ENG 101 001 - 013 Freshman Writing Seminar Staff
This course is designed specifically for students who require training in the essential skills of writing. Students will master mechanics (grammar, punctuation,sentence structure, correct usage) as well as paragraph organization and essay development. Practice in presenting clear and precise thesis statements will provide the essential understanding of how good writing works and will make students proficient writers. It is a required course for all those designated as not meeting college-level English writing standards. Fulfills English proficiency.
ENG 161 001 Introduction to Journalism Michael Pare
This course introduces students to basic journalistic experiences including interviewing, researching, and news, feature, and sports writing. It defines both standards of journalistic writing and the legal standards which govern journalism and combines lively writing experience with critical awareness. Prerequisite: English proficiency.
ENG 175 001 Introduction to Literature Staff
ENG 175 002 Introduction to Literature Tuire Valkeakari
ENG 175 003 Introduction to Literature Richard deNiord
ENG 175 004 Introduction to Literature Raphael Shargel
ENG 175 005 Introduction to Literature Staff
ENG 175 006 Introduction to Literature Staff
ENG 175 007 Introduction to Literature Staff
ENG 175 008 Introduction to Literature Staff
This course is offered for all who wish to explore poetry, fiction, and drama in order to understand what makes the three genres of literature distinctive. Appreciation and critical awareness will be developed with an emphasis on writing about literature. This course is required for English majors but is open to all who wish to learn more about literature. May fulfill English proficiency.
ENG 204 001 Literary Journalism Staff
A plus on any resume, magazine journalism gives students practical hands-on experience editing and publishing a literary journal. We will solicit and edit work, design and help produce The Alembic. Students will read literary texts in several genres withing a critical context, formulate, discuss, and develop sophistication in critical issues. Comparative essays, close readings, and book reviews will all be part of the course .
ENG 207 001 Readings in Dramatic Literature Norma Kroll
Comparative study of dramatic literature in the medium of theatre and cinema (script and screenplay) as an expression of the tragic/comic worldview. Major texts will include screen adaptations as well as original scripts that reflect the intention and vision of the classic and modern dramatists. Students will attend specific theatre performances and view appropriate screen adaptations of plays in the syllabus. May fulfill English proficiency.
ENG 231 001 Survey of British Literature I Raphael Shargel
This course is an intensive survey of English literature from its Anglo-Saxon beginnings with heroic poetry and Beowulf, to the flowering of the Middle Ages with Chaucer and the romance, to the high Renaissance with the sonnet and the dramatic tradition of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, to the Metaphysicals and the early 18th century satirists. The course emphasizes the historical development of literary forms, themes, and trends.
ENG 232 001 Survey of British Literature II Elizabeth Bridgham
This is an intensive survey of English literature from the later 18th century Age of Reason, to the Romantic cultivation of imagination and the Victorian response, and to the diverse modern and contemporary trends. The course emphasizes the development of literary tradition, its roots and manifestation in various genres.
ENG 301 001 Intermediate Writing Staff
This course is offered for those students who want to develop their writing skills beyond adequacy. Students will write short essays and discuss them in order to master the art of convincing readers to accept their own viewpoints in relation to any number of lively topics ranging from political opinions to musical taste. Students will learn to organize ideas efficiently as well as to pursue their own styles of writing. Prerequisite: English proficiency.
ENG 304 001 History of the English Language Staff
This course examines the historical and linguistic development of the English language as revealed through selected literary texts from "Caedmon's Hymm" and Beowulf through Chaucer. While there is much examination of technical aspects of language (semantics, syntax, phonology), larger literary concerns are emphasized. Changes in social and literary values wrought by the Scandinavians and Normans are explored; and the literature of the prominent Middle English dialects, including the emerging London Standard, will be sampled.
ENG 305 001 Medieval Literature Ewa Slojka
This course varies in organization: sometimes it concentrates on a major genre (Romance, Drama, Dream Vision); sometimes it surveys the period (Beowulf to Malory); sometimes it focuses on the richness of the last quarter of the 14th century (Gawain-Poet, Chaucer, Langland).
