This pamphlet contains information submitted by the teaching faculty of the Department of English, SIUC, to inform students about courses being offered. The format for each course/section description is as follows:

•  Course number and title

•  Texts (if no texts appear, they will be announced later)

•  Course objectives

•  General comments about assignments and grades

•  Course procedures

The English Department Writing Centers (located in Faner 2281, Lentz Hall Learning Resource Center , Morris Library 103i, and Trueblood Hall Learning Resource Center ) provide resources for all SIUC students who want to improve their ability as writers. Students may be seen at any of the four Centers for single-visit appointments, which can be made two days in advance, or for regular weekly appointments, which continue for as much of the semester as the student wishes. There is no charge for these visits. The staff of the Centers are graduate and undergraduate students trained in effective one-to-one teaching strategies. For more information, check out our website www.siu.edu/~write or contact: Dr. Jane Cogie, Director, Writing Center , Faner 2281, 453-6863.

For explicit information on prerequisites, students should consult the Undergraduate Catalog.

For further information, please contact the Department of English.

ENGLISH 100 BASIC WRITING Director of Writing Studies

Ramage & Bean. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, Brief . 3 rd ed. Allyn & Bacon, 2003.

Belasco. Constructing Literacies: A Harcourt Reader for College Writers. Harcourt, 2001.

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 5 th ed. Longman, 2004.

Designed for students who want extra help with their writing, this course teaches the processes and strategies students will need to succeed in English 101, 102, and at the University. Students in the course will be given many opportunities to draft, edit, and revise their writing; to discuss their writing with their instructor and peers; to address their specific writing needs; and to develop the confidence and enthusiasm for writing that can lead to success in future courses in which writing may be required. Some class discussion and readings focus on the function and scope of language and communication in personal contexts.

English 100 is the first course in SIUC's Stretch Program . The Stretch Program is designed to help students develop the writing skills they will need to successfully complete the English Composition requirement and excel at the University. In the Stretch Program , students take English 100 and English 101 in consecutive semesters with the same instructor, using the same primary textbook for both courses and following a carefully sequenced curriculum. This allows both the instructor and student to spend time addressing specific writing needs at a pace and in a sequence that will help students become better writers and readers. English 100 is offered for degree credit (3 hours). English 101 and 102 also count as credit toward the Core Curriculum requirement.

Placement in English 100

All students in English 100 will be given a diagnostic essay test on the first day of class. The essay will be scored, and the results will be used to advise students whether to remain in English 100/ Stretch Program or enroll in an English 101 course. For further information, please review “The Student's Guide to Directed Self-Placement and the English 100/ Stretch Program ,” which will also help you decide whether English 100 is the proper course with which to begin the English Composition sequence.

Student Learning Objectives

In English 100, students will

•  become familiar with the writing demands of English 101 and of the University;

•  learn useful methods for producing and interpreting a variety of texts of familiar and interesting subjects;

•  learn processes for inventing and elaborating ideas, for shaping them into purposeful and successful writing, for revising, and for editing;

•  learn strategies for effectively developing and organizing sentences and paragraphs;

•  begin to appreciate, through dialogue and reflection, the important role of language and communication in the students' own writing and reading, in college, and in the world;

•  learn the appropriate use of Edited American English.

Coursework:

•  Four Papers: Each involves invention, drafting, revising, and editing (70% of course grade).

•  Writer's Notebook: The notebook may include responses to readings, practice with invention and style, peer responses, and a variety of other types of writing that

exercise students' abilities to write clearly and analytically and to read and think critically (20% of course grade).

•  Final Examination: Students will have two hours to write an essay on a topic to be announced (10% of course grade).

 

ENGLISH 101 ENGLISH COMPOSITION I Director of Writing Studies

Required:

Rhetoric: Ramage & Bean. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, Brief. 3 rd ed. Allyn & Bacon, 2003.

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 5 th ed. . Longman, 2004.

Dilks, Hansen, & Parfitt. Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Composition I provides students with the rhetorical foundations that prepare them for the demands of academic and professional writing. The course will help students understand the strategies and processes that good writers use whenever they try to accomplish a specific purpose. In college, these purposes include writing to understand and to demonstrate that understanding; writing to teach, entertain, or persuade a reader; writing to pose or solve problems; and writing to explain or challenge existing knowledge. The course will also teach students to respond effectively to the writing of others, and to use the suggestions of their teacher and their peers to improve their own writing. Some class discussion and readings focus on the function and scope of language and communication in a variety of social contexts.

Placement in English 101

To qualify for placement in English 101, students must have completed English 100 with a C or better or have elected to enroll in the course after reviewing the guidelines for Directed Self-Placement. In addition, all students in English 101 will be given a diagnostic essay test on the first day of class. The essay will be scored, and the results will be used to advise students whether to remain in English 101 or enroll in the English 100/101 Stretch Program , a two-semester sequence designed to help students develop the writing skills they will need to satisfy the English Composition requirement and to succeed in future courses that require writing and reading. For further information, please review “The Student's Guide to Directed Self-Placement and the English 100/ Stretch Program ,” which will also help you decide whether English 101 is the proper course with which to begin the English Composition sequence. This information is available on the Internet at http://www.siu.edu/departments/english/writing/index.html, from your instructor, or from the Writing Studies office in Faner 2390.

Student Learning Objectives

Upon completing English 101, students should be able to

•  effectively use and analyze forms and conventions of academic writing; these forms include argumentative and analytical writing;

•  understand the benefits of peer feedback on their ideas, writing processes, and written drafts and be able to cooperate with others in giving and receiving such feedback;

•  understand the importance of research to virtually all writing and be familiar with how to find articles and books using library resources, how to distinguish on-line sources from Internet sources, how to take notes, and how to synthesize information from multiple sources and integrate source material into discourse;

•  generate good writing using specific methods for inventing and elaborating ideas, for arranging these ideas to achieve a specific rhetorical purpose, for producing good style, for revising, and for editing;

•  write well in a variety of rhetorical contexts;

•  understand the ways that purpose, process, subject matter, form, style, tone, and diction can be shaped to address a particular audience in a specific situation;

•  demonstrate understanding of the ways that language and communication shape experience, construct meaning, and foster community;

•  use Edited American English appropriately.

Coursework

•  Six Papers: Each involves invention, drafting, revising, and editing (70% of course grade).

•  Writer's Notebook : The notebook may include responses to readings, practice with invention and style, peer responses, and a variety of other types of writing that exercise students' abilities to write clearly and analytically and to read and think critically (20% of course grade).

•  Final Examination: Students will have two hours to write an essay on a topic to be announced (10% of course grade).

 

ENGLISH 102 ENGLISH COMPOSITION II Director of Writing Studies

Required:

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 4 th ed. or 5 th ed. Longman.

Crusius and Channell. The Aims of Argument: A Brief Guide . 4 th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Instructors also select one of the following readers:

Jacobus. A World of Ideas . 6 th ed. Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2001.

Dilks, Hansen, & Parfitt. Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

A major goal of English Composition II is to prepare students for the complex demands of academic literacy. Successful academic writing requires that students be critical observers of personal and public knowledge; that they ask questions of reading and research, formulate hypotheses, design and conduct their own research, and identify further avenues of inquiry; and that they relate their discoveries persuasively to readers. To help them develop these abilities, English Composition II also teaches students the basic skills of summary, paraphrase, analysis, interpretation, critical thinking, and documentation. Some class discussion and readings focus on the function and scope of language and communication in a variety of academic contexts. The course is designed to help students become better writers and readers in the University.

