Autumn 2001 300-Level ENGL Courses

Course Descriptions (Last updated: 29 August 2001)
The following course descriptions have been written by individual instructors to provide more detailed information on specific section sthan that found in the General Catalog. When individual descriptions are not available, the General Catalog descriptions [in brackets] are used. (Although we try to have as accurate and complete information as possible, this schedule remains subject to change.)

Interested in Medieval Literature? In the history of English? In English language study? Look at this graduate course in Old English open to undergraduates:
ENGL 512A, Introductory Reading in Old English, meeting Daily 9:30 with Professor Robert Stevick, is a beginning course in the earliest written form of the English language, extremely helpful for study of English literature of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and fundamental to historical study of the English language. Read the course description or contact Professor Stevick directly and provide the following information: your name; your student number; your year (junior, senior, etc.); a brief note about why you are interested in taking this course.

304 A (History of Literary Criticism & Theory II)
MW 10:30-12:20
Lester
In this class we will consider Marxist, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist currents in contemporary literary theory. Special attention will be given to works by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. There will be a course packet in addition to the required books. Texts: Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology; Jowett, tr., Selected Dialogues of Plato; Derrida, Dissemination; Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornografia; photocopied course packet.

307 A (Cultural Studies: Literature & the Age)
MW 12:30-2:20
McRae
Modernism. This course concerns the early twentieth century and the Modernist movement. Besides studying the literature (poetry, a film or two, and a novel), we’ll be discussing the period from a historical and cultural context. What was life like for people who lived through two World Wars, habitually lived in foreign countries, listened to jazz and hung out in clubs, cafes and salons? Who were the Modernists exactly, and what were they like? What other movements existed during the period, and how did they all influence each other? Course requirements: Midterm, final, group presentation, active and engaged participation. Texts: Richar Ellman, ed., Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; photocopied course packet.

311 A (Modern Jewish Literature in Translation)
Dy 9:30
Alexander
This course deals with the literary interpretation of modern Jewish experience, which includes the break-up of a cohesive religious culture, mass migrations of unprecedented magnitude, the destruction of European Jewry by National Socialism during World War II, and the effort to reestablish a national existence in the Jewish homeland of Israel. Readings include such classic Yiddish authors as Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and more recent Yiddish writers, among them I. B. Singer and Jacob Glatstein. At least two writers who did not write in Jewish languages, the Czech Franz Kafka and the Italian Primo Levi, will also be studied. Among the Israeli authors in the syllabus are Agnon, Hazaz, and Appelfeld. Considerable attention will also be given to the play of competing ideas that form the background of the imaginative literature. Texts: Howe & Greenberg, eds., Treasury of Yiddish Stories; Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939; Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, Heller, ed., The Basic Kafka.

313 A (Modern European Literature in Translation)
TTh 10:30-12:20
LaGuardia
[Fiction, poetry, and drama from the development of modernism to the present. Works by such writers as Mann, Proust, Kafka, Gide, Hesse, Rilke, Brecht, Sartre, and Camus.]

316 A (Literature of Developing Countries)
Dy 1:30
--withdrawn 4/30--

316 YA (Literature of Developing Countries)
MW 4:30-6:20 pm
Taranath
Added 4/18; sln: 8856
Around the World with a Book: Contemporary World Literatures. This quarter we will embark on an imaginary journey to numerous geographical and cultural locations through the vehicle of literature. Trinidad, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Vietnam, Algeria, Guyana, Palestine, and Pakistan are some of the countries whose literature we will examine through an exploration of novels and short stories. While we will certainly cover a wide range of literary styles, genres, historical specificities, geographical locations, and cultural identities, our goal is to not readthese texts as examples of some generic and homogeneous “third world/developing world literature.” Instead, we will begin the difficult work of becoming “culturally literature.” To this end, our discussions and critical readings will focus on gender, race, culture, class, colonial histories, sexuality, ethnicity, nationalism, war and relocation, and political activism. Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Texts: S. Bronw, ed., The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories; Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind; Anton Shammas, Arabesques; T. Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Jorge Amado, Dona Flor and her Two Husbands.