ENG 310 001 Milton Anthony Esolen
This course samples Milton's works from his early poetry to the great poems of his old age, culminating in his great epic, Paradise Lost. The focus is on Milton's selection of words, poetic devices, stories, and genres which create moving experiences and expressive words, combined with his broad original concerns about 17th century English culture.
ENG 311 001 Shakespeare: History/Comedies Raphael Shargel
This course concentrates on Shakespeare’s early plays, primarily comedies and histories, with close analysis of the texts in the light of relevant political, social and cultural contexts, and with some attention to stage history and film productions.
ENG 312 001 Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances Robert Reeder
This course concentrates on Shakespeare’s later plays, primarily tragedies and romances (or tragic-comedies), with close analysis of the texts in the light of relevant political, social and cultural contexts, and with some attention to stage history and film productions.
ENG 320 001 Colonial and Federal U.S. Literature Tuire Valkeakari
This course is an introduction to the writings of the colonizers of North America and their hosts and slaves, with close attention to historical milieu and interpretation. The intention of the instructor is to provide a sound basis for the examination of literary trends and the later establishment of the "tradition" of "American" literature.
ENG 356 001 American Literature 1865-1914 Suzanne Fournier
This course surveys American literature through some of the most difficult years in our history, the years of industrialization and urbanization. Major authors include Twain, James, Dickinson, Crane, Robinson, Wharton, Frost, and Adams. Some regionalist and naturalist works are also read.
ENG 357 001 Modern Drama Norma Kroll
This course is a survey of drama including authors such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Chekhov, Lorca, Yeats, Giraudoux, O'Neill, Pirandello, Albee, Miller, and Williams. The course explores the development of drama in its social, political, and psychological contexts.
ENG 358 001 Communications Internship
Internships at local agencies (radio, TV, news media, PR firms, as well as other businesses and foundations with communications services) may be obtained at the initiative of the junior/senior student to develop and apply skills in writing, analysis, and the creative imagination to the workplace. In addition to the 10-15 hours of supervised experience, students must compose and fulfill a contract to insure an academic component. Internship proposals and contracts must be on file at the end of the semester before which the internship occurs.
ENG 364 001 Modern American Fiction Margaret Reid
This course covers American fiction since World War I. Authors include Anderson , Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, Salinger, Heller, Percy, Pynchon, Morrison, and Bellow. Topics for discussion include the search for identity through tradition, the disillusionment of the ’30s, the Southern Renaissance, and the problematics of mass society.
ENG 365 001 Twentieth-Century African American Literature Tuire Valkeakari
A reading-intensive introduction to twentieth-century African American fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry, with particular attention to social and cultural contexts. Writers include Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Anna Deavere Smith. Focus on race, class, and gender, and on the authors’ approaches to the role of literary art in society. Same as BLS 365.
ENG 366 001 Developments in 20th Century Ficton Richard Murphy
I intend to visit my favorites drawn from the years I have taught this course but not include any works published before 1960. Some old friends include Cortazar's Hopscotch, Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Abish's How German Is It? For new authors, Javier Marias, David Markson, Adam Thirwell, and Witold Gombrowicz. I usually add an anthology or single volume (Barthes S/Z?) of essays in narrative theory. The final paper calls on students to find a novel of interest to them that fits the course and argue for its inclusion.
ENG 367 001 Modern British and American Poetry William Hogan
This course is a close reading of poets in the English-speaking wold from about 1890 to 1940. Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Pound, H.D., Stevens, and Moore are among the authors included. Topics pursued are the reactions of Modernists to 19th century style and subject, the underlying trends of dislocation and pessimism, and the search for new values and expressions.
