Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. Organized around individual instructors' chosen topic or theme, this course will focus on the development of students' skills in writing thesis-driven analytic essays about literary and cultural texts. Students will strengthen their reading and analytic abilities, using those skills to construct sophisticated arguments. Students will also develop and enhance their skills in academic writing by composing and revising essays in response to assigned readings. Meets Gen Ed - Communication: Literature.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. This course will examine the genre of the short story and will include a focus on close reading, an analysis of narrative technique, and a consideration of historical context. The course will primarily focus on American authors but may also include representative examples from other literary traditions, including works in translation. Students will also develop and enhance their skills in academic writing by composing and revising essays in response to assigned readings. Meets Gen Ed - Communication: Literature.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. This course examines the phenomenon of bestsellers and what these texts reveal about the cultures within which they were produced. Bestsellers have played a pivotal role in influencing the literary climate since The Bookman introduced the bestseller list in 1895. Numerous lists now appear in newspapers, on websites, in journals and trade publications. They no longer merely chart reading trends but also influence them, propelling texts into the spotlight and defining culture for the masses. This course will include a focus on close reading, an analysis of narrative form, and a consideration of works in their historical contexts. The course will take a long historical scope and may include narratives in other media such as film. Students will develop skills in academic writing by composing and revising essays in response to assigned readings. Meets Gen Ed - Communication:Literature.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. This course will examine the related genres of the literary utopia and dystopia and will include a focus on close reading, an analysis of narrative form, and a consideration of works in their historical contexts. The course will take a long historical scope and may include narratives in other media such as film. Students will develop their skills in academic writing by composing and revising essays in response to assigned readings. Meets Gen Ed - Communication: Literature.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. In the proposed course, students will study graphic novels and comics, as well as other forms of visual narrative art (including comic strips, illustrated texts, illuminated manuscripts, etc.) as literary forms. They will learn to contextualize graphic novels and comics as part of artistic traditions as well as important entries into popular culture. The course will emphasize the formal qualities of graphic narratives--their use of words and images--to enable students to analyze and interpret these texts. Students will thus look at graphic narratives from formal, social, and cultural perspectives. The reading list may include histories of comic production and reception by Robert Harvey, Charles Hatfield, or Roger Sabin; critical introductions to interpreting visual narrative by Hilary Chute, Scott McCloud, or W.J.T. Mitchell; books or collections by Marjane Satrapi, Harvey Pekar, Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Aaron MacGruder, Chris Ware, Bryan K. Vaughn, Frank Miller; studies of particular superheroes (Batman, for instance) or comic book producers (DC comics); and/or preceding examples of graphic narrative such as works by Edmund Spenser and William Blake.
This course combines Western with non-Western works to approximate an approach to a "global perspective" on literature. It is designed to introduce the student to major works of world literature; to foster an international literary sensibility; to present a variety of cultural perspectives in a context which demonstrates how they are interrelated: to present students with assignments that will direct them toward developing skills of literary analysis and interpretation; and to guide students in deepening their awareness of the connections between national literatures and their cultural contexts. Meets Gen Ed - Great Works and their Influences.
