412W-01 SPST: Renaissance Literature and Politics Dr. Stuart M. Kurland TR 10:50-12:05 The English Renaissance was not only the age of Shakespeare but the age of Queen Elizabeth I. In the 150 years that included Elizabeth’s reign, England experienced the Protestant Reformation, participated in pan-European religious and dynastic conflict (which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada), established colonies in Ireland and America, endured the apocalyptic Gunpowder Plot, and stumbled into Civil War and the temporary abolition of the monarchy. The English Renaissance was the age of More, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Webster, and Milton, major authors whose work—like Shakespeare’s—selectively reflected and engaged in the politics of the age. This course is a survey of the intersections between literature and politics in the Renaissance. We will read literary works in various genres by such major figures as Sidney and Spenser along with other, non-literary, texts, including continental imports like Castiglione’s Courtier and Machiavelli’s Prince. Tentative readings will include More’s Utopia, lyric poetry by Wyatt and Surrey, selections from Arcadia and The Faerie Queene, and popular plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, along with selected modern literary and historical scholarship. Fulfills 400 level British Literature requirement.

ENGL 418W-01 SPST: British Romantic Poetry Dr. Timothy Ruppert MWF 10:00-10:50 This course provides a chronologically organized exploration of British verse produced during the Romantic period, that is to say, between 1789—the French Revolution’s first year—and 1832, when the Great Reform Bill inaugurated a new era in England. We shall read and discuss a variety of poems, longer and shorter alike, to elucidate what is aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary in the Romantics’ art and why Romanticism, for many scholars, is the principal avant- garde movement in British literary history. This course invites students to consider poetry by authors such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Ann Yearsley, William Blake, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anne Bannerman, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Clare, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, John Keats, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Requirements include one shorter essay (5-7 pages), a longer researched essay (9-12 pages), a presentation (5-7 minutes), a mid-term examination, and a final examination. Course Text: Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 3rd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Print. Fulfills 400 level British Literature requirement.

ENGL 424W-01 SPST: Modernist Women Writers and War Professor Rita Allison Kondrath TR 10:50-12:05 Centering on the experience of women living on the British home front during World Wars I and II, and the interwar years, this course examines how literary texts across genres become artistic modes through which female non-combatants negotiated the reshaping of cultural attitudes concerning womanhood and female identity that occurred as a result of war. Our reading list will be comprised primarily of prose narratives and the long poem as authored by figures including: H.D., Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rebecca West. We will consider the extent to which texts authored during this period might or should be read as narratives of trauma and recovery, and how these concepts might also be revised in light of women’s experience. By reading through this lens, our discussions will point toward the ways in which these texts collectively broaden and complicate our understanding of war and its aftermath. Fulfills 400 level British Literature Requirement or 400 level American Literature Requirement or 400 level Literature and Diversity Requirement

ENGL 426W-01 SPST: American Autobiography Dr. Tom Kinnahan TR 3:05-4:20 In his classic Letters from an American Farmer (1782), French immigrant Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur asked ―What…is this American, this new man?‖ In this course, we will investigate a range of responses to this question through a selective survey of American autobiographical writing from the colonial period to the twentieth century, with special attention to the formative period of the nineteenth century. Our texts will reflect a variety of perspectives on the American experience and construct multiple notions of what it means to be an American. The reading list is likely to include classic examples of American life-writing by Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Zitkala- Sa and Henry Adams, along with several more recent works by writers reflecting a range of ethnic perspectives. Fulfills 400 level American Literature Requirement or 400 level Literature and Diversity Requirement

ENGL 433-61 SPST: Introduction to Linguistics Dr. Jeannine Fontaine W 6:00-8:40 This course covers current approaches to the analysis of sounds, word forms and phrasal types in language. Students will also become familiar with issues involving language use, and with research on topics as diverse as gender, metaphor, language varieties and child language. The coverage of core areas is grounded in generative linguistic theory, but ideas from fields such as cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics will also be discussed. Fulfills linguistic/grammar requirement for English education students.

ENGL 434W-01 SPST: Literary Theory Dr. Laura Callanan MW 3:00-4:15 In this course we will explore the principle developments in literary theory from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on current debates and discussions in the field. This project will entail an investigation of how and why certain older forms of humanist criticism (i.e. New Criticism) have been challenged and the impact of the poststructuralist turn on questions of literary meaning, authorial intention, and referentiality. We will do this by placing current conversations within an historical context in order to understand how these controversies developed. This course will also touch upon the Marxist, feminist, cultural studies, and multicultural interventions into these debates. This course will begin with discussions of the rise of liberal humanism and early twentieth-century criticism and then proceed to an investigation of the major post-World War II developments. Class meetings will be spent discussing critical/theoretical essays, seminar style, and will require active intellectual engagement and exchange among all participants. Students will keep a reading journal and write several formal essays.