Student Learning Objectives

In English 102, students will

•  reinforce the rhetorical foundations learned in English Composition I;

•  learn to apply the practical and productive knowledge of ethos, audience, subject matter, process, and context for complex purposes;

•  learn strategies for reading and analyzing texts;

•  sharpen their powers of observation and inquiry in conducting research in and possibly out of the library;

•  learn the methods of argumentation and analysis valued in academic contexts;

•  learn the appropriate use of documentation and Edited American English.

Coursework

•  Four Papers: Each involves invention, drafting, revising, and editing (70% of course grade).

•  Writer's Notebook: The notebook may include responses to readings, practice with invention and style, peer responses, and a variety of other types of writing and research that exercise students' abilities to write clearly and analytically and to read and think critically (20% of course grade).

•  Final Examinations: Students will have two hours to write an essay on a topic to be announced (10% of course grade).

 

ENGLISH 119 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING Staff

This course offers an introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry and short fiction. Students read and analyze published poetry and fiction, write poems and stories, and read and discuss the work of their classmates.

 

ENGLISH 120 ADVANCED FRESHMAN COMPOSITION Director of Writing Studies

Required:

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 5 th ed. Longman, 2004.

Students should check textbook listing for specific sections at the bookstore. 

This course provides an opportunity for students in the top ten percent of the English section of ACT or with the qualifying score on the CLEP to fulfill the six-hour Foundation Skills requirement in Composition with an Advanced Freshman Composition course. The course offers a reading and analysis of five critically important books addressed to the general reader. The books represent the following categories: autobiography; eyewitness reporting; an intellectual discipline; politics and the public good; and a book of fiction. Writing assignments involve rigorous critiques of each of the assigned books.

 

ENGLISH 121 THE WESTERN LITERARY TRADITION Chairperson, Professor Humphries

Students should check textbook listing for specific sections at the bookstore.

Required Reading :

Sophocles. Oedipus the King . or Plato. Symposium.

The Bible (especially Job, Genesis, and the Gospels).

Dante. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno. or Milton . Paradise Lost .

Cervantes. Don Quixote . (selections) or Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales . (selections).

Shakespeare. Othello. or Henry V. or The Tempest. or Twelfth Night .

Voltaire. Candide. or Austen. Pride and Prejudice .

Romantic verse: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats.

Franklin . Autobiography . or Melville. “Billy Budd.”

Kafka. “The Metamorphosis.” or Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground.

Woolf. A Room of One's Own.

This course promotes an awareness of tradition as something formed and revised within particular historical contexts. As a body of beliefs, premises, and ideas, tradition does not persist through time merely by the inertia of its dead weight. Tradition is a function of intellectual and aesthetic preservation, and literary tradition continues because readers and writers have reasons--both good and bad--to keep it alive. The course readings provide an opportunity to help students develop a rational view of the Western literary tradition by studying a variety of recurrent themes and forms. A few such themes may include innocence and divine justice (or punishment), love and sexuality, forbidden or tragic knowledge, and politics (not the least the politics involved in tradition itself). Formally, the readings can be arranged to pose questions about literary forms: epic, tragedy, comedy, parable, and the novel.

 

ENGLISH 204 LITERARY PERSPECTIVE ON THE MODERN WORLD Staff

Students should check textbook listing for specific sections at the bookstore.

The course begins with a focus upon culture and community and the family because the family is the gauge inevitably used to measure social change. It moves on to gender and ethnicity or the searching examination in this century of the difference between men and women and between persons from contrasting ethnic backgrounds. The course concludes with an examination of the ruptures and disjunctures in the twentieth century caused by political ideologies and conflicts and by the ethical problems raised by advances in technology and science.

Fox's section:

Beckett. Waiting for Godot. Grove.

Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms. Simon & Schuster.

Herr. Dispatches. Random House, 1991.

Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five. Dell.

Brecht. Galileo. Grove.

Bradbury. The Martian Chronicles. Spectra.

Ginsberg. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights.

 

ENGLISH 205 THE AMERICAN MOSAIC IN LITERATURE Staff

The predominant theme for the American Mosaic in Literature is family life, since family life seems at once to isolate and preserve cultural differences and to provide some means, usually through self-discovery, to resolve conflicts arising from these differences in a reconciliation without loss of identity. Course units: First Encounters; Captivity, Slavery -- and Escape; Immigration and City Life; Cultures and Families in Transition.

 

ENGLISH 206a LITERATURE AMONG THE ARTS: Professor Brunner

Topic: Graphic Novels, “Sequential Art” and Comix

Miller and Janson. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. DC Comics.

Hernandez. The Death of Speedy. Fantagraphics.

Clowes. Eightball (No. 22) issue of October 2001. Fantagraphics.

Clowes. Ghost World. Fantagraphics

Spiegelman. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles

Began (Set). Pantheon.

Brabner, Pekar and Stack. Our Cancer Year. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Satrapi. Persepolis : The Story of a Childhood. Pantheon.

Moore and Gibbons. Watchmen. DC Comics.

Gaiman. Worlds' End. DC Comics.

This Core Curriculum course fulfills the requirement for a “Fine Arts” area.

Note: The material in this course at times features images and language that were expressly designed to be controversial; please be aware of this before you enroll.

In this course we examine the visual and verbal arts of the comic strip. More precisely, we spend approximately five weeks on each of the following areas:

•  graphic novels that have been recognized as “serious” art productions

•  commercially produced superhero comic books from the 1930s to the 1980s

•  “comix” that stretch the definition of the medium

The course opens with a five-week long segment that considers an aesthetics for the comic strip, then applies that standard to graphic works that have been widely recognized as successful blends of both low art and high culture. These include Art Spiegelman's Maus, an exploration of one family's involvement with the Holocaust regularly assigned in literature and cultural studies classes; the “Duck Tales” invented by Carl Barks when Disney was looking in another direction; R. Crumb's controversial “underground” work; and Neil Gaiman's mythic narrative, The Sandman.

After this, we move back to examine the historical origins of the comic book in the 1930s, beginning with two signature creations, Superman and Batman, but also studying such important deviations from the superhero archetype as Wonder Woman, the noir-inflected Spirit, and the proto-feminist Jungle Girls of the late 1940s. After considering new alternatives introduced in the 1960s by artists working with Marvel's Stan Lee, we will focus on radical revisions of the form that were developed in the 1980s: Frank Miller's vigilante-like Batman ( The Dark Knight Returns) and Watchmen, Allan Moore's recasting of the superhero genre in political and cultural terms.

In a final five weeks, we consider some of the innovators from the last fifteen years who have moved the form into new areas. Practitioners here include Jaime Hernandez ( Love and Rockets), Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Daniel Clowes ( Ghost World), and Marjane Satrapi ( Persepolis ) . Since the works by both Pekar and Clowes have recently been made into movies, we will also look at the film version of American Splendor and Ghost World, comparing them with the original artwork and stories.

The classroom sessions will include occasional background lectures on production and theory, excerpts from relevant movies (Batman, Unbreakable, Kill Bill), in-class writing exercises, and discussions in which members will evaluate works. There will be two in-class written exams, a final, and numerous in-class brief exercises.