Organized around the premise that writers have two fundamental ways of responding to the challenge of their culture, conformity or dissent, this course will present literary works in pairs that represent opposing ways of responding to the same subject. Meets Gen Ed - Great Works and their Influences.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Myth and the myth-making process: the origins, meanings and major archetypes and motifs of Occidental and Oriental myths.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A study of 20th and 21st Century fiction written by and about individuals of non-normative genders and sexualities. The cultural, theoretical, and historical forces that have informed this literature will be analyzed. Works may include texts by James Baldwin, Jeffrey Eugenides, Leslie Feinberg, Shyam Selvadurai, Dorothy Allison, and Alison Bechdel, among others.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. A survey of American literature from the beginnings to 1890, with attention to major and minor writers in their sociohistorical context.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 105 or HONP 100. A survey of American literature from the 1890 to the present, with attention to major and minor writers in their sociohistorical context.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Through an exploration of writings by and about Muslim women in various parts of the world, students will be encouraged to develop an appreciation of the variety of aesthetic forms and narrative structures embodied therein. Representation in other cultural forms such as film will also be looked at to challenge monolithic assumptions. Meets Gen Ed - Global Cultural Perspectives.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. American drama chosen for excellence or representative of a significant era or movement in the theatre from the early 18th century imitative works through melodrama to the serious works of the 20th century. Centered on major American playwrights and their work. The course also examines the backgrounds of our modern stage, including readings in minor/historical works.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. This introductory survey course reads the literature - slave narratives, novels, poetry, drama, short fiction, essays, memoirs, autobiographies - by Black women from early slave narratives to the present. The works are read from socio-historical and cultural perspectives, and significant attention is given to the unique strategies and structures distinguishing an African American female aesthetic and critical tradition. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Black writers in the United States from Colonial times to the present. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Novels, dramas and poetry of protest against social injustices in the United States since World War I.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. English literature from its beginnings to 1660 examined through representative works of major and minor authors.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. English literature from the Restoration to the present. May be taken independently of English Literature I.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A survey of the Arthurian literature of the English Middle Ages, including the epic, poetic, and historical literature about the historical King Arthur and his times, followed by a study of the major works of English medieval literature in the Arthurian theme. Some attention will be paid to the Arthurian romances of the French writer Chretien de Troyes whose 12th century romances were the models for all English Arthurian romances. Major figures include: Aneirin and Taliesin, Celtic poets of the heroic ("Dark") age; Geoffrey of Monmouth; Marie France, who wrote in England, though in French: Chretien de Troyes; Layamon, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Gawain Poet (usually called "The Pearl Poet"), Thomas Malocy.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A survey or genre course on a topic not included in the regular departmental offerings. May be used by English majors as a departmental elective. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A survey or genre course on a topic not included in the regular departmental offerings. Satisfies the departmental major requirement in comparative literature. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. An introduction to anglophone children's literature during the period often designated as its "Golden Age," from the 1860s through the 1920s. Types of writing may include the following: early European fairy tales in translation, new fairy tales and fantasy, tall tales, religious and didactic writing, adventure fiction, female bildungsromans and family stories, school and animal stories, picture books, nonsense poetry, and children's theater. Historical matters addressed may include the history of childhood, the culture of sentiment, race and the post-Civil War U.S., and transatlantic print culture. Authors may include Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, L. M. Montgomery, Edward Lear, Mark Twain, George MacDonald, R. L. Stevenson, Eleanor Porter, Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Spofford, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Douglas Wiggin, L. Frank Baum, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, F. H. Burnett, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit, J. M. Barrie, and A. A. Milne.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Form and theme of the English novel through the 18th and 19th centuries, evaluated by literary, social, moral and cultural criteria.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. An introductory course in reading, interpreting, and evaluating poetry. Attention is paid to style, form, and poetic convention.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. An introduction to form and techniques in fiction through close reading and discussion of representative texts.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. This course explores the major forms, features, eras, and writers of world drama from ancient times to the present. Selections of plays explore ways in which cultural issues are performed. By examining a wide variety of such performances in their historical and political contexts, students will gain a broad appreciation for theater and a deep understanding of the many ways in which it expresses the tragedy and comedy of the human condition.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Examines recent narratives about immigration to the United States through the fiction, drama, and poetry of ethnic American writers. Emphasis will be on 1990 to the present, and issues addressed might include transnationalism, US empire, the classic immigrant narrative, assimilation, and multiculturalism. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. This course examines the problem of the legacy of the experience of the Vietnam War (sometimes called the "Vietnam Syndrome") as it is reflected in the culture of the United States and primarily in American literature since the end of the war in 1975. Differing discussions and evaluations of the problems bequeathed by the Vietnam War will be examined in works of political commentary, cultural criticism, history, and foreign affairs, as well as in literature.