317 A (Literature of the Americas)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Kaup
Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Using strategies from comparative literature, this course brings together major writers and texts from U.S. and Latin American literature. Intended to break down barriers between American and Latin American literary and cultural studies, this course is organized around the question, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? In our cheek-by-cheek readings of literature from the Southern and Northern parts of the hemisphere, we will look at five major themes or categories which constitute possible sites of common ground in the literature and culture of the Americas: 1) Formative Definitions of American Identities: “Our (Mestizo) America” vs. the U.S. and Canada (Emerson, Jose Martí, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Roberto Fernández Retamar); 2) Representations of “the Indian” from the 19th century to the present in the U.S. and Peru (myths of the frontier and the “Vanishing American”; Reformism, Women Writers, and the Sentimental Novel; indigenismo (Peru); contemporary Native American literature) (Fenimore Cooper, Dances With Wolves, Helen Hunt Jackson, Clorinda Matto de Turner, José María Arguedas, N. Scott Momaday) 3) Harlem and Havana: the Black Atlantic, modernism and African-American / Afro-Cuban connections (blues poetry [Langston Hughes] and poesía negra [Nicolás Guillén]) 4) Modernism in the Americas: Modernity and the Search for a Usable Past / the Quest for Origins—hybrid genealogies, transculturation, hemispheric multiculturalism (Octavio Paz, Richard Rodriguez, Carmen Tafolla, William Carlos Williams, Alejo Carpentier) 5) Postmodern Connections and American Labyrinths of Fiction (Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon). Part of the fun of this class is to “test-drive” a “discipline-in-progress”: Comparative Hemispheric American Literary and Cultural Studies is just in its infancy as a discipline, and we can all participate in its creation and development. Students need to be willing to handle a demanding reading schedule. Assignments: participation and presentations, 2 short papers (2-3 pp.), final exam. Texts: Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona; William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain; Clorinda Matto de Turner, Torn from the Nest; N. Scott Momaday, House of Dawn; Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie; photocopied course packet.

320 A (English Literature: The Middle Ages)
MW 12:30-2:20
Remley
The course will provide a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the literature of the Middle Ages, which will endeavor to place texts remote from our modern era in their social and historical contexts. Students will read and discuss the best-known poems of the Old and Middle English periods (including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), augmented by a number of non-canonical items as well as contemporary Celtic and medieval French texts. The informing critical theme of the course will be the phenomenon of “syncretism,” the process of cultural accommodation that accounts for the fact, e.g., that the days of the week are named after pagan Norse gods. There will be a mid-term, final, and major term paper. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Heaney, ed. & tr., Beowulf; Keynes, tr., Alfred the Great; Kinsella, ed. & tr., The Táin; Tolkien, tr., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies (tr. Richards).

321 A (Chaucer)
MW 1:30-3:20
Mussetter
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poetry, with attention to Chaucer's social, historical, and intellectual milieu. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Chaucer, General Prologue and Twelve Major Tales (ed. Michael Murphy); Chaucer's Dream Poetry (ed. Phillips & Havely).

321YA (Chaucer)
MW 4:30-6:20 pm
Cancelled 4/18.

323 YA (Shakespeare to 1603)
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Streitberger
Shakespeare’s career as dramatist before 1603, including Hamlet. Study of history plays, comedies, and tragedies. Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Text: Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

324 A (Shakespeare after 1603)
MW 9:30-11:20
--withdrawn 4/30--

325 A (English Literature: The Late Renaissance)
MW 11:30-1:20
--withdrawn 4/30--

327 A (English Literature: Restoration & Early 18th C.)
TTh 10:30-12:20
McCracken
Since the Restoration and early 18th century is the great age of satire, this will be chiefly a course about satire. We’ll be reading satiric poems by Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, satiric prose by Swift, and satiric engravings by Hogarth, as well as two comic plays and some lyric poetry. Our focus will be on close, careful, attentive reading of words and pictures, on understanding the workings of irony and comedy, and on the historical scene of Restoration and 18th-century London—its knaves, fools, Grub Street writers, politicians, etc.—that constituted a splendid target for comic and satiric writers. You will need to be in class, well-prepared, regularly. Course requirements will include informed, engaged discussion, short papers (sometimes in class), and two exams. Majors only, Registration Period 1 Texts: Alexander Pope, Poetry and Prose; Hopkins, ed., John Dryden; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings; William Hogarth, Engravings; Congreve, The Way of the World; Gay, Beggar’s Opera.