A good deal of the material we will be working with will be available on electronic reserve. This will include work by practicing cartoonists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud (each of who propose a practical set of principles for understanding how the comic srip is used by its audience), critical commentary from various theoreticians and cultural historians, interviews with writers and artists, and selected examples of comic strips that are no longer available because their collections are out of print. Other material that the course requires you to have access to includes the texts listed at the beginning of this description.

 

ENGLISH 290 INTERMEDIATE ANALYTICAL WRITING Director of Writing Studies

Required:

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 4 th ed. Longman, 2001.

Rosenwasser and Stephen. Writing Analytically. 3 rd ed. Thomson/Heinle, 2003.

Individual Instructors may select a Reader. (Students should check listing for specific sections at the bookstore.) 

English 290 is a course designed for any student enrolled in the University who wishes to improve his or her writing skills to meet the demands of academic writing across the disciplines. The emphasis is on analytical writing and research, and students will have opportunities to study and practice the rhetorical forms appropriate to their discipline. The course also teaches students the rhetorical foundations necessary for adapting writing to any situation.

Course Objectives

  •  to foster rhetorical awareness of the conventions, purposes, patterns of arrangement, forms of proof, and style appropriate to a particular discipline.

•  to teach methods of conducting and analyzing research, which includes textual and non-textual sources.

•  to provide ample opportunities for various writing experiences.

•  to develop prose that is clear, incisive, logically organized, persuasive, informative, and interesting.

•  to teach students strategies for improving the texture, rhythm, grace, and coherence of sentences and paragraphs and for suiting style to purpose, form, and situation.

 

ENGLISH 291 INTERMEDIATE TECHNICAL WRITING Director of Writing Studies

Required:

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 4 th ed. Longman, 2001.

Anderson . Technical Communication: A Reader-Centered Approach . 5 th ed. Thomson/Heinle, 2003.

This course provides students with a greater awareness of the demands of professional literacy. Students will assess rhetorical situations (context, purpose, audience and subject matter) that are typical of nonacademic settings, while fostering skills that are essential for academic literacy. Emphasis will be placed on writing as a process with particular focus on making the transition from academic to work world writing tasks: recursive writing, using group conflict for invention, synthesizing research and feedback, and confronting issues of authorship.

Student Learning Objectives

In English 291, students will

•  continue with the development of strategies for assessing and integrating the demands of context, purpose, audience and subject matter;

•  write documents that address a variety of audiences;

•  adapt form, style, and tone to enhance credibility;

•  develop strategies for assertive and effective collaboration;

•  analyze and synthesize research from various sources and of different genres;

•  sharpen powers of observation and listening through dictation and interviewing;

•  revise by synthesizing different levels and sources of feedback;

•  develop tools for organization and readability such as visual display;

•  reinforce usage of Edited American English.

Coursework

•  Five Assignments: Each involves invention, drafting, revising and editing (50%).

•  In Class Assignments: Includes assessing rhetorical situations, dictation, and responses to readings (20%).

•  Collaborative Project: (20%).

•  Final Examination: Students will have two hours to demonstrate their knowledge by choosing from a list of rhetorical situations, assessing the situation, and chronicling the process an individual or group would go through to produce the appropriate, final document (10%).

 

ENGLISH 300 INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE Analysis Professor Halliday

Morenberg. Doing Grammar. 3 rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002.

English 300 is concerned with the nature of language and linguistic inquiry. The course will begin with a brief review of the evolution and historical context of English. A general linguistic introduction will follow, which will include material on semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and dialect variation. Another area of interest will be language acquisition and development, both in children and non-native speakers of English. A strong emphasis will be placed on critical thinking skills, including recognition of the various purposes for which language is used and decoded, and the various ways that society, culture, economics and politics impact our language use. Concurrently, we will be studying elements of grammar and usage in Edited American English.

Because this is a required course for teacher training candidates, the course will contain both theoretical and applied pedagogical components. Students will have an opportunity to collaborate, as well as to develop and present their own “grammar lessons” to the class. To teach a subject well, one must gain a solid mastery of the subject matter—in this way, your teaching will facilitate your learning. This will culminate in an individual age-level-appropriate “teaching portfolio/textbook” of student-created and adapted materials. These textbooks can be modified to reflect your interests. For example, in addition to the required elements of the portfolio there are several optional assignments. Creative Writing students might choose to look at elements of language via reflective essays, poetry, and fiction. Students of literature might work on a stylistic and/or grammatical analysis of a favorite writer. Your textbook is meant to demonstrate your understanding and application of the content of the class—and how to position yourself as a co-creator of language among others.

 

ENGLISH 301 INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY ANALYSIS Professors Chandler , Klaver and Molino

Required of all English majors, English 301 is intended to be one of the first English courses a student takes. The emphasis is on writing based upon intensive rather than extensive reading, although selections are drawn from several major genres (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction).

Students are introduced to basic terms and concepts of literary study and to different ways of approaching literary texts. Students are required to write and revise at least seven papers of various kinds, including a documented research paper.

Chandler 's section (Section 2):

Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Selected Poems. Dover Thrift Edition.

Rossetti. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Dover Thrift Edition.

Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dover Thrift Edition.

World War One British Poets. Dover Thrift Edition.

Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt Brace.

Kafka. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Dover Thrift Edition.

Murfin and Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Bedford Books.

Aaron. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook. 5 th ed. Longman, 2004.

Requirements:

•  Five critical essays of varying lengths, with accompanying preliminary work

•  Weekly reading quizzes

•  One hour examination

Klaver's section (Section 4):

Edson. Wit. Faber & Faber.

---. The Theory Toolbox. Eds. Nealon & Giroux, Rowman & Littlefield.

James. The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Beidler. Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Poems will be given as handouts.

Requirements: short essays and a research essay.

Molino's section (Section 3):

Joyce. Dubliners. Signet, New American Library.

McPherson. The Weir. Dramatists Play Service.

Heaney. Open Ground. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Doyle. Paddy Clarke ha ha ha. Penguin.

Strunk &White. The Elements of Style. 4 th ed. Longman.

Requirements: Two documented research papers (6-8 pages), several short literary analyses of assigned texts, summaries of library research, oral presentations of library research.

 

ENGLISH 302A LITERARY HISTORY OF BRITAIN: BEOWULF TO CIVIL WAR , Professors Amos and Riedinger

  Required Texts Sections 1 & 2:

Abrams, et al., eds. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1A. The Middle Ages (or Medieval Period). 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Abrams, et al., eds. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1B. The 16 th and Early 17 th Century. 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

This course surveys British literature from its beginnings through the work of Milton . Emphasis is upon close reading of major works by major authors, although the course also traces the chief lines of literary continuity from the Middle Ages to the Restoration.

Amos' section:

Recommended:

Abrams. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7 th ed. Thomson Learning.

Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Hieatt & Hieatt. Bantam, 1964.

---. Canterbury Quintet: The General Prologue & Four Tales, A Reader-Friendly Edition. Conal & Gavin Press.

Requirements: active participation in class discussion; one recitation; one presentation; a student-selected mix of reading responses, short essays, and scholarly reviews; three preliminary examinations (no final examination).

Riedinger's section:

Requirements: Attendance, informed participation in discussion of assigned readings, three short papers, two hour-examinations and a final. Papers and all examinations are of equal weight in determining course grade.

