|
||||
|
||||
       |
1701 North State Street Jackson, MS 39210-0001 (800)352-1050 (601)974-1000
|
||||
|
||||
|
ENGL 1000-01: Introduction to Interpretation
T-TH 10:00, W 12:00
Instructor: S. Kistulentz
This course is a prerequisite to most courses in the English department. It focuses on a variety of interpretive problems and on different kinds of texts, including films.
ENGL 2010-01: British & American Literary History I
Section 1: MWF 9
Instructor: S. Marrs
A history of British and American literature from the beginnings to 1800, with an emphasis on the meaning and development of literary history.
ENGL 2400-01: Introduction to Creative Writing
CC 22 T-Th 2:45
Instructor: R. Boada
This course will introduce students to a variety of literary genres. Unlike a literature class, though, students will write much of the work studied. We will explore literature as a writing practice; our goal is to discover how wide and varied the creation of literature can be and students will move toward this goal by creating a wide variety of literary expressions: poetry, short story, and non-fiction. Students will help each other become better writers by developing analytical/critical techniques and by applying them to each others' work as well as to the work of established writers. By working in a variety of genres and receiving feedback from the instructor and peers, it is hoped that students will: develop a proficiency in narrative and poetic technique, exhibit a writer's understanding of how form and content work together to create literary meaning, and discover avenues for further growth.
ENGL 2440-01/ HIST 3210-01: The Great Depression
T-Th 1:00/ W 7:00 p.m. (for films)
Instructor: R. McElvaine
An interdisciplinary examination of American history and culture during the era of the Great Depression (1929-1941), utilizing literature, film, music, painting, and photography, as well as more traditional historical sources.
ENGL 3120-01: Sex Comedies in the Eighteenth Century
MWF 11
Instructor: L. Franey
After the British monarchy was restored in 1660, King Charles II soon became known for his patronage of the theater and a vibrant theater culture developed. Especially popular with Restoration audiences were bawdy comedies that focused on flirtation, infidelity, erotic wordplay, and complex courtship plots. Yet these plays were not just about sex; they often contained strong political and social critiques as well as explorations of philosophical concepts under debate at that time. In this class, we will explore 7-8 comedies written and performed between 1660 and 1770, including William Wycherley's The Country Wife, Aphra Behn's The Rover, William Congreve's The Way of the World, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.
This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.
ENGL 3180-01: Twentieth-Century African-American Fiction
T-Th 1:00 - 2:40
Instructor: A. MacMaster
In this course, we'll work chronologically from the early twentieth-century to the almost the present, exploring five great American novels in great depth. Works that we'll include Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1988). We'll read with an eye to discovering the distinctive characteristics of an African American tradition in literature as well as the relation of this tradition to the larger movements of realism, modernism, and the post-modern. In addition to primary literary texts, we'll read a variety of relevant secondary sources - critical articles, newspaper articles and political speeches contemporary with the fiction that we read, as well as other kinds of non-fiction selected to create a cultural context for the literary works that we read. Class discussions and written assignments are designed to enable each student to develop his or her abilities as a reader of and writer on literature. Students will be encouraged to deepen their understandings of different literary forms and modes and to try their hands at different approaches to the interpretation of literature. Emphasis will be placed on students' finding their own voices as critics of literature and articulating their own positions within a community of readers.
ENGL-3310-01: Shakespeare, and the Play of Genre
MW 1-2:40
Instructor: G. Miller
This course will explore the poetic and dramatic career of William Shakespeare from the perspective of contemporary critical approaches, with particular attention to literary genre. We'll read histories, tragedies, comedies, and romances - 10 plays - and we'll share as a common critical text Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All. We'll often watch and discuss scenes of film productions, and the course will be "film friendly," meaning students may elect to write a film-focused critical essay as a major component of their work.
ENGL 3410-01: Reading and Writing Poetry
W 6:30 p.m.