328 A (English Literature: Later 18th Century)
MW 11:30-1:20
--Cancelled 5/14--

329 A (Rise of the English Novel)
MW 1:30-3:20
Lester
Study of the development of this major and popular modern literary form in the eighteenth century. Readings of the best of the novelists who founded the form, and some minor ones, from Defoe to Fielding, Richardson and Sterne, early Austen and the gothic and other writers. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Journal of the Plague Year; Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissina; John Cleland, Fanny Hill.

330 A (English Literature: The Romantic Age)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Halmi
An introduction to the Romantic period in Britain through poetry, prose, and visual arts ranging roughly in time from the accession of George I to the throne (1760) to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815). In contrast to Romantic Poetry I and II, this course will be organized thematically rather than around authors in order to illustrate the literary manifestations of and responses to the remarkable social and political convulsions that Britain experienced in this period, including the loss of the American colonies, almost continuous war with France from 1793 to 1815, and the beginnings of industrialization. Particular attention will be paid to the topics of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, the French Revolution, women’s rights and writing, the slave trade and its abolition, city and country, and the role of the writer in society. Writers to be studied include Barbauld, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Hemans, Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Williams, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two short essays, and a final exam. Students are encouraged to explore the CD-ROM which accompanies the text; it will be used for some of the assigned texts and paintings. Additional texts will be placed on library reserve or made available in electronic form. Many of the assigned texts will be downloadable from links on the course Web page. Majors only, Registration Period 1 Text: Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism: An Anthology (2nd ed., with CD-ROM).

331 A (Romantic Poetry I)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Modiano
[Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their contemporaries.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

333 A (English Novel: Early & Middle 19th C.)
MW 9:30-11:20
Butwin
Few periods—including our own—can have seen such great and sudden changes as the first half of the 19th century in England. Our task will in part be to chart those changes within the boundaries of the novel, the genre that would come to epitomize the age. Like that other great signature of rapid change—the railroad—English fiction would transport all classes of people and pass through all terrain, urban and rural, where nothing would be left unseen or unaltered by its presence. At the same time we will have to drop the industrial metaphor and learn to understand the art of the novel in its own terms. The course will takes its shape in lecture and discussion and a series of short essays. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Jane Austen, Emma; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

333 YA (English Novel: Early & Middle 19th C.)
MW 7-8:50 pm
Dunn
The reading will center on major novels that were (or have become) both popular successes and literary classics. All seem both self-confident and uneasy about their fictionality in what was an age expecting fiction that both entertained and instructed. The selection of texts for this course should stimulate reading of individual works both with and against one another, as we see establishment values (moral, social, literary) both furthered and challenged or ridiculed; class and gender power relationships exerted and thwarted. The critical editions required for this class provide both contextual frames for these works and also insightful modern readings of them. There will be a midterm and final.Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.

334 A (English Novel: Later 19th C.)
MW 1:30-3:20
Dunn
This course will deal with English fiction of the late nineteenth century: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles; George du Maurier’s Trilby; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; and selected short fiction of Joseph Conrad. Our focus will be on ways in which fiction copes with changing senses of its own nature, of changing boundaries and power relationships between genders, nationalities, and classes. Midterm, final, and course project (due by 8th week). Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Eliot, Middlemarch; Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles; du Maurier, Trilby; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories.

334 B (English Novel: Later 19th C.)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Hennessee
Added 4/27; SLN: 8996
Victorian “Hearts of Darkness.” Murder, revenge, identity theft, child abuse, sexual licentiousness, class anxieties, gender bending, racism, xenophobia . . . these are some topics this course will take up. The Victorian period is often stereotyped as the age of the “stiff upper lip” taken to the nth degree, when no one talked about sex or other “low” topics, and everyone went to classy tea parties where table legs were discreetly covered. Yet when one reads many novels of the period, a different picture emerges—of a society obsessed and anxious about threats to its respectability and propriety, and about the “dark side” of human experience more generally. We’ll explore these themes in representative novels from the later nineteenth century. Wuthering Heights, a mythic and Gothic tale of sublime love and vengeance. Great Expectations, an exposé of the “beat or cringe” world of mid-century gentility. The Woman in White, a sensation novel about the hidden terrors of the doorstep and drawing room. Heart of Darkness, a novella of colonial terror that anticipates Modernism. These primary texts will be supplemented by lecture, theoretical and critical readings, and in-class screenings of film adaptations. Course requirements are a short (4-5 pp.) essay (textual explication, to be instructor- and peer-reviewed), a longer essay (7-8 pp.) incorporating historical and critical material, and active class participation. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Great Expectations; Collins, The Woman in White; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Poole, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.

