Lower Division Courses
First Year Writing Courses:
ENG-100.2 College Writing 3.0 cr.
Fall. Prereq.: Placement. A course in the essential elements of critical thinking and rhetorical strategies necessary for effective college writing. The course emphasizes writing as process and focuses extensively on revision. Students whose native language is English and who are enrolled in ENG-100.2 are encouraged to enroll in STS-110, Effective Studying. Students whose native language is not English may be required to do work in English as a Second Language (MFL-101, 102) while enrolled in ENG-100.2. All students who complete ENG-100.2 must also complete FYS-101 in the spring term to fulfill the Liberal Arts Curriculum First-Year Seminar requiremt.
FYS-101 First Year Seminar
English Courses:
NOTE: All 200-level English courses fulfill the Literature portion of the Humanities Liberal Arts Core Curriculum.
ENG-140 Native American Art & Literature 3.0 cr.
(Same as ART-140). Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course will offer students an opportunity to see the connection between Native American art and literature. The focus will be on Navajo and Pueblo traditions involving word and image. Authors will include Leslie Silko and Scott Momaday. (HUMANITIES and FINE ARTS and CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-218.1 Poetry Writing Workshop 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. In this workshop students will both study examples of and write various kinds of poetry, such as lyric, narrative, dramatic, and prose poems. Students will critique the work of their classmates and analyze that of published authors, who may include Anne Carson, Pablo Neruda, C.D. Wright, Mary Oliver, Antonio Machado, and Billy Collins. Special emphasis will be given to studying the forms and strategies of poetry, critically responding to others' work and generating and revising one's own work. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-219.1 Fiction Writing Workshop 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. In this workshop students will write short stories and study contemporary novels, comic books, and short narratives. Students will critique the work of their classmates and analyze that of published authors, who may include Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and David Foster Wallace. Special emphasis will be given to studying the forms and strategies of fiction, critically responding to others' work, and generating and revising one's own work. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-220.1 Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. In this workshop students will both study examples of and write various kinds of creative nonfiction, such as memoir, travel writing, nature writing, cultural criticism, and literary journalism. Students will read the work of their classmates as well as that of published authors, who may include Tom Wolfe, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Kim Barnes, and John McPhee. Special emphasis will be given to understanding the forms and strategies of creative nonfiction, critically responding to others’ work, and generating and revising one's own work. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-294 Independent Study 1.0 to 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: Permission and ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. A special research project on a selected topic. This course will not fulfill the Liberal Arts Core requirement for independent work. Independent studies cannot substitute for specific course requirements in the major or minor. See the English Department's independent study guidelines and the College's independent study guidelines.
ENG-299T.3 Money in Literature 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Sampling several centuries, countries, and literary genres, this course traces the love-hate relationship between literary art and financial calculation, a relationship which raises questions regarding what has value and what doesn't, what is real and what isn't, what humans in society owe to one another, and what purpose artistic endeavor is supposed to serve in a world where such endeavor rarely pays. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.4 Thief-making & Thief-taking: Nineteenth-century Crime Literature 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. The nineteenth century was immersed in the cultural project of defining criminality and, through the gradual professionalization of the police, constructing the criminal's nemesis, the detective. Through popular crime fiction, newspaper accounts of an actual criminal case, and articles from nineteenth-century periodicals, we will explore how the nineteenth-century fascination with crime and detectives was shaped by preoccupations with the construction of gender, class dynamics, and the tension between the didactic and entertainment functions of popular fiction. We will also turn the spotlight on ourselves, considering why we might sustain that fascination today and why mystery stories remain one of the most widely read genres. As we address these questions, we'll be making forays into interpretative strategies based on Marxist, cultural studies, psychoanalytic, and narrative literary theories. Texts include Charles Dickens' Newgate novel, Oliver Twist; Wilkie Collins' sensation novel, Woman in White; selected short stories featuring the exploits of Sherlock Holmes; and at least one late twentieth-century text adopting and adapting the figure of Sherlock Holmes. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.8 Forever Mourning: Narratives of Loss in Expatriate & Immigrant Writing 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Through a cross-genre mixture of travel writing, memoir, fiction, poetry, and essays on displacement, this course will address particular elegiac narratives unique to the expatriate and immigrant experience. In addition to examining transnational modes of mourning, the class will also evaluate whether or not such displaced writers can ever achieve consolation. Possible authors include Hanif Kureishi, Bharati Mukherjee, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Mohsin Hamid and Edward Said. (HUMANITIES and CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-299T.9 Visions of Environment 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course focuses on writers who have shaped thinking about the environment in the United States. The course first examines the historical and philosophical bases for American conceptions of nature, and then analyzes literary treatments of concepts such as bioregionalism, wilderness, sense of place, and environmentalism. Authors include Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and others. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.10 Shakespearean Comedy 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course will trace the development of Shakespearean comedy through representative plays from all stages of the dramatist's career. In the process, the class will explore the literary, theatrical, religious, political, and cultural significance of comedy, both in general and in its Shakespearean form. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.15 World War I & Modern Literature 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. World War I, the most literary war in British history, may well have permanently altered the landscape of British literature through its poetry and prose. This course will examine the war poets' verse; soldiers' and nurses' autobiographies; Virginia Woolf's modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway; T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land"; and Pat Barker's recent novel Regeneration, the fictional account of the relationship between military psychiatrist William Rivers and shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.18 You Can't Read This: Censorship & the Politics of Literature 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course will explore the political and ideological dimensions of literature through a study of censorship and book banning. The course will focus on the power of literature, both real and imagined, as a subversive and disruptive force in society through case studies of banned books. Case studies may include Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, Lolita, and The Satanic Verses. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.19 Introduction to Shakespeare 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Through careful scrutiny of representative plays in several genres and from different periods in Shakespeare’s career, this course will test popular perceptions of English literature’s most overexposed figure by situating him in his literary, theatrical, historical, and cultural contexts. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.20 Captivity & Emancipation 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course looks at representations, both fictional and non-fictional, of captivity and enslavement in American literature. Students will explore the psychological, political, and intercultural dynamics of captivity and domination, as well as the role of language in defining, enabling, justifying, and protesting captivity as well as emancipation. Authors may include Mary Rowlandon, William Apess, Frederick Douglas, and Ken Kesey. (HUMANITIES and CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-299T.21 Literature & Medicine 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course focuses on literature as a medium of empathy and explores such relationships as those between doctor and patient, mind and medicine, the scalpel and the act of poetry. Authors may include William Carlos Williams, Robert Coles, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, and Toni Morrison. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.22 The Literature of Motherhood 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course will critically examine various constructions of motherhood through close readings of literature written by both mothers and non-mothers. Authors may include Pattiann Rogers, Jane Smiley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Kingsolver. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.23 Asia Through Its Movies 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Students will analyze contemporary Asian cultures through movies from Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, mainland China and the Indian subcontinent. Genres will include wu-xia, anime, sci-fi, musicals, yakuza narratives and "art house" movies. Course readings will include cultural studies theory, short stories, and the directors' and artists' essays and commentaries. (HUMANITIES and CULTURAL DIVERSITY)
ENG-299T.25 Prose & Cons 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course critically examines representations of incarceration and explores possible connections between social justice and art by examining prose by current and former prisoners. Authors may include Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ken Lamberton, and Agnes Smedley. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.26 Literature of the American West 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. What is the American West as imagined and depicted by 20th-century writers? Which mythologies and ideologies about the West (such as rugged individualism and the idea of the frontier) dating from the 19th-century are still present and perpetuated by contemporary authors? How do contemporary writers reject or revise such mythologies? How do individualism, counter-culturalism, racial difference, aridity, competition over natural resources, and environmentalism shape the way Americans imagine the West? How does the West in its conflicts, diversity, and complexity epitomize in a dramatic way what we imagine as deeply American? These are just some of the questions that we will attempt to answer through our reading of novels, short stories, poems and essays by 20th-century American westerners such as Wallace Stegner, Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edward Abbey, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Gary Snyder. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.27 Literature and Comedy 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. In this course we study the evolution and variety of comedy in literature, from classical Greece to contemporary United States. Along the way, we examine different comedic categories, such as the picaresque, absurdism, parody, satire, and black comedy in the work of authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, and Flannery O’Connor. In each case, we examine the rhetoric of comedy: What makes a particular work funny? Why do we laugh? What are the motivations for comedy; when is it meant as “comic relief” from reality, and when is it meant as subversive critique of society? (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.28 Asian Pop Culture 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. This course will critically examine contemporary Asian pop culture narratives defined by and representing the Rising Asia phenomenon of the past thirty years. Students will study Asian movies, manga (graphic novels), anime and television shows (drama and talk shows), all with special emphases on transnationalism, the cosmopolitan, and hyphenated identities in contemporary Asian cultures. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.29 Baggy Monsters and Friends: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature 3.0 cr
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Henry James famously called nineteenth-century novels “loose baggy monsters.” But the Russian novels that inspired this comment—by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy—are not only long, but also rich with insight into life and human nature. This course will focus on the most famous of the nineteenth-century Russian prose writers as well as writers who inspired them or joined the Russian conversation about history and society. Assignments will focus on close reading of text and interpretation of historical context. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.30 Literature & Landscapes 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG-101, WRI-102, or FYS-101. Classes on literature often cover the “setting” of a work, but what is the larger role that landscape plays for the meaning and structure of some novels? By reading works in which landscape plays a significant part in the author’s writing, students in this course will interrogate what “place” and interaction with landscape means for human activity, emotion, and memory. Readings will include works by Ivo Andric, Vladimir Nabokov, Abd al-Rahman Munif, and V.S. Naipaul. Assignments will emphasize close reading of text and will include an independent reading project. (HUMANITIES)
ENG-299T.31 Crossing Borders in & around Europe 3.0 cr.
Prereq.: ENG 101, WRI 102, or FYS 101. From the end of communism to the confrontation with Others, European novelists of the twentieth century have explored broad questions about history and cultural contact. This course will survey major works by Eastern European and modern European prose writers and poets in order to explore questions about what “Europe” is and what it means to cross boundaries—whether social, cultural, or political. Assignments will focus on close reading of text; lecture material and student research will provide geographical and historical context. (HUMANITIES)