 

ENGLISH 302B LITERARY HISTORY OF BRITAIN: RESTORATION TO 1900, Professors Boulukos and McEathron

This course surveys British literature from 1660 to 1900. Roughly a third of the course is devoted each to Restoration and 18 th- century literature, the Romantics, the Victorians. Emphasis is on an understanding of the literature itself, but students also consider works in relation to their historical eras and their social contexts.

Boulukos' section:

Required:

Abrams, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1C, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century. 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Abrams, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2A, The Romantic Period. 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Abrams, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2B, The Victorian Age. 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Recommended:

Equiano. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. Dover Thrift Ed. Dover .

Requirements:

•  Midterm examination

•  Final examination

•  5 page paper

•  5 response papers (2 pages ea.)

•  Attendance and participation

McEathron's section:

Abrams, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. 7 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Pope. Essay on Man and Other Poems. Dover Thrift Edition. Dover .

Requirements: Three 3-5 pp. papers, two examinations.

 

ENGLISH 303 LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES BEFORE 1900, Professor Anthony and Wells

This course surveys American literature from its beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, with emphasis on selected major writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain, and cultural movements such as Puritanism, Romanticism and Realism as well as the writing of women and ethnic and minority groups.

Anthony's section:

Lauter, et al. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I. 4 th ed. Houghton- Mifflin, 2002.

Foster. The Coquette. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Ed. Galloway. Penguin, 1986.

Twain. Pudd'nhead Wilson . Penguin Classics. Penguin.

Hawthorne . The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Baym. Penguin, 1983.

James. Aspern Papers / The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Curtis. Penguin, 1984.

Melville. Moby-Dick . Penguin Classics, Penguin.

The aim of this course is to provide you with an overview of the ways in which the notion of “ America ” and the concept of American citizenship were constantly being formulated and reformulated within the nation's literature, from the earliest moments of the founding of the new nation to the late nineteenth century. Starting with the basic hypothesis that much of early American literature revolves around the thematics of an individual who transgresses authority, we will attempt to understand how American literature reflects an on-going process whereby state authority is both critiqued and affirmed for reading audiences. Moving from gothic stories about the perils of passion and democracy in the post-revolutionary era; to tales of adultery and slave revolt; to post-Civil War texts about racial detection and ship-board mutiny, we will hear a culture telling itself a story about itself. We will have to decide as a class how to define the exact nature of that story, but suffice it to say that it is one in which individual passion, desire and pleasure combine with guilt, shame and discipline to form the unique and often perverse “American” selfhood evolving under the experiment known as democracy.

Requirements

•  Examinations:

There will be one midterm and one final examination. The examinations will test your factual knowledge about the readings, as well as your ability to process your ideas about the major conceptual themes we will cover during the term.

•  Response Papers:

There are fourteen response papers assigned over the course of the term. The response questions are due on the first day of each week of class. I will count your ten highest scores, which means that you can miss four papers without hurting your overall grade.

Well's section:

Adams . Democracy. Plume Books, Reissue edition, Penguin/Putnam.

Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Penguin.

Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Penguin.

Lauter, et al. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I. 4 th ed. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.

In his 1840 study, Democracy in America, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the United States ' revolutionary political spirit had not yet found its way into its books: “ America is perhaps in our days the civilized country in which literature is least attended to.” De Tocqueville even concluded that American literature was still fundamentally aristocratic: that in both form and content it resembled too strongly the British literature it was supposed to have transcended. “[T]hey transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary fashions that are current among the aristocratic nation they have taken for their model . . . [whereas] they hardly ever represent the country they were born in as it really is. . . .”

We will use de Tocqueville's words as touchstones in this course as we survey American literature from the late 18 th century to the late 19 th . Was he right to proclaim the American literature he found in 1840 “undemocratic”? Would subsequent writers better meet the standards of literary democracy? What, for that matter, should a democratic literature look like? What should be its subject matter? What forms and genres would best express democracy? Who should write it? Who should read it? How should it be read?

We will read a wide variety of authors and works with these questions in mind. Most of our selections will be drawn from the Heath Anthology of American Literature , and they will include poems by such figures as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, memoirs by Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, and works of narrative fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, and others. We will also read at least three novels, including Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and (inevitably!) Henry Adams' Democracy.

Required work is likely to include a midterm and final, two short (4-5 pp.) papers, regular attendance, and vigorous participation in class discussions.

 

ENGLISH 305 LITERARY HISTORY OF BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES: 1900 TO PRESENT Professor Dettmar

Baym, ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2D. 6 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Baym, ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2E. 6 th ed. W. W. Norton.

Damrosch, ed. Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2C. Longman.

This course surveys literature in America and Great Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present including the writings of women and minority and ethnic groups with an emphasis on comparing and contrasting significant writers in both countries and on the distinction between modernist works and postmodernist texts.

Requirements: 2 essays, midterm, final, weekly reading quizzes.

 

ENGLISH 307I FILM AS LITERARY ART Professor Williams

A critical introduction to some of the most influential and representative works in the study of World Cinema as an historical and artistic tradition. Specifically, this course studies cinema in relationship to the literary world from which film has emerged. Course screenings and readings are designed to give the student an awareness of the Cinema's claims as a unique art form, but also as Cinema is connected to significant movements in literature. The course will concentrate upon relevant movements in western mainstream narrative Cinema in comparison to the major historical achievements in Asian and Third World Cinema. The primary intention of the class is to stimulate students to engage in critical readings of films. Representative course topics: Early Cinema; French Impressionism and German Expressionism; Silent Hollywood; American Cinema 1930s-1945; Italian Neorealism; French New Wave; and Political Cinema in the West.

This course changes its emphasis periodically, but the common feature of the last two years has involved the question of film authorship in relation to the American cultural tradition. It is not a literature into film adaptation class whereby films are selected to illustrate the supposed “superiority” of the novel but rather one which examines the complex relationship film has to literature and culture in terms of relevant factors of history and industry.

Required texts:

Welles & Bogdanovich. This is Orson Welles. Ed. Rosenbaum. DaCapo Press, Inc.

Naremore. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Southern Methodist University Press.

Corrigan. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. 5th ed. Addison Wesley Longman.

As a core curriculum “Film as Literary Art” course, the cinema of Orson Welles is ideally suited for inclusion in the Spring semester slot. As a twentieth century renaissance man, Welles's talent encompassed the diverse worlds of literature, theater, acting, television, and film direction. As well as screening his acknowledged masterpieces such as Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil , the class will examine his various Shakespeare adaptations such as Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and The Chimes at Midnight as well as Welles's affinity to many national cinematic styles and movements such as “film noir.”

One particular emphasis of this class will be on the formative period of the New Deal Federal Theatre productions which offered Welles the opportunity to stage various classics such as voodoo Macbeth and the modern dress version of Julius Caesar as well as the Mercury Theatre radio productions, several of which (such as Heart of Darkness and The Magnificent Ambersons ) are very relevant to his later film productions.

This class will meet weekly with evaluations based upon written papers and regular class attendance.

 

ENGLISH 352 FORMS OF POETRY Professor Jordan

   

ENGLISH 365 SHAKESPEARE Professor Collins

This course offers an introduction to Shakespeare through study and appreciation of six of his major plays. Along with an examination of staging and performance of the plays in films, lectures and discussions invite the students to measure their contemporary experience of plays against their literary and historical backgrounds.

