Fall 2013 Course Descriptions

ENG 337 - TOPICS IN AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE              [Context]  DeBarros

MWF 10:20-11:15

This course introduces students to the major representative writers, themes and aesthetics of one of the major ethnic literatures in the United States, for example, Black-American, Jewish-American, Native American.  PREREQ: Minimum sophomore standing or instructor permission.  NOTE: This course may be taken more than once if the topic is different.

ENG 347 - CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE  [Context]            LaLonde

W 5:30-8:10

We will spend our time reading, listening to, and thinking about texts produced by Choctaw writers. The works range from Mississippi to California, from Oklahoma to New Mexico. In short, they run throughout "Indian Country." Thus, we will be in a position to examine the importance of place in and for the texts and to imagine the possibilities of a tribal-centered criticism. Students should expect to write essays and take exams. The course counts as an elective in the Native American Studies minor and as a World Awareness-Humanities offering in the general education program slated to begin in Fall 2013.

ENG 351 - AMERICAN POETRY SINCE 1945                [Text]                            Pangborn

MWF 11:30-12:25

This course surveys the most remarkable poets and poetry in the U.S.A. (and a bit from the rest of North America) between about 1945 and the present day. We will devote most of our class time to close reading and discussion, often with documentary footage of poets reading. Students are expected to read beyond the assigned textbook to produce two well-researched essays and, depending on class size, one in-class presentation.

ENG 360 - LITERATURE IN GLOBAL CONTEXT                [Context]               Holt-Fortin

TR 11:10-12:30 and 2:20-3:40

Futurism. Feminism. Colonialism. In the past 100 years the world has changed radically. In this course we will look at a few writers influenced, recorded, and responded to the 'isms' of the modern world and their effects of course of the past century. Of necessity, we can only touch the surface of that writing. We read around the world, mostly exempting European writers who might be covered in other courses.

ENG 365 - JUNIOR SEMINAR                                                                                Staff

MWF 10:20-11:15

An intensive introduction to the study of authorship organized around questions of authority and institution, cannon, law, signature and property, history and biography. Focused study on a single author, including selected works, biography, correspondence, etc.  PREREQ: ENG 265; or ENG 304 either previously or concurrently; or instructor permission.

ENG 365 - JUNIOR SEMINAR                                                                                Moore

MW 3:00-4:20

"Hemingway & Fitzgerald"

The careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who met for the first time in Paris in the early 1920s, were inextricably linked.  They shared a friendship and at times an intense rivalry as well as a literary relationship with the most influential American editor of fiction of the period, Scribner's Maxwell Perkins.  But most importantly they shared their commitment to fiction.  And their novels explore the intertwining of their lives through biographical sources and letters, and consider what critics have had to say about their work over the past three-quarters of the century.  Texts:  The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. By Bruccoli; The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald; The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway; A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway; The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway; The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald; For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway; A Moveable Feast, Hemingway.  Course Requirements:  1) critical secondary reading, 2) research essay, 3) oral presentation, 4) final exam.

ENG 365 - JUNIOR SEMINAR                                                                               Jayawardane

TR 9:35-10:55

 "Graphic/Comic Novels and Memoirs: From Surviving the Holocaust to the Iranian Revolution"

Autobiographical comics first became popular in the underground comic movement; some were humourous anecdotal vignettes, while others had more serious content, like Japanese Manga - which first chronicled the artist's experiences of the nuclear wasteland after his city, Hiroshima, was bombed. In our class, we will focus on how author-artists like Art Spiegleman and Marjane Satrapi meld the medium of the graphic/comic with the genre of memoir, innovating both art form and genre.

English 365, the seminar for Juniors in English, is meant to be a course in which we learn how to conduct in-depth analysis of an author or a particular genre. Here, we learn the skills necessary for the next step in your career as a reader capable of injecting theory to your critiques of a writer and her/his body of work, highlighting your skills as a skilled researcher ready for your senior year of university. We will work on establishing how authors construct themselves as narrators in graphic memoirs, where they situate themselves in the literary landscape, and how they have been "received" by the literary/critical community of readers and critics over time.  The coursework, therefore, involves more than reading cute picture books: be prepared to carefully read and analyse scholarly articles and theory that pertain to graphic art and to memoir writing.

