Courses - Spring, 2010

Spring 2010 English Courses

ENGL 1000 01: Introduction to Interpretation
MWF 10 – 10:50 a.m. AC 222
Dr. Anne MacMaster
This course focuses on a variety of interpretive problems and on different kinds of texts, including examples of prose fiction, poetry, drama, and visual media. It is a prerequisite to most courses in the English department.

ENGL 1000 02: Introduction to Interpretation
TTh 10 – 11:15, W 12 – 12:50 AC 222
Dr. Laura Franey
This course focuses on a variety of interpretive problems and on different kinds of texts, including examples of prose fiction, poetry, drama, and visual media. It is a prerequisite to most courses in the English department.

ENGL 2020 01: British and American Literary History, II
MWF 9 – 9:50 SH 269
Dr. Laura Franey
A history of British and American literature from 1789 to the present, with an emphasis on the meaning and development of literary history.

ENGL 2020 02: British and American Literary History, II
MWF 10 – 10:50 a.m. AC 335
Dr. Laura Franey
A history of British and American literature from 1789 to the present, with an emphasis on the meaning and development of literary history.

ENGL 3130: The Romantics
TTh 10 – 11:15 a.m., W 12 – 12:50 p.m. AC 222
Dr. Anita DeRouen
The works of the period known as British Romanticism reflect the great social and cultural changes, particularly artistic reactions to new political landscapes and the domestic changes brought about by the continued shift to an industrial economy. In this term we'll examine these and other changes through the study of major poets (including Wordsworth & Coleridge's collaboration on Lyrical Ballads and Blake's fusion of visual art with poetic form), commentary on public and domestic life in both fiction and non-fiction (including Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman [excerpts], Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and related dramatic and prose texts, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and the evolution of artistic sensibilities that still largely shapes the way we think of literary art today (including the poetry and literary criticism/prose of Percy Shelley and John Keats).
Focus: Literary Period, Cultural Studies.

English 3180 (01): Modern Drama [20th-Century Drama is the title give on Major Access]
TTh 1:00 – 2:40 AC 222
Anne MacMaster
Starting with Ibsen and moving chronologically to the present, we’ll analyze plays not only as works of literature, but also as dramas for the stage. We’ll also view different film-adaptations of some plays, bearing in mind that every production is an interpretation. If possible, we’ll take a field trip to see a play on the stage. Reading English, American, and European plays, we’ll consider different kinds of realism, modernism, and post-modernism in drama. Readings will probably include the following plays: Ibsen’s A Doll House, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Shaw’s Major Barbara, Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Arthur Miller, The Crucible, Samuel Beckett, Endgame, Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine,August Wilson, Fences, and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. In addition to reading and analyzing these these plays, we’ll discuss how (and why) to write about drama.
Foci: Literary Period and Genre

English 3300: Chaucer
Dr. Greg Miller
The course is designed to help students develop a greater appreciation and understanding of the literary works and career of Geoffrey Chaucer. We’ll work hard together at becoming proficient readers of Chaucer’s Middle English, reading short lyrics, The Book of the Duchess, passages from Troilus and Criseyde and and the lion’s share of The Canterbury Tales. We’ll attempt to understand more fully Chaucer’s handling of a variety of literary genres and modes and to articulate for ourselves the particular nature of this great writer’s achievement.
Focus: Author. Satisifies the pre-1800 requirement.

ENGL 3340: Shakespeare and the Play of Gender
TTh 2:45 – 4 p.m. Murrah Hall 204
Dr. Eric Griffin
Why is there so much cross-dressing in Shakespearean comedy? Why are Shakespeare’s tragedies so replete with negative representations of women? How come so many of his plays feature absent mothers and motherless daughters? Why does Shakespeare focus so insistently on males bonding as “bands of brothers” or living in fear of the “cuckhold’s horns”?
While examining the dramatic career of William Shakespeare within the context of his time, this course will explore the various ways the genders are constructed in representative Shakespearean Comedies, Tragedies, Histories and Romances. By way of providing historical and cultural counterpoint, we will view film versions of the dramas that offer more self-consciously presentist interpretations of Shakespeare’s “play of gender.”
Focus: cultural studies, genre, or author
Foci: Author and Cultural Studies. Satisfies the pre-1800 requirement.

ENGL-3420-01 Writing and Reading Creative Nonfiction
TTh 1:00 to 2:40 p.m. AC334
Dr. Steve Kistulentz
In this workshop-based course, students will devote roughly equal amounts of time to readings in the art of the personal essay as well as writing, revising, and preparing to submit for publication their own essays. We’ll chart a historical course in reading selections from Montaigne to present day practitioners such as Sedaris, Klosterman, Didion, Vollmann, and many others.
Focus: Genre. Also counts as an intermediate course in creative writing.

ENGL-3900-01 Senior Workshop in Creative Writing.
W 6:30-9:00 p.m. SH267
Dr. Steve Kistulentz
In this intense, once-a-week workshop, students will work with the instructor to devise a workplan for a semester-long project in the genre of their choice. Portions of the project will be workshopped on a regular basis, and revisions will of course be a part of any serious workplan. We’ll write these plans together based on the cumulative knowledge of creative writing as a recursive and occasionally collaborative project. By permission of the instructor.