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. An introduction to the literature of Brazil focusing on the second half of the 19th Century and continuing to the present day . The course is taught entirely in English. Major movements such as lndianismo, Brazilian Modernism, the "Cannibalist" approach, the Generation of 1945 and Concretism will be explored. The course will address a number of themes, such as the invention of national identity; the history of slavery; the celebration of interracial erotic desire; gender and its relationship to power; Catholicism and candomble; "Third World" capitalism and class struggle; and the politics of samba and carnival as represented in the national literature.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A study of Latinx, Hispanic, and other Spanish-speaking or Latin American-descended writers in the United States. The course is taught entirely in English. The class will illustrate the history and diversity of the Latinx contribution to U.S. literature, challenging the exclusion of these writers and texts from the American canon, as well as exploring the shifting titles, identities and communities that are grouped under “Latinx.” Students will read works from Latinx American writers that deal with significant political questions and will analyze how writers engage with these issues in a variety of literary forms. In addition, students will see the aesthetic experimentation by Latinx writers connected to modernist and postmodernist movements as well as their complex inheritance of “magical realism” from important Latin American writers. The reading list may include William Carlos Williams, Rodolfo Acuña, José Martí, Américo Paredes, Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Junot Diaz, Ernesto Quiñonez, Gabby Rivera, and others.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. A study of literature and environmental humanities. Course will explore texts dealing with the human relationship to the natural environment. Topics covered may include environmental justice, sustainability, climate change, resource extraction, environment and place, environment and war, indigenous narratives, deforestation, wildfires, catastrophe, the Anthropocene, conservation and activism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and globalization.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. The history and development of English from its Indo-European and Germanic origins to the present, with emphasis on the morphology of Old and Middle English.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 110, ENGL 111, ENGL 113, ENGL 114, WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Selected poets from Sappho through Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath examined in relation to contemporary women poets. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An inquiry into what constitutes contemporary literary study: its subject matter and its underlying goals and methods. Students study literary and cinematic texts of various genres, as well as literary criticism and theory; inquire into the nature of authorship and of texts; examine and expand their ways of reading, interpreting, and writing about texts; trace the relation of literary criticism to theory; consider the relation of literary study to issues of power; and develop independent habits of thought, research, discussion and analytic writing that are informed by literary theory and criticism. Meets the Graduation Writing Requirement for majors in English.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. This course focuses on the fiction of Toni Morrison. Readings will include her published novels (from 1970 to the present), as well as selections from her critical writings. Such matters as the nature of her prose style, developments of her literary reputation, and place within the literary canon will be studied.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Students will read a broad representation of Young Adult fiction and concomitant theoretical essays and critical articles. Students will explore the issues surrounding what youths read, the books taught in our nation's schools, the constructs these texts espouse to their intended audiences and what such works reveal about the socio-cultural contexts within which they were produced.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A study of Asian American literature and film through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Topics addressed will include major issues in Asian American literary studies, such as orientalism, intersections of race and gender, changing gender roles, the invention of "tradition," bachelor societies, queer sexuality, family, intergenerational issues, war, and colonialism and empire. Ethnic groups addressed might include Chinese American, Filipino American, Hmong American, Japanese American, Korean American, South Asian American, and Vietnamese American, among others. Mutually Exclusive with GSWS 308.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. "American Indian Themes" will be organized around the following topics: attitudes toward the land and animals; relationship to the divine and its manifestations, gods and goddesses; culture, specifically understood as arts and rituals; gender identities and family structures; political realities of a conquered people; contemporary status of American-Indians and their lives.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. "African, Asian, and Caribbean Literature in English" will include four genres: prose, poetry, drama, and performance pieces. Significant connections will be drawn among the varieties of English and the thematic and critical issues being raised by experts who are studying these literatures.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. American poetry from Poe to Langston Hughes with an emphasis on what makes the American voice unique.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. American poetry beginning with William Carlo Williams and continuing to the present with an emphasis on new attitudes, techniques and contributions to American culture.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. American literature from the Puritans to 1800, tracing the development of colonial and revolutionary thought and the beginning of America's cultural independence.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An introduction to the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as a work of literature. Biblical texts covered in part or full may include the following: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations, the Song of Songs, Esther, Daniel, Jonah, and the major prophets. Attention will be paid to the themes, historical background, and formal literary qualities of biblical prose and poetry and their influence on later literature.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An analysis of American literary texts between 1820 and 1865. Covers American Romantics like Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe and transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Special attention given to political writings (e.g., Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass) and to women writers (including Fanny Fern, Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott).