Instructor: S. Kistulentz
This class is an intensive introduction to the reading and writing of poetry. We will read widely from individual volumes and anthologies, and supplement our knowledge using prosody, essays on poetics, as well as the form and history of poetry. Through in-class writing exercises, reading of model poems, and discussion of student work, this workshop-based course helps students develop a greater creative, critical, and aesthetic understanding of their discipline. Workshop format makes use of reading assignments, writing exercises, and critique of student work. Students are expected to become familiar with a wide range of models and formal strategies. Active participation is a basic requirement for this course.
ENGL 4900-01: Senior Seminar in English
MW 2:45
Instructor: L. Franey
This class will focus on narrative practice and theory, especially in relation to prose fiction and prose nonfiction in the English-language literary tradition. Storytelling will be our central focus, meaning that we will ask questions about how and why humans tell stories, how and why they shape those stories in the ways that they do, and about the purposes to which stories are put in various contexts. We will read selections from classic theoretical and critical texts such as Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, and Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey. Primary texts will include short stories from a wide variety of British, American, and world Anglophone writers, at least one novel (probably either a 19th-century realist novel or a 20th-century postmodernist novel), and at least one autobiography or memoir (most likely a slave narrative or immigrant life story).
COMM 2000-01: Introduction to Communication Studies
T-Th 1:00
Instructor: C. Coats
This course introduces students to the broad academic discipline of Communication Studies. It will cover a breadth of communication theories and methods that will help students understand the role communication and media play in their everyday lives. In this class, students will learn to critically explore their own culture and the culture of others, and they will learn to critically examine media texts, like advertisements, music and/or films.
COMM 3400-01: Intercultural Communication
T-Th 10:00/ W 12:00
Instructor: C. Coats
This course will focus on intercultural encounters through a field of communication study called "development communication." Development communication is a field fraught with loaded cultural terms. Historically, it has involved the ways in which "the West" has attempted to "modernize" what has been called the "Third World," "Fourth World," or the "Global South." This class will unpack these terms and their assumptions, and it will consider contemporary communicative methods that engage intercultural dialogue in an ethical, just, and respectful way.
COMM 4900-01: Senior Seminar in Communication Studies
MW 1:00 - 2:40
Instructor: C. Coats
This is an advanced methodological and theoretical course that culminates in original research in the field of Communication Studies. In this class, students will encounter a variety of critical communication perspectives that will equip them with tools to understand media texts, their production, and their consumption. Special attention will be paid to theories associated with Cultural Studies.
IDST 2400-01: Renaissance and Revolution in Britain
MTWF 9:00
Instructor: G. Miller
This course will explore the world of Renaissance Britain, including the English Civil Wars, Cromwell's Protectorate, ending at the restoration of King Charles II. We'll begin with plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, exploring connections between theater, the visual arts, religion, culture, and politics. We'll explore poetry and prose by revolutionaries like John Milton, monarchists like Katherine Philips, as well as radical Quakers like Margaret Fell, and chameleons like Andrew Marvell in favor of a mixed state.
Foci: literature and history
IDST 2400-02: Slavery and the American South
MWF 10; Th 8:00
Instructor: S. Marrs
This study of slavery in America will address questions that have long preoccupied students of the South's peculiar institution. What do we know about the people who were enslaved? About the African cultural traditions they brought with them to America and managed to preserve? About the conditions under which these men and women lived and labored? About the methods by which they sought to escape from slavery or to obtain a degree of power within it? What do we know about the individuals who owned slaves, about their family lives, their cultural traditions, their religious beliefs? How did they see themselves? How did they attempt to rationalize their participation in the slave system? In attempting to answer these questions, we shall examine fiction written by black and white, male and female, nineteenth-century Southerners, we shall read excerpts from nineteenth-century diaries and slave narratives, we shall look at twentieth-century novels about slavery, and we shall pay close attention to recent essays by major historians. In addition, we shall listen to music and look at photographs from the nineteenth-century American South. Short quizzes, a term paper, mid-term and final examinations will provide the basis for grading. Texts: Rosengarten, Tombee, Portrait of a Cotton Planter (booklet of excerpts); A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard; Douglass, Narrative of a Life; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Gerster and Cords, Mythology and Southern History, Vol. I; Morrison, Beloved; Jones, The Known World.
|
|