The Necessary Shakespeare. 2 nd ed. Ed. Bevington. Pearson Longman, 2005.

Detailed reading and discussion of six plays: two tragedies ( Othello and Hamlet ); one comedy ( Twelfth Night ); one “problem play” ( The Merchant of Venice ) ; one history play (Henry 5) ; and a late romance ( The Tempest).

Requirements: regular attendance and participation; frequent in-class writing and/or quizzes; four or five papers (5+ pages each); and mid-term and final examinations.

 

ENGLISH 381A CREATIVE WRITING: BEGINNING FICTION Staff

This is the first fiction workshop in a series intended for majors in Creative Writing. Students will be expected to read and respond to literature with careful attention focused on craft, language, and form. In addition to the study of established writers, students will complete several writing exercises to strengthen their abilities within specific elements of the craft of fiction (point of view, scene, dialogue, etc.). Later in the semester, students will be expected to write one or two complete stories and participate in a workshop with the class.

 

ENGLISH 381B CREATIVE WRITING: INTERMEDIATE FICTION Professor Lordan

Charters. The Story and Its Writer. Compact 6 th edition. St. Martin Trade.

Intermediate Fiction Writing continues the development of the art and craft of fiction writing, concentrating on attention to language and the forms of contemporary and classic short stories. Prerequisite: 381A (Beginning Fiction Writing)

Requirements: Briefly, the following are required:

•  Two short stories, each of which you will revise, one of which you will revise again.

•  Readings and writing exercises as assigned.

•  Two memorizations and recitations.

•  Class attendance.

•  Workshop participation, both written and oral.

 

ENGLISH 382A CREATIVE WRITING: BEGINNING POETRY Professor Jordan

English 382A is an introductory level-poetry writing class, taught in mostly workshop, rather than lecture, format. Prerequisite: English 101. This class is for those who seek to generate new poems and receive feedback on those poems. Previous poetry-writing experience is not required, but active class participation is.

 

ENGLISH 382B CREATIVE WRITING: INTERMEDIATE POETRY Professors Joseph

Thiel. Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry. Longman.

This intermediate-level workshop is designed for students with previous poetry-writing experience. We will write new poems, read and comment on one another's poems, and continue to learn about poetry's formal elements. We will use our text as a basis for poetry discussions and as a source of poetry exercises. Class requirements: a portfolio of 10 poems, one book review, participation in a public poetry reading, class participation, regular attendance.

 

ENGLISH 401 MODERN ENGLISH GRAMMARS Professor McClure

Required Texts:

Buttny. Talking Problems: Studies of Discursive Construction. State University of New York Press, 2004.

Kolln. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. 4 th ed. Longman, 2003.

Lakoff & Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 2 nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Vygotsky. Thought and Language. Rev. ed., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986.

Group Texts : (you'll need to purchase only one of the following to complete your group project):

Delpit & Dowdy, eds. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. The New Press, 2002.

Cameron, ed. The Feminist Critique of Language , 2 nd ed. Routledge, 1998.

Gonzalez & Melis, eds. Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement: Education and the Social Implications of Official Language.

Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.

Ogulnick, ed. Language Crossings: Negotiating the Self in a Multicultural World. Teachers College Press, 2000.

Valli & Lucas. Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction. 3 rd ed. Gallaudet University Press, 2001.

In the most general sense, a grammar is a set of relational principles that direct the living process of the mind making connections. With that in mind, this course explores modern attempts to articulate grammars that can account for the dynamics of texts and the production of meaning. Course participants, therefore, survey the discipline of linguistics as it relates to literacy and English studies. Among the topics we'll cover are these: prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, linguistics and grammar, the “ebonics” controversy, the “English only” debates, and grammar and gender. We'll also consider options for teaching grammar and ways in which the study of grammar can enhance the reading of any text. The knowledge gained from this survey provides students in English with an extensive linguistic background for graduate study in composition, literacy, literature, and rhetoric.

Requirements: daily/journal assignments; major paper assignment; group project (oral and written); a midterm and a final examination. Graduate students will also write a longer paper.

 

ENGLISH 404B MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY, HISTORY AND ROMANCE Professor Amos

Topic: Outcries, Outlaws, and Acting Out in Medieval Lyric, Ballad, and Drama

Required:

Alexander, trans. The Earliest English Poems. Penguin, 1985.

Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology . Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Knight and Ohlgren, eds. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Medieval Institute, 1997.

Stone, ed. and trans. Medieval English Verse. Penguin Books, 1971.

Stevick, ed. One Hundred Middle English Lyrics. University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Supplemental:

Child, ed. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Vol. III, Dover , 1965.

Davidson, ed., Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge. Medieval Institute, 1993.

Duncan, ed. Medieval English Lyrics: 1200-1400. Penguin Classics. Penguin, 1996.

Morgan, ed. Medieval Ballads: Chivalry, Romance, and Everyday Life: A Critical Anthology. Peter Lang Publishing. Rose, ed., The Wakefield Mystery Plays. W. W. Norton.

Silverstein, ed. English Lyrics Before 1500. Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Walker, ed. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Blackwell.

Throughout the more than eight hundred years comprising the Middle Ages, popular literature included lyric celebrations of life and God, ballads of fantastic heroes and lovers, and dramatic stagings of secular and sacred issues. This course looks at the earliest English developments of three genres of popular literature: lyric, ballad, and drama. We will explore the different social, civic, and religious functions these genres served and examine how the presuppositions of medieval literature align with and differ from their modern counterparts.

Lyric Ranging in subject from the Blessed Virgin Mary to Mary the Lusty Milkmaid, medieval lyrics lament, encode, and celebrate developments of English thought and culture from their Old English beginnings as 'Elegiac Lyrics' through their Middle English incarnations as 'Love Poems Religious and Erotic.'

Ballad Originally oral narratives, anonymous ballads represent the varied ways popular imagination engaged contemporary social and political interests through adventurous tales -- most notably our central focus, the popular hero Robin Hood.

Drama From biblical reenactments to farcical romps, throughout Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, public drama was an integral part of society at every level. Written, staged, and performed by ordinary citizens, townspeople, and clerics, noble interludes and sex farces, liturgical plays and mystery cycles, morality plays and humanist dramas drew little distinction between actor and audience, in marked contrast to modern drama, with its carefully effaced and passive audience.

As we examine the trajectories of these three genres we will attend to the discourses of life and thought in the Middle Ages, examining presentations and critiques of religious/ faith institutions, social structures, and ideological systems. These multi-layered medieval texts functioned at once as repositories of biblical and legendary histories, as purveyors of contemporary social lessons, and spiritual guideposts, disparate uses which could not always be reconciled. While seemingly written to celebrate and to validate a Church-and-king centered hierarchy, medieval popular literary texts call into question the inherited traditional and monolithic view of the world as divinely divided into three estates – those who work, those who pray, and those who fight – and interrogate the structures and functions of these discourses which sought to define institutional beliefs and individual actions.

Modus operandi

We will ground our study in close readings of primary texts -- all in modern English or heavily-glossed editions. In our examinations we will examine and deploy ancient, medieval, modern, and post-modern methods of critical reading including philological, biographical, New Critical, historicist (both old and new), materialist, feminist, and, most consistently, the methodologies of Cultural Studies (with their emphasis on high/low distinctions, production and consumption, and performance and performativity).

