Upper Division Courses
Note: Three and four hundred level English courses are designed for junior and senior English majors and minors. All other students who are interested in taking an upper-level English course should speak with the professor teaching the course before enrolling.
ENG-301 Advanced Writing 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101 or WRI-102 and junior standing. The study of modern forms of writing; course requires weekly writing assignments totaling 50 to 60 pages of original work by the end of the term and develops lifetime writing skills. The course emphasizes writing as process and focuses extensively on revision.
ENG-307 Seminar: Origins & Traditions of English Literature 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102 or permission. A survey of landmark poetry and prose from the Anglo-Saxon Era to the Enlightenment, with special emphasis on how the assumptions, concerns, and techniques of these texts came to be seen as the kernel of a coherent national literary tradition.
ENG-308 Seminar: Origins & Traditions of the Literatures of the United States 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102 or permission. This course features a range of "literature," including transcribed Native American oral stories, colonial promotional tracts, sermons, speeches, captivity narratives, political pamphlets, personal letters, and slave narratives. The class will explore personal and cultural issues that concerned early Americans, and discuss how texts both define and complicate some of the terms associated with this period, including "Puritan," "Enlightenment," "Transcendental," "liberty," and even "American."
ENG-309 Seminar: Constructing World Literatures 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-101 or WRI-102 or permission. In order to see the picture, one must step out of the frame. In this course, students will step out of their own cultural frames by studying how and why genres, politics, trade/war, religion (and also how we ourselves) construct global culture and identity. The texts will provide not only vicarious experiences of lands and cultures but will also reflect the dialogic nature of specific cultural and cross-cultural literary traditions. Possible traditions covered may include those of the Ancient Near East, the Ottoman Empire, the Subcontinent, Mogul and Persian poetry, Greco-Roman culture, North Africa, Native America, and the Caribbean-African-Asian heritage. (CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-318 Poetry Writing Workshop II 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-218 or permission. An opportunity for students to continue reading and writing poetry. Students are expected to demonstrate continued development as writers and to submit work for publication.
ENG-319 Fiction Writing Workshop II 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-219 or permission. A continuation of ENG-219, intended primarily for students who have already taken that course. Students are expected to show evidence of continuing development as writers and to submit their work for publication.
ENG-320 Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop II 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-220 or permission. A continuation of ENG-220 intended primarily for students who have already taken that course. Students are expected to show evidence of continuing development as natural history writers and to submit their work for publication.
ENG-325 Introduction to Literary Theory & Criticism 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version). This course introduces the principal theoretical traditions that inform advanced literary study. Students will evaluate the major figures, schools, and concepts of literary theory and criticism through intensive reading and application. This course does not fulfill the Liberal Arts Core requirement in literature.
ENG-326.3 Author Seminar: Naipaul & Rushdie 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie describe themselves as marooned men caught between imaginary homelands, and as such, Naipaul and Rushdie reside in between cultures, languages, and religions. In this course, we will vicariously travel with Naipaul and Rushdie as they navigate between the "real" worlds of Trinidad, East Africa, London, India, Pakistan, and New York, and the "imaginary" worlds of brutal colonization, partitions of countries, and the ghostly lyrics of "native" poetry. We will examine how these authors ultimately turn to writing as a way to record and to grapple with the cruelties of history. Possible books assigned: A Way in the World, Letters between Father and Son, The Enigma of Arrival, Shame, Midnight's Children, and The Moor's Last Sigh.
ENG-326.5 Author Seminar: Shakespeare 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. An intensive study of representative poetry and plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, focusing both on the features of Shakespeare's artistry and on the cultural conditions to which that artistry responded.
ENG-326.6 Author Seminar: Adrienne Rich 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version). An intensive study of the works of one of the major American poets of the last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. The course will chart the progression of Rich’s poetry as well as examine some of her works of nonfiction and critical theory, interrogating along the way some of Rich’s key conceptualizations of nation, power, and women’s sexuality.
ENG-368 The Prison Experience 6.0 cr.