ENG 380 002 Creative Writing in Fiction Staff
This course encourages students to express their imaginative energy in the form of short story writing. Exercises are carefully designed to strengthen the students’ awareness of and skill in rendering the elements of fiction. All work is discussed in a workshop situation. An anthology of short stories is read along with students’ work. A folio of exercises, short stories, and revisions provides the basis for the course grade. Sophomores and above. (Fine Arts Core)
ENG 381 001 Creative Writing - Poetry Staff
ENG 381 002 Creative Writing - Poetry Richard deNiord
This course encourages students to express their imaginative energy in writing poetry. Exercises are carefully designed to sharpen students' awareness of and skill in rendering the elements of poetry. A folio of poetic exercises, poems, and revisions of each provides the basis for the course grade. The class discusses its own work and a wide variety of anthologized poetry in a workshop situation. Sophomores and above.
ENG 400 001 Literary Criticism and Theory Richard Murphy
This course offers possibilities in serious analysis and in seeing how some very fine minds have approached literature in the twentieth century. I have not made a decision as to which critics we shall read, but I am leaning toward Cleanth Brooks and Lionel Trilling for the earlier critics, one work by a creative writer (e.g., a collection of Ellison essays, Pound's ABC of Reading, Eliot's The Sacred Wood, Graves's The White Goddess, Williams's The American Grain, Woolf's The Common Reader). Then, some very influential criticism, works by Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, Kate Millet, de Certeau, Fredric Jameson, Leslie Fiedler. One major assignment will be the reading of and reporting on a major critical work by a significant writer now out of print or so expensive as he/she might as well be-Leavis, Blackmur, etc. There will be one non-critical piece, perhaps Flaubert's A Simple Heart or Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, that will serve as a guinea pig for the various critical principles we uncover. The final paper will be an analysis and evaluation of the student's first essay, written as an analysis of the non-critical piece.
ENG 440 001 18th Century Novel John Scanlan
This course will concentrate on two subjects. The first will be the high-spirited world of the eighteenth-century British novel. We'll read a range of novels written during the century, emphasizing the development and transformations of the comic novel. We'll read Henry Fielding's delightful Joseph Andrews, Laurence Sterne's learned and bizarre Tristram Shandy (now, amazingly, turned into a contemporary movie), and Tobias Smollett's raucous travel narrative, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. We'll also read a good selection of less well known works, some dealing with crime and the underworld, including John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
As things now stand, I'm planning to make the second main focus of our attention the writing of substantial scholarly essays. In fact, there will be only two major assignments throughout the term: all students will write two essays, each of roughly 15-25 pages. Accordingly, we'll spend a lot of time going over our ideas for the essays, discussing our drafts, working through our revisions, and finally presenting our work to one another. We'll spend a good amount of time considering and commenting on published scholarly work on eighteenth fiction, all the while comparing our own writing to that of our fellow scholars. In short, this course will be something of a seminar in the writing of scholarly essays. The immediate hope, of course, is that the work you do in this course will help you improve your work in other classes. More broadly, this class aspires to prepare you for significant writing of any kind, both during your undergraduate years and afterwards. The course will be run as a discussion, and there will be no examinations.
ENG 441 001 Women in Drama Norma Kroll
What do women want, why do they want it, and how do they acquire enough power to get it (if they do)? This course will explore these questions in texts and films of plays by female (and some male) dramatists. These questions will also allow us to consider the psychological and social as well as moral and spiritual dilemmas raised in each play's vision of the characters' struggles to shape their lives.
ENG 481 001 Seminar: Charles Dickens Elizabeth Bridgham
This course will examine the works of Charles Dickens in the context of the rapidly changing cultural landscape of Victorian England. While Dickens is, of course, best known as a comic novelist and social critic, his influence in his own day stretched far beyond the novels which created his literary legacy. Dickens was a journalist, an editor, an activist, a playwright and actor, a dashing public figure, and an international celebrity. While our primary focus will be the intensive reading of several Dickens novels, we will also contextualize and supplement the long fiction with short pieces from Dickens’s journalism and with a study of contemporary issues on which the fiction comments.