English 4900: Senior Seminar: Poetry, Theory and Practice
MW 1- 2:40 p.m. CC 22
Dr. Greg Miller
In this course, we’ll consider the function, nature, and purpose of poetry from a variety of perspectives. We focus on both reading individual poems closely and thinking about poetry as a genre. We’ll scan poems for metrical patterns and variations, considering the functions of rhythm, line, stanza, metaphor, diction, sound, and genre, among other things. And we’ll read some examples of practical criticism of poetry as well, including such works as Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn. The seminar will require a sustained and developed essay on a particular poet or critical question about poetry that will demonstrate a command of critical vocabulary, complexity of thinking, and a clear and compelling analysis of particular poems; students will write these final essays in conversation with other scholars of poetry in accordance with the standards of the discipline.

COMM 1000-01 Public Speaking
TTh 10 – 11:15 a.m., W 12 – 12:50 p.m. AC 137
Dr. Curtis Coats
This course will develop public rhetoric skills – both speaking and listening. Of the former, students will practice and perform public address using skills and rhetorical principles developed in class. In addition, students will engage in a public address using a new media: the podcast. Of the latter – listening – students will learn about rhetorical and cultural criticism and apply principles of rhetoric to analysis of media texts. We will examine “great” speeches, e.g. Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet” speech, and we will apply critical, rhetorical listening skills to pop culture.

COMM 2000-01 Introduction to Communications
MW 1 – 2:40 p.m. AC 334
Dr. Curtis Coats
In this course, students are introduced to the discipline of communication. Thus, while a secondary goal is to learn how to communicate better, the primary goal is to understand various theories of communication. The course will focus on theories of interpersonal and group communication, theories of rhetoric, and theories of media criticism.

[Communications courses originating in another department include the following:
COMM 3000 Popular Culture, Dr. George Bey, MWF 11 – 11:50, SH 269
COMM 3100 Mass Media and Mass Communications, Dr. Ashleigh Powers, TTh 1- 2:40, SH 269]

IDST Core Topics Courses taught by English Department faculty, Spring 2010

Heritage: Dr. Eric Griffin

IDST 1300: Monsters, Magicians, and Trickster-Monkeys:
The Significance of the Supernatural in Pre-Modern Art and Literature
MWF 11 – 11:50 a.m.
Dr. Anne MacMaster
In the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the hero fights not only the quasi-human monster Grendel, but also Grendel’s mother and (later, when he is old) an elderly fire-breathing dragon. What aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture might these monsters stand for? How much reality are we to credit them with? Did the Anglo-Saxons believe in dragons and other monsters? And what about the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth? Did people in the court of James Stuart actually believe in witches?
Asking questions like these, we’ll read the heroic poem Beowulf, selections from The Lais of Marie de France and from Dante’s Inferno, two of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Franklin’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Monkey: A Journey to the West (a classic of sixteenth century Chinese literature). Keeping our focus on the supernatural, we’ll also examine representative works of art produced at the same cultural moments as these works of literature: early middle ages, high middle ages, and Renaissance.
Foci: Literature and Fine Arts

IDST 1300: Love and War in Feudal Europe and Japan
Dr. Greg Miller
Is all fair in love and war? What are the rules of engagement? Is the lover an intimate adversary? Is the enemy in war an intimate ally? Do literature and art represent codes of conduct and models of behavior? What is the relationship between desire, romance, and war? We will pursue these questions as we read literary texts written in feudal Europe and Japan, texts that include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Marie of France’s Lays, the great early Japanese war saga The Tales of the Heike, and the world’s first novel, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. We will also examine artistic representations of lovers and warriors, considering the social contexts in which these texts were written and these images were created. Readings in Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism as well as Western Christianity will augment our studies and discussion.
Focus: Literature

IDST-2500-04 We Are the 80s.
TTh 10 to 11:15 a.m. AC 334
Dr. Steve Kistulenz
If the 1970s were famously labeled the “me decade,” what labels do the films and novels of the 1980s put on the decade of Ronald Reagan? It’s a short ten years from the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle, to crack cocaine, Live Aid, trading arms for hostages, and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall. From “Where’s the beef?” to “Just say no,” were the 1980s a decade of clever slogans and little substance, or do they mark a seminal period in the emergence of an American culture dominated more by consumption than production?
We’ll read novels, screen a few films, and even watch a few music videos, all in an attempt serious answers at any or all of the following questions: what were the cultural, personal and artistic values of the 1980s and to what extent are those values reflected today?
Foci: Literature, Fine Arts and History

IDST 2500-06 Religion in a Media Age
TTh 1 p.m. AC 222
Dr. Curtis Coats
Against prediction, religion has not faded away in the 21st Century. Rather, it has persisted as a social, cultural, and political force. Religion and spirituality remain active in the media age, whether in pop cultural contexts like Harry Potter, The Passion of the Christ or Angels and Demons; in political invocations of God and conversations about Christianity and Islam, or in “virtual” contexts like Tangle.com (formerly GodTube) or World of Warcraft. This course engages examples like these and the way that religions and media intersect – and often collide – in everyday life. We will focus on the critical study of media and religion, using textual, ethnographic and rhetorical methods.
Focus: Religious studies.