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Examination of the origins and development of Romantic literature in Europe, ca. 1780 to 1830. Emphasis on comparative analysis of genres (poetry, drama, prose, memoir, and novellas) and themes common to Romantic-era writing, such as nature, utopia, freedom, the grotesque, and the uncanny. Authors may include Goethe, Hoffmann, Kleist, Holderlin, and Heine; Rousseau, Hugo, Nerval, and Chateaubriand; as well as overlooked writers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A study of contemporary Irish writers reflecting cultural, social, political, economic and class changes since the Irish Revival period. Writers include Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Eavan Boland, and Brian Friel.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The works of James, Howells, Twain, Crane, Norris, Dreiser and others are examined in light of the developing literary concepts of realism, naturalism and social Darwinism in the changing cultural period between 1860 and 1900.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. American fiction from 1918 to 1945 with attention to the works, criticism and lives of such authors as Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Study of American fiction since the end of the Cold War. Fiction will be examined in its cultural and political contexts. Authors considered might include Ana Castillo, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Bret Easton Ellis, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A course on American fiction from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, including such movements as Beat writing, postmodern literature, minimalism, and cyberpunk. These writers will be read in the cultural and historical contexts of the Cold and Vietnam Wars; the Civil Rights movement and other struggles to recognize American inequality regarding race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; philosophical developments such as deconstruction and poststructuralism; the rising significance of technology; suburban conformity and disaffection.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A comparative study of literature and ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on British, French, and German literature that reflects the legacy of the Enlightenment. Major literary and intellectual trends are analyzed, including the rational and satirical attack on traditional values. Works by Defoe, Diderot, Kant, Lessing, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sterne, Swift, Voltaire, and others.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Important works of literature from the long eighteenth century (ca. 1660-1780), including poetry, criticism, fiction, and drama, examined within the literary, cultural, social, and intellectual contexts of the Restoration era through the period of Enlightenment. Authors may include Behn, Burney, Cavendish, Defoe, Dryden, Fielding, Gay, Goldsmith, Haywood, Johnson, Montagu, Pope, Richardson, Sterne, Swift, and others.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Important works of English literature--poetry, criticism, philosophical prose, fiction and drama--examined within the literary, social, cultural and intellectual contexts of the period 1745-1800.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An introduction to the mind and art of Milton. Intensive study of one major work and selections representative of the full range of his achievement.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales and some of the minor poems in Middle English. No previous language training required.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The literature of England in the English Language from ca. 700 A.D. to A.D., in its historical and social contexts, and in relation to continental literature. Where appropriate, works are read in Middle English.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The revolutionary expression of such poets and essayists as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Lamb.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Major British poets from the Victorian period (1837-1901), including Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Major poets and prose writers of 16th and early 17th century England such as Sydney, Lyly, Nashe, Greene, Donne and Browne, whose individual contributions in poetry and prose reflect the literary and philosophical preoccupations of the period.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A course on popular fiction of the Victorian period (1837-1901), including such new genres as sensation fiction, detective fiction, neo-gothic horror, thrillers, colonial adventure fiction, and early science fiction. Central issues for the course include the late 19th-century explosion of print media and its establishment of modern genres that are still in place. Authors include such figures as Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Vernon Lee, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Machen, Olive Schreiner, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Mona Caird, George Du Maurier, Marie Corelli, Joseph Conrad, and H.G. Wells.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Major British novels of the Victorian period (1837-1901) by such authors as Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Subjects addressed will include some of the following: the development of nineteenth-century realism; the Victorian novel as a mode of social critique; the impact of new modes of publication and distribution on the novel form; changing views on gender, sexuality, psychology, race, empire, and the family as reflected in the novel; the growth of the historical novel; and the development of new popular genres in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, including sensation fiction, detective fiction, and neo-gothic horror.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A survey of significant non-fiction works of the period, including essays, memoirs, letters, journalism, travel and nature writing, popular science writing, conduct books, sermons, abolitionist and other political writings, and works of history. Major figures include Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. English drama from its Medieval origins to the closing of the theaters in 1642; from miracles, mysteries and moralities through the development of Tudor and Stuart drama. Shakespeare excluded.