Class time will be a confection of lecture, student presentations, and discussion. To provide a range of opportunities for involvement, assignments will be distributed among a variety of written assignments (including response essays, formal essays, reviews of scholarship) and an oral component including informal participation and formal presentations.

No prior experience with medieval languages or literatures is assumed, and non-specialists are encouraged to use this course as a gateway to this fascinating and rewarding literature.

 

ENGLISH 425 MODERN CONTINENTAL POETRY Professor Fox

Rimbaud. A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. New Directions.

Rilke. Duino Elegies. W. W. Norton.

Mandelstam. Fifty Poems. Persea.

Montale. Cuttlefish Bones. W. W. Norton

Lorca. Selected Poems. New Directions.

Milosz. Facing the River. Ecco.

Cesaire. Notebook of a Return to the Nativeland. Wesleyan.

This course will involve intensive study of the poetry of Rimbaud, Rilke, Mandelstam, Montale, Lorca, Milosz, Cesaire, and Durrell, along with some of the surrealists.

Requirements: Regular attendance and conscientious participation. For undergraduates: a series of short essays, midterm and final examinations. For graduate students: one brief analytical paper, two substantive essays, final examination.

 

ENGLISH 436 MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS Professor Anthony

Topic: “Gothic America : Commerce, Horror, and Middle-Class Desire, 1800-Present”

Hawthorne . The House of the Seven Gables. Ed. Stern. Penguin Putnam, 1981.

---. The Blithedale Romance . Penguin Classics. Penguin.

James. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales. Penguin Classics. Penguin.

---. The Aspen Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Penguin Classics. Penguin.

Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Ed. Galloway. Penguin, 1986.

Irving . The Sketch Book: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. Signet Classics. Penguin.

Stoker. Dracula. Ed. Hindle. Penguin Putnam, 1993.

Dickens. Oliver Twist.

In this course we will examine the gothic as the genre in which American culture has conducted its most intensive cultural responses to the rise of capitalism and consumerism over the past 200 years. Focusing on the way in which the middle-class family has acted as the focus of this genre, we will spend time seeking to understand how the thematics so central to the gothic—the haunted house; the maiden in distress; incest; gender panic; etc.—can themselves be understood as attempts to make sense of the increasingly fraught nature of middle-class selfhood as it has evolved within a capitalist system. This course will be comparative in nature, which is to say that we will move back and forth between nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and very recent versions of the gothic in fiction and film. We will also cheat a little bit, and include analysis of a couple of British texts central to American versions of the gothic.

Film:

Burton . Edward Scissorhands

Kubrick. The Shining

Demme. The Silence of the Lambs

Hitchcock. Psycho

Hitchcock. Rear Window

Friedkin. The Exorcist

Fincher. Fight Club

Requirements: Undergraduates: 3 papers of 5-6 pages in length; Graduates: 2 papers of 5-6 pages, one longer term paper.

 

ENGLISH 445 CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS OF WESTERN LITERATURE Professor Humphries

Lawall, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces . Vol. I. 7th ed. W. W. Norton.

Strassburg. Tristan . Penguin.

Voltaire. Candide . Ed. Adams. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton.

Prévost. Manon Lescaut . Trans. Tancock. Intro. and notes Sgard. Penguin.

Goethe. Faust. Part One. Revised ed. Bantam.

This course provides a historical, thematic, and stylistic study of literary masterpieces by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Gottfried, Rabelais, Cervantes, Voltaire, Abbé Prévost, and Goethe. Particular emphasis is on the influence of these authors' works on later English, American, and European writers, all together establishing the Western literary and cultural tradition as we now know it.

Requirements: There will be a midterm and a final, each containing ID questions (covering the reading assignments) and a section requiring a short essay. Also, there will be a short term paper on a subject of a comparative nature. Graduate students are required to give in addition an oral report on an assigned subject. NOTE: Because of the substantial amount of reading required for this course, it is absolutely essential that students keep up with the daily reading as assigned in the syllabus.

 

ENGLISH 452 NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH FICTION Professor Collins

Brontë. Jane Eyre . Penguin.

Brontë. Wuthering Heights . Penguin.

Dickens. Great Expectations . Penguin.

Eliot. The Mill on the Floss . Penguin.

Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd . Penguin.

Thackeray. Vanity Fair . Penguin.

Trollope. Barchester Towers . Penguin.

Reading and discussion of seven classic Victorian novels (1847-1874) chosen for their variety of subject and their beauty of language and form. We will place these novels within their cultural settings and explore, in particular, their treatment of social class, personal ambition, family relations, and erotic love.

Requirements: Some lecture, but chiefly discussion in which active, regular participation is required. Two or three papers (50% of final grade), mid-term and final examinations (30%), and regular in-class writing and/or quizzes (20%). In their final papers, graduate students must show command of some recent criticism or scholarship (chosen from sources placed on reserve), while undergraduates have the option of rewriting a passage from one novel as if it had appeared in another and analyzing their revision in detail.

 

ENGLISH 462 ENGLISH RESTORATION AND 18 TH CENTURY DRAMA Professor Boulukos

Required Text:

Canfield, ed. Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama Concise Edition. Broadview, 2003.

The period of the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most turbulent in all of English history. Parliamentary and Puritan forces defeated the Royalists and took control of the country after the civil war, going so far as to execute the King, and even to close down the theater (due, of course, to its immorality). Perhaps naturally, when the Puritans could not maintain power after Cromwell's death, both the royal court and the theater returned with a vengeance. For the first time, women were allowed on the stage, a development that did nothing to diminish the perception of the theater as transgressive and even sinful. Having been completely outlawed, playwrights now flaunted their immodesty as a badge of honor, and the comedy of the period is distinguished by some of the bawdiest and wittiest plays ever written in English. Figures like the poet Lord Rochester, a notorious rake and libertine, the actress Nell Gwynn, who acknowledged herself to be “the King's whore,” and the playwright Aphra Behn, one of the first women to support herself as a professional writer, seemed to typify the era. None of these developments did anything to placate the Puritans, and in 1698, Jeremy Collier launched an attack on “The Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.” The return of the King was often addressed through the metaphor of patriarchal power, and therefore gender relations and marriage became doubly important to dramatic plots. Furthermore, England 's emerging colonial ambitions, and its internal political strife, led to a strong interest in heroic and tragic roles. In the early eighteenth-century, the most popular plays followed the poetry of the age by turning to satire and even farce. This produced one of the most enduringly popular plays of all time in John Gay's Beggar's Opera , set in London 's criminal underworld, and drawing constant parallels to the upper classes and the political figures of the day. Finally, the best plays of the late century, such as Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conque r and Sheridan 's School for Scandal self-consciously returned to the bawdy wit of the Restoration era. Theater was never as much fun again, at least not until Oscar Wilde wrote over one hundred years later.

In this course, we will examine the theater of the time in detail, reading a dozen plays spanning the restoration and eighteenth century. We will pay close attention to the historical and cultural contexts of these plays, and to the contributions of female playwrights. Texts, in addition to those mentioned above, will likely include Behn's The Rover , Wycherly's Country Wife , Centlivre's Bold Stroke for a Wife , Southerne's Oroonoko , Otway's Venice Preserved , Farquhar's Beaux Strategem , and Cowley's Belle's Strategem.