335 A (English Literature: The Age of Victoria)
Dy 11:30
Tandy
In this course we will primarily be reading Victorian poetry and nonfiction prose works on art and aesthetics. We will also look at some visual art and study the very popular artistic duo of William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan via their operetta, The Mikado. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

335 B (English Literature: The Age of Victoria)
Dy 12:30
Alexander
Among the poets and prose writers to be studied are Carlyle, Tennyson, Mill, Newman, Arnold and Ruskin. They will be viewed in relation to what the historian G. M. Young called “A tract of time where men and manners, science and philosophy, the fabric of social life and its directing ideas, changed more swiftly perhaps, and more profoundly, than they have ever changed in an age not sundered by a political or a religious upheaval.” Some of the recurrent topics will be: the reaction against the Enlightenment; rejections and revisions of romanticism; the nature of authority; the religion of work; the idea of a university. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2B (“The Victorian Age”).

336 A (English Literature: The Early Modern Period)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Keeling
In 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote that for "the moderns," the "point of interest" in any novel "lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored." In this course, we will explore those "points of interest" that were previously "ignored," and seek to shed light on "the dark places of psychology" that, as Woolf insisted, are "the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought." Authors accompanying Woolf may include Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, and May Sinclair. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: James Joyce, Dubliners; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread; The Longest Journey; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence; Mrs. Dalloway; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories.

337 A (The Modern Novel)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Keeling
Added 4/30; sln: 4998
According to Astradur Eysteinsson, when Georg Lukacs wrote of the avant-garde in his studies of European literature of the early twentieth century, he was referring to what Anglo-American scholars refer to as “modernism.” In this course, we will explore a number of texts that hail from both the Anglo-American traditions of modernism and the European traditions of the avant-garde in order to, as Eysteinsson suggests, “uphold a dynamic reciprocity between the two concepts. Majors only, Registration Period 1.Texts: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales; Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings; H.D., Pilate’s Wife; Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Remembrance of Things Past #1); Robert Musil, Five Women; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; James Joyce, Dubliners; D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Georg Lukacs, The Lukacs Reader (Kadarkay, ed.).

338 A (Modern Poetry)
--Withdrawn 4/30--

340 A (Modern Anglo-Irish Literature)
Dy 12:30
Vaughan
Irish writers (from Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce to Beckett and Heaney) have contributed much to the quality and variety of modern literature in English. Any list of important writers of the twentieth century will include them in its upper echelons, and there are others (e.g., Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Muldoon) who will appear not much further down. In this course we will read and discuss poetry, fiction, and drama of Ireland, for the msot part from the beginning (Joyce, Yeats and the Abbey Theatre) and end of the century (Friel, Heaney, Muldoon). Readings will include Joyce’s Dubliners; Yeats’s Selected Poems; Harrington’s Modern Irish Drama; Forkner’s Modern Irish Short Stories; Heaney’s Selected Poems and Muldoon’s Poems. Grades will be based on participation in class discussion, weekly response-papers, and a final essay exam (or final paper). Majors only, Registration Period 1.