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Representative comedies and histories: their sources, devices and characteristics; their staging in the context of Elizabethan society; and Shakespeare's vision of man as actor.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Representative tragedies and romances: their sources, devices and characteristics; their staging in the context of Elizabethan society; and Shakespeare's view of man in the tragic mode and in the later romances.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. In-depth study of representative novels and short stories of the Modernist period in British Literature, 1900-1945. Fiction will be studied in its political, societal, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Authors read might include Joseph Conrad, D.H.Lawrence, E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, and Samuel Beckett.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. In-depth study of representative novels and short stories of the post-World War period in British Literature, 1946-1990. Fiction will be studied in its political, societal, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Authors read might include Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Kingsley Amis, Samuel Selvon, V.S.Naipaul, John Fowles, Buchi Emecheta, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. In-depth study of representative novels and short stories of the post-Cold War period in British Literature, 1990-present. Fiction will be studied in its political, societal, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Authors read might include Kiran Desai, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Salman Rushdie, Colm Toibin, Rohinton Mistry, Pat Barker, Monica Ali.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An in-depth study of James Joyce, one of the preeminent novelists of the twentieth century. The course will devote significant time to his long novel Ulysses. Other works including the short story collection Dubliners, the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the experimental novel Finnegans Wake, as well as Joyce's poetry, drama and critical writings, may also be included. Joyce's work will be studied in the contexts of international modernism, the artist's own life, Irish and British politics, and Joyce's place in literary history. His understanding of religion, gender, sexuality, language, nationalism, empire, the epic tradition, and Irish culture will all be subjects of discussion.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Irish fiction, drama, poetry, and prose during a period of energetic cultural nationalism from the 1890's through the Irish War of Independence and into the 1930's. Particular attention will be paid to the works of Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Gregory and others.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. An introduction to Irish drama from the great plays of the Abbey Theatre's earliest days through the late twentieth century. Playwrights studied may include W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, and Sebastian Barry. We will look at the formal and literary qualities of the plays and at the place of Irish drama in the emerging movement for Irish independence in the early years of the last century. The later plays will be considered in terms of their responses to the traditions of Irish drama and to contemporary cultural politics.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Works of the French symbolists and the Georgian and imagist poets of Britain, the continent and America whose theories and principles underlie modern poetics.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Distinctive movements in poetry since the imagists, comparing the diverse styles, themes and poetic theories of representative poets of English-speaking countries.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The nature of the sub-Saharan experience and vision through African myths and literary works within the context of culture, criticism and theory. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A comparative study of the literatures of African writers from countries with a history of British colonialism dating from the 1960's to the present. Topics will include: forms of storytelling and narrative representation; contemporary issues and themes in postcolonial texts; political and aesthetic frameworks; and dissemination of African literatures in a global market. ENGL 206 or 207 recommended. Meets World Cultures Requirement.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A scholarly interest beyond the scope of a presently offered course pursued under the direction of a specialist in that field of interest.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A second scholarly interest beyond the scope of a presently offered course pursued under the direction of a specialist in that field of interest or a study begun in ENGL 370 that continues for a second term.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Readings in the international fiction and non-fiction of women writers. The focus will be on such themes as the nature of the family, changing relationships between women and men, evolving concepts of the "feminine," the impact of colonialism on gender related issues (i.e. work and women's identity) and interrelationships between religion and women's lives.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The intellectual concepts of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism in the early 20th century, which continue to influence literature and art.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Plays representing the themes, values and dramatic techniques of selected British and continental (French, German, Italian, Russian and/or other) dramatists.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Major modern plays and the playwrights whose critical insights and historical perspectives led to their unique contributions.