Requirements:

Response papers, Midterm, Final Exam

Undergrad: 2 5pp papers

Grad: 10p paper, annotated bibliography, brief report on criticism.

 

ENGLISH 468 AMERICAN DRAMA Professor Klaver

Topic: American Metropolis

Treadwell. Machinal. Theatre Communications Group.

Mamet. Glengarry Glen Ross. Grove.

Parks. In the Blood. Dramatists Play Services.

Wilder. Our Town. Perennial. HarperCollins.

Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun. Vintage. Random House.

Rice. Street Scene. Samuel French.

Valdez . Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Arte Publico Press.

English 468 covers plays of the twentieth century that speak to the place of the American city, metro and micro, in contemporary culture. We study plays that are set in Chicago, Los Angeles , New York as well as the small towns and suburbs.

Undergraduate requirements: oral response, 10-page research essay, midterm and final examinations.

Graduate requirements: oral report, 15/20-page research essay, theory reports.

Plays:

Machinal , Sophie Treadwell

An Enemy of the People, Ibsen (dramatized by Arthur Miller)

Our Town, Thornton Wilder

Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), The Wooster Group

A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

Street Scene, Elmer Rice

In the Blood, Suzan-Lori Parks

Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet

The Music Man (the movie)

Chicago (the movie)

Dutchman, Amiri Baraka

Zoot Suit , Luis Valdez

 

ENGLISH 472 SHAKESPEARE: THE MAJOR TRAGEDIES, DARK COMEDIES, AND ROMANCES Professor Lamb

Required Texts:

Shakespeare. Cymbeline. Folger Shakespeare Edition.

---. King Lear. Folger Shakespeare Edition.

---. Othello. Folger Shakespeare. Edition.

---. Tempest. Folger Shakespeare Edition.

---. Troilus and Cressida. Folger Shakespeare Edition

---. Winter's Tale. Folger Shakespeare Edition.

Requirements: two papers, two hourly tests, and a final examination. There will also be quizzes, response paragraphs, and summaries of secondary material for each play. Graduate requirements may vary somewhat to include an extra assignment.

 

ENGLISH 481 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY Staff

This course is designed to introduce prospective and in-service teachers to the field of literature for the adolescent. Better defined as "literature AND the adolescent," the course looks at what adolescents read and why. Beyond the psychological background implied by this, students look at how to evaluate materials in this area and at the application of critical approaches, particularly reader response theory, in the teaching of literature to adolescents. There is also an emphasis on multicultural literature: authors, reading cross-culturally, and the impact of race, gender, and culture on how we read and write.

 

ENGLISH 485 PROBLEMS IN TEACHING COMPOSITION, LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND READING IN HIGH SCHOOL Staff

This course acquaints students with the methods and materials for teaching English in the secondary schools. It is intended for English majors planning to do student teaching in English in a secondary school within the following year. The course focuses on methods, content, instructional materials, and organization of secondary English programs.

Requirements: Journal, group project, two analytical essays, three-week unit plan, microteaching lesson, and a final examination.

 

ENGLISH 491 TECHNICAL WRITING Professor McClure

  Required Texts:

Lay, et al. Technical Communication. 2 nd ed. McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Aldred, et al. The Technical Writer's Companion. Bedford Books, 2002.

Additional Texts: (For those interested in teaching Technical Writing)

Bridgeford, Kitalong, & Selfe, eds. Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication. Utah State University Press, 2004.

Rankin. The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals. Jossey-Bass, 2001.

For those interested in developing their technical writing skills, English 491, Technical Writing, will introduce the processes, genres, and conventions of writing for the workplace. Students will produce a variety of different kinds of written documents, including memos, reports, proposals, etc., and reflect critically on the processes and conventions used to produce such texts. We also will focus on collaboration in the production of written documents, a common phenomenon in the work world. And you will be required to have an e-mail address and communicate via e-mail during the course.

Requirements: a variety of technical documents in draft and revised form; in-class impromptu writing; writing portfolio; final examination.

For those graduate students interested in also learning how to teach technical writing, this course will introduce major issues involved in technical communication and teaching it. In addition to doing the technical writing required of the other students in the class, these students will be asked to do additional readings, keep a reading notebook or journal, and meet separately once a week at an agreed-upon time to discuss the teaching of technical writing. These students will also be required to participate as aides in the teaching of the course. Their responsibilities could include teaching a small unit of the course and/or conferencing with individual students or small groups

 

ENGLISH 492A CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR: FICTION Professor Westmoreland

This course will follow the workshop format. Students will submit original fiction to the class for group critiquing. The requirements for this course are a minimum of thirty pages of original fiction and several analytical essays.

 

ENGLISH 493 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Professors Brunner and Cogie

Brunner's section:

Topic: An American Studies Approach to American Poetry in the 20 th Century.

Nelson, ed. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Oxford University Press., 2000.

This course satisfies the area requirement for 20 th Century American literature. Prerequisite: English 301(Recommended: English 305)

This course focuses on two periods in the twentieth century – one in the first half, the other in the second half – when poetry in America grew at a sudden and unprecedented rate. Each period is about twenty years in length, but apart from that, they are remarkably unlike one another. The first occurred between 1910 and 1930, and the second occurred between 1955 and 1975, give or take a few years. The first period was marked by a disruptive world war that saw America 's role on the world stage as entirely transformed, while the second opened during a time of prosperity but ended after a long and confusing muddle in an Asian war. If it is not possible to generalize about what causes poetry to flourish based solely upon short-term patterns in the nation's history, it may be necessary to look in a larger scale.

As much as one can call American Studies a discipline, it should be at least defined as a practice that openly invites what Albert O. Hirschmann calls “trespassing,” in which the scholar wanders across borders that more commonly separate one art form from another. In both the twenty-year periods that we will investigate in this course, poetry regularly trespasses into areas where it had not always been welcome as a visitor. Indeed, poems in 1910-1930 often bore a distinct resemblance to the look of visual art (William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore), or sounded in the same register as American musical idioms like the blues and jazz (Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings), or acted as if they were privileged to charge the details of history with a new vitality (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound), or were especially useful in disseminating “down-home” advice in the manner of older religious speakers (E. A. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost). In a similar manner, the poets writing in 1955-1975 were just as quick to work within forms taken from disciplines tangential to the poetic tradition. John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell borrowed from the practice of psychoanalysis; Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg borrowed from an older prophetic heritage; African American poets like Melvin B. Tolson borrowed from later developments in jazz like bebop; and poets as varied in their technique as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara borrowed from the performance-based procedures employed by nonrepresentational painters.

For the semester, the writers we will study include Frost, Williams, Hughes, Pound, Moore, Eliot, Stevens, Crane, Rukeyser, Lowell, Bishop, Tolson, Ginsberg, Plath, O'Hara, Ashbery and Merrill, among others. Of course any close reading of poetry will depend upon the linguistic conventions that poets assume from their predecessors, and the class will always be aware of such conventions as rhythm, syntax, and line break. We will spend some time examining prosody, for example, in various works. But to understand American poetry especially in these two extraordinary periods of its growth, it is necessary not only to read the poetry carefully but to examine that poetry in the light of these other influences – the art, the music, the history, the social science, the medicine of its time. While this course concentrates primarily on the work of the major poets of the twentieth century in America , it offers explanations of their poetry not just in relation to the literary tradition in English but also in relation to other practices, other disciplines, other trends and movements.