343 A (Contemporary Poetry)
MW 8:30-10:20
Reed
American Poetry, 1976-2000. This course surveys several of the principal developments in American verse over the last twenty-five years. We will be covering second- and third-generation New York School poetry; the rise and fall of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing; and the recent proliferation of postmodernisms among racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. We will also be examining such phenomena as the mania for prose poetry; the popularity of the “poessay”; the rise to respectability of “visual poetry”; and the acrimonious, post-Vietnam War debates about the relationship (if any) between poetry and progressive political activism. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

352 YA (American Literature: The Early Nation)
MW 7-8:50 pm
Abrams
Conflicting visions of the national destiny and the individual identity in the early years of America's nationhood. Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Henry Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

353 A (American Literature: Later 19th C.)
Dy 10:30
J. Griffith
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels, short stories and sketches produced by American authors in the decades following the Civil War. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussion. Written work will consist entirely of from five to ten brief in-class essays done in response to study questions handed out in advance. Majors only, Registration Period 1 Texts: Judith Fetterley, ed., American Women Regionalists, 1850-1910; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories; Frank Norris, McTeague; Stephen Crane, Great Short Works; Henry James, The American; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; Mark Twain, Great Short Works.

354 A (American Literature: The Early Modern Period)
Dy 8:30
J. Griffith
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories by American authors writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussion. Written work will consist entirely of from five to ten brief in-class essays done in response to study questions handed out in advance. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Richard Wright, Black Boy; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories; John Steinbeck, The Long Valley.

354 B (American Literature: The Early Modern Period)
Dy 11:30
Barnett
Literary responses to the disillusionment after World War I, experiments in form and in new ideas of a new period. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Nella Larsen, Quicksand/Passing; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Richard Wright, Native Son; Jean Toomer, Cane; Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!; F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.

358 A (Literature of Black Americans)
--withdrawn 5/1--

359 A (Contemporary American Indian Literature)
MW 1:30-3:20
Colonnese
[Creative writings—novels, short stories, poems—of contemporary Indian authors; traditions out of which they evolved. Differences between Indian writers and writers of the dominant European/American mainstream.] Majors only, Registration Period 1 (Meets with AIS 377)

367 A (Women and the Literary Imagination)
MW 1:30-3:20
Prebel
America, Women, and Movement. This class explores the often conflicted and seemingly paradoxical relationship between women and movement in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature and culture. We will be looking at how various forms of female mobility—geographical, social, political, economic, sexual—are represented in this era, tracing the evolution of the idea of the mobile woman as a social and national “problem.” Texts: Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Street; Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars.

368 YA (Women Writers)
TTh 4:30-6:20 pm
Lydia Fisher
This course examines women’s writing as participating in and commenting on the process of domestication – women’s training for their work in relation to the home. We will examine a wide range of texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, looking at the different cultural and historical perspectives women have brought to their confrontation with domesticating forces, producing diverse philosophical and creative responses. Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus; Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers; Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or, The Wrongs of Woman.

370 A (English Language Study)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Dillon
This course is an introduction to the scientific study of language. Drawing most of the examples from English, it surveys the major concepts of phonetics/phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics as they have been developed during the twentieth century. Written work will include exercises from the text, quizzes, a mid-term and a final. Texts: Pinker, The Language Instinct; Cipollone, et al, Language Files.

370 YA (English Language Study)
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Curzan
This course introduces the systematic study of language and aims to help you step back and think about language in new ways. The course covers the many levels of structure working in language--from sounds to words to sentences to discourse--as well as the ways speakers learn and change language over time. Discussions will also focus on the social issues tied up in language, including attitudes to dialects, gender and language, Standard English, and national language policies. The focus of much of the course will be words—how they work structurally and socially. We will address questions such as: Why isn’t pfigr a possible English word? What is the difference between religiousness and religiosity? When could boys be girls because girl meant child? Why isn’t ain’t always in the dictionary? Words are one of the primary building blocks of language and by studying how they work, we can gain insight into the structure and meaning of language, and into the social and political power we wield with words. Evening Degree students only, Registration Period 1. Text: Cipollone, et al., eds., Language Files, 8th ed.

371 A (English Syntax)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Wennerstrom
This course covers the basics of standard English grammar. We will take a descriptive approach to understanding the main structures of sentence-level grammar as used in the U.S. today. Assuming that class members are likely to be teaching English in the future, we will also focus on grammar in writing, analyzing native speaker and second language speaker writing and developing activities for those whose goal it is to learn Standard American English. The course assumes no previous study of grammar. Prerequisite: ENGL 370. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Barry, English Grammar: Language as Human Behavior.