ENG 365 - JUNIOR SEMINAR                                                                                Staff

MWF 10:20-11:15

An intensive introduction to the study of authorship organized around questions of authority and institution, cannon, law, signature and property, history and biography. Focused study on a single author, including selected works, biography, correspondence, etc.

ENG 370 - WOMEN IN LITERATURE                    [Context]                                Curtin

TR 12:45-2:05

Reading an array of poems, short fiction, and theoretical essays authored by twentieth-century women, we will examine the assumptions that underwrite our notions of authorship, representation, and difference (sexual, racial, gender, class, etc). Students will demonstrate the ability to analyze figurative language, poetic form, and narrative strategies in support of arguments about women's writing.  Students will also take positions on whether women's writing is distinctive on epistemological, aesthetic, political, or ontological grounds.

In their analyses and arguments, students will demonstrate some mastery of critical vocabulary proper to literary and feminist theory. Specifically, students will engage accounts by a range of feminist thinkers, including Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Simone De Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Barbara Smith, and Chela Sandoval. Their theoretical texts will be a resource as students analyze literary texts and develop arguments. Students will also have opportunities to examine women's writing in relation to literary movements and historical events and will conduct research to offer their own accounts of the relationship between women's writing and the feminist movements of the twentieth century. Finally, students will produce and present a "creative reflection" on the course material.

ENG 373 - THEORIES OF LANGUAGE                [Theory]                                 Pangborn

MWF 9:10-10:05

Assumptions about language--what it is and how it functions--color many of our judgments about literature and life, so we will examine some of the most influential theories of linguistic science, its history, and the uses literary critics have put it to.

ENG 374 - HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE [Context] Hildahl

TR 3:55-5:15

An exploration of the nature of language, and an introduction to the multiplicity of the world's languages, those that have thrived and those that have survived into modern time.  The course is primarily a study of the historical and social backgrounds and development of English as an Indo-European and Germanic language, and of its position in relation to other Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The course is also an inquiry into the influence of ethnicity, migration, and conquest, of the geographical displacement and absorption of non-English-speaking  groups in the development of English, and the influences of diverse languages and cultures on the English word-stock. We will address the issues of linguistic diversity and tolerance in complex, heterogeneous present-day society.

Students will need to acquire:

a)  the terminology and the linguistic concepts  to understand the internal structure of the English language and the internal changes it has undergone;

b) the  phonological tools to describe the grammatical and sound changes that have altered the language over time and distance, i.e., the symbols which comprise the phonetic alphabet [IPA] and the sounds they represent.

Texts:    Pyles and Algeo, Origins and Development of the English Language, 4th ed.

McCrum, Cran, MacNeil. The Story of English, 3rd ed.

Algeo,  Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language [workbook]

Requirements:  Two papers:  one etymological study; one paper with research.  Mid-Term Exam, Final Exam; several quizzes the universe, and everything.

ENG 375 - THEORIES OF DIVERSE SEXUALITY                       [Theory]                     Murphy, P.

W 6:00-8:40

This course will survey recent controversies and intellectual issues within (and among) the lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgendered, and transsexual communities, along with the prevailing (heterosexual) culture, in order to identify recurrent problems, questions, or conflicts and opportunities that may profit from theoretical and literary reflection.  We will try to locate those problems and possibilities within historical contexts that might place them in a different light--specifically by raising questions about how we determine what a relevant context is.  We will try to appraise what people ordinarily find themselves saying (both pro and con) when they talk about sexuality (or when they represent diverse sexuality in literature or art), while we study the rich discourses from where various phrases emerge.  We will ask other questions as well, such as: What historical, political, cultural, and personal conditions are served by diverse experiences of sexuality?  This inquiry will also examine heterosexism, homophobia, outing, and coming out of the closet, among other topics.  Why do we talk the way we do about our sexual identities?  (And all the while we will be asking: Why is sex so much fun?)  How do we construct and perform our sexual identities?  To what conditions might this construction answer? Does this way of talking (and living) have a history?  If so, can we discover what that history might be, and can we solve some of our difficulties by understanding those histories (and perhaps by finding more adequate ways of speaking and thinking about them and our diverse sexual lives)?  Can our sexualities not only record our history, but might they also be able to act upon history in ways that change or alter the world?  This course also serves the Women's Studies program.