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The creative expression of such novelists as Gide, Hesse, Kafka, Proust and Woolf as shaped by events of the period 1910 to 1930, and how these works influenced the future of the novel.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The impossible and improbable in fairy tales, myth, legend, horror, sword and sorcery, the supernatural and high fantasy as a critical mode. Technological science fiction excluded.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Fiction of the future that speculates and extrapolates from the physical and social sciences, selected from both the classics and contemporary writings.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Comic and satiric devices compared and exemplified historically from Aristotle's time to the present.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. A critical overview of traditional, structural, and transformational- generative approaches to the problems of analyzing the grammar of the English language; practical applications for teaching English and for understanding grammatical principles as a means of more effective writing and literary analysis. Mutually Exclusive with LNGN 384.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s. This course will focus on the literature and culture of the period. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the movement had a global reach and defined a new era in African American artistic, cultural, and intellectual history. Urbanization, industrialization, and migration set the stage for what Alain Locke termed the“New Negro.” This period marked the emergence of a distinctive current of a modern Black literature, involving a remarkable constellation of writers who sought to give expression to the African American experience in all its complex range. Works will be analyzed from sociohistorical and cultural perspectives, with an emphasis on class, gender, and racial identity. Writers to be studied may include Fauset, Hurston, Hughes, Johnson, Larsen, Locke, McKay, and Toomer.
Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level ENGL course. Autobiographical readings, especially in letters, diaries, and journals, from ancient times to the present. Emphasis on the aesthetics of autobiography, autobiography as the mirror of an age, and autobiography as a model of the examined life.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Selected prose and poetry representative of the heroic, elegiac, religious and popular traditions of pre-conquest England, with recitation and reading in the original old English. No previous language training required.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 106 or HONP 101. The schools of Donne and Jonson and the works of Marvell and Dryden. Milton excluded.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Major innovation of dramatic form and conventions in the period from 1660 to 1715 on the English stage in the works of Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Dryden.
Prerequisite(s): Departmental approval; concurrent or completion of the intermediate field experience, SASE 451 and permission of the English teacher education coordinator. Communicating both the discipline and the human dimensions of English as a subject in the classroom, including familiarization with adolescent literature and the uses of computers in the English classroom. A course in the professional sequence not credited to the English major requirements.
Prerequisite(s): Any 300-level ENGL course. Restriction(s): Junior or senior English major. A culture, era, theme or literary approach studied through international literary masterpieces. Enrollment limited. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Restriction(s): Junior or senior English major. The works of one major American author in depth or of a group of authors whose works are related by theme, artistic form or cultural period. Enrollment limited. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): WRIT 106 or HONP 101. Restriction(s): Junior or senior English major. The works of one major English author in depth or of a group of English authors whose works are related by theme, artistic form or cultural period. Enrollment limited. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Specimens of Old English prose and poetry are read in the original language and studied for an appreciation of their literary art. No previous study of Old English is required. The first half of the course is spent on grammar and pronunciation, using prose from the chronicles and other works as examples. Oral recitation is required of all students. Poetry is studied in the second half of the course. Topics include the oral-formulaic tradition, the verse types, and the mixture of Christian and pagan themes characteristic of the literature.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Advanced study of an author, genre, movement, theme, or critical theory. See current announcement for specific topic. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different. Equivalent course ENGL 601 effective through Spring 2020.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Advanced study of an author, genre, movement, theme, or critical theory. See current announcement for specific topic. May be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different. Equivalent course ENGL 600 effective through Spring 2020.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Writing in one or more of the following: essay, review, scholarly research, autobiography, creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, screenwriting. May be repeated three times for a maximum of 12 credits as long as the topic is different. Equivalent course ENGL 603 effective through Spring 2020.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Specialized study of a topic, issue or theory in the field of Teaching Literature. See current announcement for specific topic. May be repeated for a maximum of 9 credits as long as the topic is different.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An intensive study of the Canterbury Tales and other works against their literary and social backgrounds, with special attention to Chaucer's language and to the procedures of Chaucerian scholarship. No previous study of Middle English is required.