381 A (Advanced Expository Writing)
MW 8:30-9:50
Tandy
This quarter we will focus on the variety of things we can do as writers, rather than on those things the style and grammar books tell us we can’t. The English language is incredibly flexible; it is an extremely versatile tool to have at our disposal, and I hope to expand your relation to it over the next 10 weeks. I want, perhaps a bit idealistically, to reclaim writing as it were, so that rather than being a task we dread, it becomes for us a welcome, exciting chance to communicate our ideas to an audience. Your work outside class will consist primarily in writing; your work in class will consist mostly in talking about writing, both as a class and in small groups. We will also read several examples of writing by a variety of authors to start to get a sense of the range of tools we have to work with. There will be a course packet for this course, and I will require that you all have a good writing manual, such as A Writer’s Reference or The Everyday Writer. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

381 B (Advanced Expository Writing)
TTh 10:30-11:50
Barnett
[Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.] Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace; Toni Morrison, Sula.

381 C (Advanced Expository Writing)
TTh 1:30-2:50
Hennessee
This course will focus on style, a crucial (but often vaguely understood) aspect of writing. We will work to refine our individual prose styles through several means. We will read several essays on the subject of style. We will perform stylistic analyses on a diverse group of prose writers, examining how their words achieve their effects. Through the study and practice of what Martha Kolln calls “rhetorical grammar” we will learn to exercise more conscious control over our own stylistic choices. Finally, we will experiment with various genres of writing -–the academic essay, the abstract, the personal ad, the review, life writing, and another genre of your choice – with an eye toward understanding how the generic conventions of specific writing contexts shape the stylistic decisions writers make. Expect lots of attention to syntax and diction, lots of revision, peer and instructor critique. Texts: Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Lessons on Clarity and Grace; Martha Kolln, Rhetorical Grammar; David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day.

383 A (Intermediate Verse Writing)
MW 10:30-11:50
Winakur
[Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem. Further development of fundamental skills. Emphasis on revision.] Prerequisite: ENGL 283.

383 B (Intermediate Verse Writing)
TTh 11:30-12:50
Bierds
Intensive study of ways and means of making a poem. Students will write six original poems, plus rewrites of those poems. Prerequisite: ENGL 283. Text: Friebert, Young, Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 2nd ed.

384 A (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
MW 10:30-11:50
Jana Harris
This is a seminar on writing fiction in the short story form. The class will concentrate on the basic elements of storytelling. Our purpose is to acquire experience in planning, writing, and revising a work of fiction. Participants will write in class and have weekly reading and writing assignments. The class will consist of three components: (1) lecture and discussion of modern fiction writers and their craft; (2) in-class writing exercises; (3) the analysis and discussion of our own creative writing (here it is suggested that the participant leave his/her ego at the door). The class will devote at least half of its time to component number three. Each participant will hand in duplicated original material for class discussion. All assignments will be double-spaced with good margins. Material will be collated with pages numbered, stapled in the upper left-hand corner. In addition to helping each other develop and repair our creative efforts in a workshop-like atmosphere, we will pull together to form a broad critical ground as well as a support network. Our goal is to learn to approach our writing with an editor's critical eye. FINAL PROJECT: one short story due on the last class (together with an SASE—stamped, self-addressed envelope). GRADE: To successfully complete this course, you must attend class regularly and in a timely fashion, participate in class discussion, complete reading and writing assignments on a timely basis, and complete the final project. Prerequisite: ENGL 284. Texts: Gioia & Gwynn, eds., The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Compact Edition; strongly recommended: Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life.

Remember: you can't write if you don't read. Once you've started reading, stop reading for pleasure and start reading with an editor's eye which asks the questions: why did the author do this and how can this author’s craft help me better my own writing?

384 B (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
TTh 1:30-2:50
Gunn
John Barthe asserts that fiction is a figurative “funhouse” with various mechanisms of artifice – pulleys, switches, ropes, mysterious operators – whirring and sweating behind the scenes. This is a course in the design and construction of funhouses. Prerequisite: ENGL 284. Text: Tobias Wolf, ed., The Vintage Book of American Short Stories.

AUTUMN 2001 300-Level Courses

AUTUMN 2001
300-Level Courses