ENG 376 - SCIENCE FICTION                                            [Context]                    Bertonneau

MWF 11:30-12:25

This course explores the development of scientific, philosophical, technical, and religious themes in the speculative genres, concentrating on science fiction; the course includes science fiction films in its purview.

ENG 380 - NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY                            [Context]                    Hildahl

TR 9:35-10:55

The readings will focus on the intersection of the self and the society in which the narrator, author or protagonist lives.  We will examine accounts of characters who attempt to live in a society while intending to survive as individuals, either in conformity with the society or in spite of its pressures.  We will focus especially on the  lives of persons who live in one society but between cultures,  caught between the dominant culture  and a sub-culture or alternate society, or between the person's present society and the culture of one's origins, or one's family's origins.  We will also examine the situation of individuals who attempt to separate themselves from the pressures and definitions of the society to which they were born, or from the family or figures of authority who gave them their personhood.

We  will consider too the sources of personal identity as presented in different texts, and the questions of whether one's identity is an absolute, a given, created before or conferred at one's birth,  whether one's character  is constructed by the  culture in which one grows and lives, or whether character and identity can be substantially chosen and fashioned by oneself.   Some of the texts we will read are self-evidently fictitious.  Others are biographical, autobiographical, historical, or quasi-historical.

Among the readings:

            Stories by William Faulkner

            Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

            Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave

            Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson

            Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider

            Selected Iroquois tales by Joseph Bruchac, from Turtle Meat & Other Stories

            Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Antigone

            Jean de Coras's The Return of Martin Guerre

Requirements:  A reading journal, with every-class entries; four or five essays written from one's journal.  Mid-Term Exam; Final Exam.

ENG 385 - CHILDREN'S LITERATURE                             [Text]                          Troy-Smith

MWF 9:10-10:05

A survey course of literature for children.  Not a course in methodology, the basic purpose of this course will be to survey the various genres of literature that have been written especially for children (approximately 2-14 years of age), or literature that was originally written for adults, but now has generally been relegated to children.  The genres include:  picture books, nursery rhymes, folk literature, modern fantasy, realistic fiction, poetry, and information books.  Criteria will be established for literary evaluation.  Certain social issues such as sex, sexism, and violence will be discussed in terms of children's books.

ENG 386 - THE CINEMA                                                     [Theory]                     Schaber                        

TR 2:20-3:40

R 6:00-9:00

A direct engagement with some fragments of the major theories of film from the 1930's to the present.  These primary documents will mediate an extended discussion of what cinema has been (or perhaps might have been), what it is (or perhaps might be), and what it is becoming (or perhaps might be becoming).   But we don't only have to think about the cinema; sometimes the cinema encourages us to think about other things, many other things, as well.  Three "take-home" exams. 

ENG 387 - VISION & TEXTUALITY                                                                                    Staff

MWF 9:10-10:05

The course is a study of historical, political and theoretical relations of vision and the visual arts to writing, both literary and nonliterary.  PREREQ: Minimum sophomore standing or instructor permission.

ENG 388 - FILM GENRE                                                       [Theory]                    Ieta

W 3:00-6:30

In-depth analysis of four film genres illustrated in films from different time periods and countries: comedy, film noir, biopics, and melodrama. Readings by film critics to question the applicability of generic characteristics; original "recipes" to generic patterns developed by auteur directors.

ENG 395 - SS:  BUSINESS IN LITERATURE                                                       Pangborn

MWF 8:00-8:55

Course in specialized literary topics, with emphasis on the development of analytical and interpretive skills.