SENIOR SEMINARS

**ENGL 450W, Senior Seminar, is open only to English Majors (including Engl/Ed. Majors) in the senior or second-semester junior years. YOU MUST HAVE A SPECIAL PERMISSION TO REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE. See Gabrielle Rebottini in 637 College Hall for the form.

ENGL 450W-01 SPST: Pearl Poet Dr. Anne Brannen TR 1:40-2:55 In this class, we will immerse ourselves in the work of the ―Pearl Poet,‖ also called the ―Gawain Poet.‖ Naturally we’ll read ―The Pearl‖ and ―Gawain and the Green Knight.,‖ the poet’s best known works; we’ll also read ―Patience‖ and ―Cleanness,‖ along with ―St. Erkenwald,‖ which is often argued to be by the same poet, and a few accompanying texts, to provide contrast and context. The course will give you a chance to think deeply about some of the best medieval literature in English, and to approach the middle ages through one of Chaucer’s great contemporaries. You’ll be responsible for taking a midterm and a final, researching and writing a semester paper, and giving short presentations in class. Fulfills senior seminar requirement or 400 level British Literature requirement.

ENGL 450W-02 SPST: Transatlantic American Writers Dr. Frederick Newberry MWF 1:00-1:50 The course will examine notable authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose works are set (partly or entirely) in Britain or on the Continent. Principal aims of the course will be to discover and analyze (with the help of recent secondary materials) the cultural and ideological values varyingly possessed by Americans in relation to their acquired assumptions about European cultural values—and then what happens to Americans with these outlooks when they confront actual experience abroad. What if anything do Americans learn about themselves and their cultural values when confronted by different or competing values of Europe? To what extent do Americans’ values mediate their perceptions of Europe? For some Americans, to what extent are their home-grown cultural and ideological assumptions threatened, qualified, altered, or transformed during their European experience? What role is played by Americans’ familiarity with European history and literature in their perceptions of European life? In what ways do notions of democracy and progress triumph, suffer, or change as Americans become familiar with European cultures apparently bound by tradition and socially stratified? In some twentieth-century cases, what native circumstances account for Americans abroad discovering greater freedom in Europe than at home? These and other questions will be addressed. Students will research, write papers, and present oral reports. Texts may include: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; Henry James, Portrait of a Lady; Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; and James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room. Fulfills senior seminar requirement or 400 level American Literature requirement.

ENGL 450W-03 SPST: 20th Century British Poetry & Beyond Dr. Linda Kinnahan MW 3:00-4:15 As the twentieth century began, amidst rapid modernization of the western world and changing international relations, Great Britain occupied the center of commerce, political power, and empire. It also became one of several important centers for the emergence of a distinctly modern poetry, as international gatherings of poets located in the British Isles formulated ideas, practices, and movements that reimagined the relationship of a ―new‖ poetry to a distinctively modern world. As Great Britain experienced the fall of empire, the destructive power of two world wars, economic restructuring, and postcolonial waves of immigration – all of which challenged norms of gender, class, and race -- the century’s poetry would register the concerns, conflicts, and issues emerging amidst Britain’s changes. This course will be structured around five clusters of poets, each organized around distinct (though overlapping) points of poetic and socio-historical intersections. Each cluster will begin with the study of a poet from the first half of the twentieth century, and then consider two to three poets from later in the century in relation to central concerns and poetic practices. Tentatively, these clusters will include the following poets and foci (pre-1945 poets are in bold): 1) western culture, myth, and fragmented form in T.S. Eliot (American Anglophile), Ted Hughes (English), and Denise Riley (English); 2) empire, race, and the epic in Mina Loy (English), Grace Nichols (Anglo-Caribbean) and Basil Bunting (English); 3) nation and gendered voice in Charlotte Mew (English), Gillian Clarke (Welsh) and Jackie Kay (Scottish); 4) history, colonization, and language in W.B. Yeats, Eavan Boland, and Ciaran Carson (all Irish or Northern Irish); 5) social class and lyric experiments in Sylvia Townsend Warner (English), Tony Harrison (English) and Carol Anne Duffy (Scottish). Short readings in works by other poets will also be included, to help establish a framework of chronology in a class that will continually move back and forth across the century (and into the current century), rather than progressing in a straight historical line. Therefore, we will strive to gain a working knowledge of historical movements or groupings in poetry (such as Imagism, the political 1930s, neoromanticism, the Movement, Black British poetry, feminist poetry, and the British Poetry Revival), especially through student reports. Throughout, we will pay close attention to how poetic form and language function in richly varied ways, both experimental and traditional, to instruct us in reading not only poetry but the culture and history out of which it emerges.

In this capstone senior seminar, students will be expected to collaborate as a community of scholars and to take great responsibility for the quality of the learning that takes place within that community. Students must participate actively in class discussions, keep a reading journal, develop several short papers, conduct substantial research and produce a semester project, prepare oral reports on assigned topics and on individual research, and open their minds to amazing literature. Fulfills senior seminar requirement or 400 level British Literature requirement or Literature and Diversity requirement.