(Same as SOC-368) Winter. Prereq: Permission. An opportunity to learn firsthand about prisons and prison life as students read prison-related texts in sociology and literature and as they write in response to what they read and what they see at local correctional institutions. Authors will include Jimmy Santiago Baca, Jerome Washington, Malcom X, and Agnes Smedley. (3 credits HUMANITIES and 3 credits SOCIAL SCIENCES)
ENG-380.1 Seminar: World Dramatic Literature 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. A study of selected plays of significant periods and movements of world drama from Greek tragedy to Japanese Noh and Indian, African theatre to Theatre of the Absurd. (CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-380.2 Seminar: 19th-Century Literature of the British Isles 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG 299T (any version) or permission. This survey will concentrate primarily on fiction and poetry from the beginnings of Romanticism to fin de siècle decadence and naturalism. Attention will be given to literary texts’ power to reflect and shape British culture in the nineteenth century, a period which many observers, including the American Mark Twain, believed experienced more change than any previous century. We will also explore the impact shifting literary tastes and critical approaches have played in texts’ and authors’ reception and popularity.
ENG-380.4 Seminar: The American Renaissance 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. This course explores the literary movement that scholars have designated as crucial to the development of a truly "American" literature, focusing roughly on the years 1836 to 1865. In addition to studying canonical authors, students will explore those writers who worked, in the words of one recent critic, "beneath" the American renaissance, focusing on issues of concern to women, Native Americans, and African Americans. Authors will include Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Lydia Maria Child.
ENG-380.5 Seminar: Narratives Against Opression 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. Students will examine how authors from around the world have used literature as a way to comment upon, to protest, or to record various forms of oppression ranging from dictatorial regimes to cultural divisiveness to colonization and occupation. Such literatures are written in order to inspire people to know the world in which they live, and to that end, the course will also deal with contemporary politics and world affairs. Authors studied may include Edwidge Danticut (The Farming of Bones, Haiti), Manil Suri (Death of Vishnu, India), Edward Said (Out of Place, occupied Palestine), Matthew Kneale (The English Passengers, Tasmania/Australia), V.S. Naipaul (A Way in the World, Trinidad and South America). Videos will include Rabbit-Proof Fence (movie), Palestine is Still the Issue (documentary), and The Soul of India (documentary). (CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-380.6 Seminar: The Arthurian Tradition 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. This course will trace the evolution of Arthurian literature from its first flowering in 12th-century European court culture to its influential gathering and retelling in Thomas Malory’s LeMorte D’Arthur and its persistent presence in modern literature and culture. Along the way we’ll ask what Arthurian literature tells us about medieval conceptions of heroism, aspiration, hierarchy, and failure, and about why a cultural product so quintessentially "medieval" continues to fascinate modern writers. Authors may include Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, and Walker Percy.
ENG-380.7 Seminar: 20th Century Literature of the British Isles 3.0 cr.
Fall or Spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. A survey of prominent texts of the twenty-first century. Authors studied may include, but are not limited to, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Beckett, Heaney, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan, and Ali Smith.
ENG-380.8 Seminar: Postcolonial Authors 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. Intensive study of Salman Rushdie's and V.S. Naipaul's works, and their shaping of postcolonial and third-world cultural studies. For additional context, other postcolonial authors may be examined. (CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-380.9 Seminar: Drama of Early Modern Europe 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG-299T (any version) or permission. This course explores the flowering of professional and literary theater in Europe between 1500-1700, focusing on the four prominent centers of early modern theatrical activity: northern Italy in the 16th century, Elizabethan and Jacobean London, Golden Age Spain, and 17th century France. The course will combine literary analysis with attention to the material, social, and political conditions of playing in these four centers, hoping to understand what they shared as participants in a larger European theatrical culture, and how their specific situations help account for their unique theatrical and literary achievements.
ENG-380.10 Seminar: Ecopoetics 3.0 cr.
Fall or spring. Prereq.: ENG 299T (any version) or permission. This seminar will ask students to consider poets' experimentation with form in response to their understanding and experience of the natural world. How do poets express ecological ideas in poetry? Poets we consider may include Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Sylvia Plath, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, A.R. Ammons, and Mary Oliver.
ENG/MFL/EDU-446 Linguistics for Language Teachers 3.0 cr.