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 300. Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. This course offers a foundation for research and scholarly writing in literary study across specializations and an introduction to how to participate in the scholarly conversations of the profession. Students learn to distinguish between research, literary theory, criticism, and analysis, develop facility with print and digital archives and digital tools for literary study, and refine the use of research materials in their arguments. Recommended for the first semester of graduate study.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 300. Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An in-depth study of late-nineteenth through twenty-first century theoretical frameworks for the interpretation of literary texts, including structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and ecocriticism. Students undertake guided analyses of literary texts through the lenses of these critical theories.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Shakespeare's tragic drama against a background of classical and Medieval theories of tragedy, and in relation to the practice of his contemporaries. Consideration is given to Shakespeare's use of plot sources and to Elizabethan theories of rhetoric.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Shakespeare's comic art in the light of comic theory and practice from Aristotle to the present. Areas of analysis include Shakespeare's use of Roman and native English comedy, his language, characters, sources, and the traditions of Shakespearean criticism.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. A study of the ten English history plays. Shakespeare's use of historical sources and variations from historical fact are examined carefully. Attention is given to scholarship, criticism, and production of the history plays.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. A comprehensive view of the period of the apex of English drama, from 1550 to the closing of the theaters in 1642. Major works by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists other than Shakespeare are studied in the light of Medieval English drama and the new Renaissance theories of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Attention is given to changes in subject matter, tone, dramaturgy, and staging during the latter part of the period.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The poetry of Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, and Milton, supplemented by historical and intellectual background and by selections from the works of Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, Carew, and Cowley. Stylistic categories such as the metaphysical, the classical, and the meditative are considered in the light of a close critical analysis of the major poetry.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and some of the minor works are analyzed intensively. Styles, themes and techniques are considered in the light of Milton's life and the political and religious controversies of his time. The poetry is also studied in terms of its relation to Milton's Italian and classical models, his Elizabethan masters, and his contemporaries.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century in its cultural contexts. Topics include criticism and aesthetics, satire, the new nature poetry, and the relationship between literary forms and philosophical and critical ideas. Emphasis on the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Addison and Steele, and Thomson.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The rise of the English novel and its various traditions: Comic, realistic, satirical, psychological, and gothic. Authors include Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Austen.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The poetry of the two most important writers of the first generation of the Romantic movement in England. Emphasis is placed on the significance of their poetry in terms of the poets' own personal experience and in the context of the age of democratic and industrial revolution.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The responses of the major prose writers of the period to such issues as the rise of a large working class, the sudden growth of cities, demands for political freedom, and the promises and threats of science. The problems of establishing an aesthetic of nonfiction prose are also considered. Works by Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Macaulay, Huxley, Newman, Pater, and Wilde.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The Victorian novel in its historical and cultural contexts, with emphasis on the responses of the most vital art form of the age to the unprecedented changes in English life that took place during the era. Works by Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, the Brontes, Eliot, and others.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The course concentrates on the major mid-Victorian poets, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold, and to a lesser extent on their successors among the pre-Raphaelites, the aesthetes, and the rhymers.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An examination of British literature in the transitional period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writers might include Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence. Attention is given to the ways in which their works illuminate the movement from Victorian to modernist thinking and demonstrate the relation between literary consciousness and society.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Innovations in characterization, narrative technique, and theme under the impact of major twentieth-century political, economic, and cultural developments. Works by Forster, Huxley, Waugh, Orwell, Greene, Amis, Murdoch, Lessing, and others.