ENG 481 002 Seminar: New York Avant Garde Richard Murphy
I focus on the introduction of "indeterminancy" in the cultural scene of New York City beginning in the 1940s and carrying through into the world of Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. This period sees NYC "steal" modern art from Paris, Ornette Coleman and "free jazz," Jack Kerouac's experiences which become On the Road, the developments of art around the "abstract expressionists" such as Jackson Pollock, the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning among others, the collaborative work of artists, musicians, choreographers, and dancers, especially that of Merce Cunningham and John Cage with Rauschenberg and Johns.
Key texts will be concerned with indeterminancy and change: Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, concerned with the New York poets Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, Schuyler; Ashbery's early poems and art criticism, O'Hara's Lunch Poems and art criticism, and Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960, as well as Kerouac and Ginsberg's work, Cage and the I Ching (Chinese book of changes), and Perl's New Art City.
Significant women artists and poets will also receive close attention: Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles, Lee Krasner, and others.
I find of interest this, the initial breakdown of formalist criticism (the "New Criticism") despite the best work of Clement Greenberg and Poetry to enforce a formalist reading of literature and art. The course allows for a dipping into cultural criticism such as that done by Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu.
We shall see films of modern dance, music, and art, and the students are encouraged to pursue this material or that related to the avant-garde generally. I hope to visit major museums and exhibits as they turn up in the fall. If you have any questions, e-mail me.
ENG 481 004 Seminar: Whitman & Dickinson Richard deNiord
This seminar will concentrate on the works and lives of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, focusing in particular on their respective "meter making arguments" (Ralph Waldo Emerson) as radical American departures, in both form and content, from the English prosodic tradition of their time. We will examine the very different but complementary arcs of these two poets' groundbreaking careers, paying particular attention to the verbal nature of their transformative power as America's first iconoclastic poets. In the course of our study, we will explore Whitman's paradoxical use of the first person as a transpersonal self in contrast to Dickinson's epigrammatic, often runic speaker who ventures singularly into interiority. The conclusion of this seminar will focus on the question of just how the dramatically different conceits and styles of these two poets established an American poetic sea change that not only presaged modernism, but gave memorable voice to two equally transcendent post Puritan visions that continue to resonate today with enduring social, religious and existential relevance. In addition to reading selected poems from each poet, concentrating in particular on Whitman's 1855 version of Leaves of Grass and Dickinson's seminal output between 1861 and1865, we will also read biographical and critical essays. Required texts include: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin, Walt Whitman, edited b Gary Schmidgall, The Passion of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr, and Walt Whitman's America by David S. Reynolds.
ENG 481 005 Seminar: Ethnicity & American Fiction Margaret Reid (cross-listed with AMS 470 006)
To consider one’s own identity is to realize that identity—no matter how the term is conceived—is never pure or single, but always made up of overlapping, often competing claims made by such varied influences as social roles, family histories, individual experiences, and ethnic ties. In turn, each of these influences is multi-faceted, and to understand the “ethnicity” of one’s self or another is far more complicated than it seems. So, this course starts from the premise that, while we are each unique individuals, there are large categorical claims made on our identities at all times; some of these we wish to resist, and others we embrace. This course will examine the case of modern America as a particularly potent context for the production of a literature and culture that gains its strength from the diversity of voices within it—a diversity made up of the perspectives and experiences of individuals as well as of the multiple groups to which each of us belongs. We will combine readings in ethnic theory with ethnic American literature, and as we do so, we will work to understand what ethnicity means, how its meanings have evolved over the last century. In addition to the literary focus of the course, historical, sociological, anthropological, and theoretical approaches to the material are encouraged and may be pursued in papers and reports. Writers to be studied include Nella Larsen, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Chang-Rae Lee, and others.
ENG 498 and 499 Senior Thesis
This course is designed for seniors who wish to undertake a significant research project and write an extended essay on it. Students will work directly with a faculty advisor who will guide and collaborate with them, from the early planning stages of the project until acceptance of the final draft. Students must present a proposal to their faculty advisor and the department chair—and have it approved—before registering for Senior Thesis credit. The thesis will be evaluated by the faculty advisor and a second faculty reader of the student’s choosing. Prerequisite: Eng 400.