Spring. Alt. years. Prereq.: Junior or senior standing. A study of the central concepts of linguistic theory. Includes the theoretical areas of pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology; and the applied areas of language variation, first language acquisition, second language acquisition, and written language. Students will acquire the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as an essential tool for disciplined examination of linguistic phenomena. Issues of socio-linguistics will be addressed as students wrestle with the relationship between language, thought, and culture, and the nature of the cognitive and brain systems that relate to language learning, language teaching and language use.
ENG-494 Independent Study 1.0 to 3.0 cr.
Fall, winter, spring. Prereq.: Permission. A sustained and self-directed study of a particular topic under the guidance of a professor in the department. Independent studies cannot substitute for specific course requirements for the major or minor. See the English Department's and the College's independent study guidelines. (INDEPENDENT WORK)
ENG-496 Creative Writing Capstone Seminar 3.0 cr.
Spring. Prereq.: Senior standing and completion of ENG-218, 219 or 220. A cross-genre course for Creative Writing majors, in which students will propose and work on independent projects. Creative writers will begin to approach writing and their works as professionals--i.e., thinking long-term beyond the classroom, and considering marketing their works (scouring journals and framing rejection letters!). In addition to writing intensively, students will help design the reading list, contextualize their works/writing styles within a literary tradition/genre, and create a community of writers. (INDEPENDENT WORK)
ENG-497 Internship 1.0 to 3.0 cr.
Fall, winter spring. Prereq.: Permission. Individually arranged internship designed to provide practical editorial and writing experience. An extended analysis of the experience is required and periodic reports may be assigned. See the English Department's and the College's internship guidelines. (INDEPENDENT WORK)
ENG-498 Senior Thesis Seminar in Literature 3.0 cr.
Spring. Prereq.: Senior standing and completion of ENG-307, 308 or 309. A capstone course for senior literature majors designed to help students move toward post-college study. Students will propose, research, write, and revise a senior thesis for formal presentation. In addition, students will research and compose an individualized reading list based on their interests and post-graduate plans. Lists may focus on American, British, or world literature, graduate record exam preparation, or literature ancillary to secondary education teaching. (INDEPENDENT WORK)
Off-Campus Interdisciplinary Study Courses for Academic Year 2008-2009:
IND-307.01 London: Art, Architecture, Literature 2.0 cr.
Fall. Prereq.: Permission. This course is a prerequisite for the winter session off-campus study course IND307.02 of the same name. An interdisciplinary study of the history, art, architecture, literature, and culture of 19th- and 20th-century London as reflected in the literature, memoirs, art, periodicals, and other public documents of the day. The course will consider the central place of London as an imperial metropole and its continuing existence as a city operating at the center of an emerging modern world leisure economy. Credits earned in IND 307.01 and its companion course, IND 307.02, may be applied in the following ways: students may earn three credits in any two of the following LAC's: Humanities (Literature), Fine Arts, or Cultural Diversity. Alternatively, students majoring or minoring in History, English or Fine Arts may apply three IND 307 credits towards these majors or minors. Students majoring in History, English, or Fine Arts who wish to apply more than three credits towards their majors must speak to course instructors by the end of the first week of IND 307.01 class for further information.
IND-307.02 London: Art, Architecture, Literature 4.0 cr.
Winter. Prereq.: IND-307.01 An interdisciplinary study of the history, art, architecture, literature, and culture of 19th- and 20th-century London as reflected in the literature, memoirs, art, periodicals, and other public documents of the day. The course will consider the central place of London as an imperial metropole and its continuing existence as a city operating at the center of an emerging modern world leisure economy. The central three weeks of the course will be conducted in London. Credits earned in IND 307.01 and its companion course, IND 307.02, may be applied in the following ways: students may earn three credits each in any two of the following LACs: Humanities (Literature), Fine Arts, or Cultural Diversity. Alternatively, students majoring or minoring in History, English or Fine Arts may apply three IND 307 credits towards these majors or minors. Students majoring in History, English, or Fine Arts who wish to apply more than three credits towards their majors must speak to course instructors by the end of the first week of IND 307.01 class for further information.