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The poetry of major British and Irish writers from about 1890 to the middle of the twentieth century. Writers studied may include W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith, Sylvia Townsend Warner, W.H. Auden and more recent figures such as Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Topics may include stylistic issues (the multi-part long poem, the very short poem, fragments, allusiveness, revisions of nineteenth century poems), thematic issues (politics, sexuality nationality, class, gender), biographical background, and manuscript analysis.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The Irish contribution to twentieth-century literature and aesthetic theory, specifically to that brand of experimentation, individualism, and internationalism associated with the idea of the modern. Special attention to W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Frank O'Connor.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. All major and several minor American writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are studied within several contexts: literary, religious, philosophical, and political. Topics include the development of American literature, 1620-1800; the effects of puritanism and deism; the concept of the American dream; the originality of the founding fathers; and the extent to which modern American literature and culture reflect the colonial heritage.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An exploration of the Romantic movement in America with attention to transcendentalism and other social movements. Writers might include Brown, Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Whitman.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An intensive examination of the writings of the three "Dark Romantics" of the American Renaissance, set against their biographical backgrounds and the literary and historical contexts in which they worked.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The development of American realistic fiction, with emphasis on the works of Twain, Howells, and James in relation to their literary heritage and to their social milieu. Attention will also be given to local-color writers, such as Jewett and Freeman, and to naturalist writers, such as Crane, Norris, and London.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. After a brief examination of late nineteenth-century realism, the major writers of the twentieth century (up to World War II) are studied with special attention to the critical attitudes of the period and to related scholarship. Authors include Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Beginning with background material on late nineteenth-century poetry, the course examines selected major modern poets. The changing scene in modern poetry is noted, and the reading of contemporary poets is included. Works by Hart Crane, Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and others.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. American fiction of approximately the last forty years in the context of American culture and traditions. The course analyzes the characteristics of theme, technique, and sensibility which form the basis of a writer's response to the ambiguities of life in the contemporary world. Works studied might include Bellow, Roth, Didion, Walker, Doctorow, and Morrison.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The major American playwrights, such as Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, are placed in the perspective of their contemporaries and of the traditions of the American stage.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. This course explores the writings of Black American women. We will examine the conditions out of which Black women write and the ways in which their works are critiqued and theorized. Discussions will center on questions of race, gender, sexuality, and class; narrative approaches and literary devices; and the Black "womanist" creative tradition.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Pedagogical strategies to develop students' written critical responses to literature and other cultural texts encountered in the secondary school classroom, or at other levels of education. Both literary criticism and pedagogical theory inform the syllabus.
Prerequisite(s): Department permission required. This graduate level course prepares students to teach English on the secondary level (grades 6-12). ENGL 571 is required for graduate students enrolled in either the Initial Certification or MAT program. The course familiarizes students with the English classroom, the design of lesson and unit plans, writing assignments, and alignment of classroom activities with state curriculum standards and assessments. Students explore and experiment with approaches to teaching selected literary texts, including the adaptation of teaching styles and materials to meet the needs of diverse learners. This course provides a foundational understanding of composition pedagogy, including how to respond to and assess student writing.
Prerequisite(s): Departmental approval. The student completes a research project under the supervision of a member of the graduate faculty. This course is designed to allow investigations into areas not covered by regular courses and seminars. Permission of the graduate program coordinator and of the project supervisor is required before registration. May be repeated once for a maximum of 6 credits as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): Departmental approval. The student completes a research project under the supervision of a member of the graduate faculty. This course is designed to allow investigations into areas not covered by regular courses and seminars. Permission of the graduate program coordinator and of the project supervisor is required before registration. May be repeated once for a maximum of 6 credits as long as the topic is different.
Prerequisite(s): Departmental approval. Independent research project done under faculty advisement. Students must follow the MSU Thesis guidelines, which may be obtained from the Graduate School. Students should take ENGL 699 if they don't complete ENGL 698 within the semester.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 698. Continuation of Master's Thesis Project. Thesis Extension will be graded as IP (in Progress) until thesis is completed, at which time a grade of Pass or Fail will be given.