The requirements will include several short papers, and there will be an opportunity for a longer research project. There will be a final examination.

The central text is Anthology of Modern American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson ( Oxford , 2000). This anthology is supported by a well-maintained website known as MAPS (Modern American Poetry Site:b “www.english.uiuc.edu / maps”) which presents background information, commentary and criticism on all these poets. We will regularly draw upon this website and some others as part of the reading material.

Cogie's section:

Topic: One-to-One Teaching: Practice and Theory

Gillespie & Lerner. Allyn & Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2 nd ed. Allyn & Bacon.

Course Pack.

One-to-One Teaching: Practice and Theory provides students with the opportunity for hands-on experience in tutoring writing and for learning the theories that underpin that practice. The course should be of interest to future teachers and individuals going into careers that demand strong writing and one-to-one teaching skills.

Students will spend three hours each week in the Writing Center , observing tutorials at first and then moving on to conduct their own tutoring sessions. Class time (two hours per week: Mon. and Wed., 4:00 to 4:50 p.m.) will involve discussion and application of the theories central to writing center work, including theories of collaborative learning, the writing process, error analysis, and the sociolinguistic dimensions of the student-tutor relationship. The course will also introduce students to theories and strategies for working with particular student populations such as English as a Second Language and dialect speakers, basic writers, and students with learning disabilities.

Through the hands-on practice and discussion of theory, students will learn key elements of the one-to-one teaching of writing: analyzing of the weaknesses and strengths of student essays and the causes behind the weaknesses, assigning priorities for tutoring, and applying a wide array of tutoring strategies (such as open-ended questioning, listing and clustering, glossing, and error analysis) to meet the needs of the individual student writer.

Prerequisites: A or B in English 101 and 102, and permission of the instructor.

Requirements: Reading and Tutoring Journal, analyses of sample essays, one short paper, and one research project.

 

ENGLISH 494 CULTURAL ANALYSIS AND CINEMA Professor Williams

Topic: Kubrick: Cinematic Satire and Parody

Nelson. Kubrick: Through A Film Artist's Maze. 2 nd ed. Indiana University Press, 2001.

Falsetto. Kubrick: A Narrative Stylistic Analysis. 2 nd ed. Praeger Publishers.

Corrigan. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. 5 th ed. Pearson Education. Prentice Hall.

Other texts and articles will be on reserve in the Undergraduate section of the Morris Library.

This course will examine the films of Stanley Kubrick according to the parameters of the ENGL 494 Cultural Analysis and Cinema in terms of both authorship and cultural context. It intends to relate the director's films to certain literary cinematic issues, most particularly associations involving literary satire and modernism as well as Michel Ciment's observations concerning the Quattrocento Renaissance traditions. It will begin by screening two rare Kubrick documentary shorts, The Day of the Fight and The Flying Padre (both 1951) before study of the features begins. Relevant works will include Killer's Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1958), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001-A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). An additional bonus for this class will be the screening of the original, uncensored European version of Eyes Wide Shut .

Requirements: Class assignments will involve four in-depth papers.

 

ENGLISH 495 A SURVEY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Professor Zimra

  Required:

Keesey. Contexts for Criticism. 4 th ed. McGraw Hill.

Richter. Falling Into Theory. St. Martin 's Press, 2000.

Phelan. Tempest Casebook. St. Martin 's Press, 2000.

Recommended:

Lentricchia, ed. Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2 nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Childres, ed. Columbia Modern Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Columbia University Press, 1995.

Richter. The Critical Tradition. Bedford Books.

Class Format. Depending on your skills and comfort level, we'll spend the first three weeks reviewing basic texts and foundational positions in the history of criticism from Plato onward, before looking simultaneously at modern theoretical positions and their applications (Keesey). Along the way, we shall review critical concepts and the evolution of technical terms of literary analysis (Richter). We proceed along two intertwined (and often conflictual) axes: (1) historical, asking what terms and concepts have gradually defined literature as a separate human activity with its own critical tools; and (2) analytical, considering how, and why literature and literary criticism became, for the modern age, separate and sometimes antagonistic activities.

Required Work (on top of the assigned reading, of course):

undergrads (70%) and grads (50%): weekly responses, up to 3pp; undergrads will have a final (30%); grads a critical portfolio with annotated bib. (25%) oral reports: required for grads (25%); extra-credit for undergrads (15%).

 

ENGLISH 506 OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH STUDIES Professor Riedinger

Topic: Studies in Beowulf

Required:

Klaeber, ed. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. w/First and Second Supplements. Heath, 1950.

Recommended:

Blair. An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England . Cambridge University Press.

Donaldson, trans. Beowulf. W. W. Norton, 1966.

Hall. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4 th ed. w/suppl. By Meritt. Cambridge University Press.

Readings in the great English epic poem Beowulf in its original Old English language. Primary emphasis will be on the poem itself, the art of its translation and its poetics. In addition to Klaeber's modern edition of Beowulf, we shall learn to read from the original, handwritten manuscript (in facsimile), a record from the First Millennium (A.D.). Studies will also include the cultural and oral traditions from which Beowulf is derived and major critical trends in interpretation. Class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, and translation.

Requirements: class participation in discussion and translation, practice in reading and copying the one thousand year-old manuscript, one hour-examination, one research paper, one oral report on a critical article, and one oral performance from Beowulf .

 

ENGLISH 510 RENAISSANCE STUDIES Professor Lamb

Topic: Twelfth Night and the Tempest

Required texts: (We are using various editions simultaneously to show different approaches to these plays, so students are advised to obtain all of them.)

Twelfth Night. Ed. Baker. Signet Classics. Penguin, 1998.

Twelfth Night. Eds. Warren and Wells. Oxford Shakespeare, 1994. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Twelfth Night. Ed. Smith. Bedford Shakespeare Series, Bedford Books, 2001.

Tempest. Eds. Graff & Phelan. Case Studies in Critical Controversy. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Tempest. Ed. Kermode. (originally for Arden Shakespeare) repr as University Paperback by Routledge, 1990.

Tempest. Ed. Vaughan. Arden 3 rd series, 1999.

A Tempest. Cesaire. Tcg Translations, 2002.

This seminar allows for intensive and in-depth exploration of two plays that I have always wanted to think about together. Both plays include interactions between groups shipwrecked on an island and the island's inhabitants. They are by far the two most musical of Shakespeare's plays. They combine fantasy with practical realities. Perhaps most directly of Shakespeare's plays, they set out issues of social hierarchy. Both plays have elicited a particularly rich critical history. In this seminar we will begin with a close reading, and then turn to the kinds of critical discussions circulating around them. For Twelfth Night, we will be considering the homoerotic and/or feminist implications of cross-dressing, music and musical settings, the nature of “service” relationships in the early modern period, interpretations of Malvolio (or of another character), and issues of performance on stage or film. For the Tempest, we will be considering some similar topics—musical settings, the implications of master-servant relationships, stage and film performances. We will also be looking at the considerable post-colonialist readings it has evoked and the tensions these have set up with an older criticism foregrounding constructions of authorship. We will be considering the “packaging” of both plays by comparing various editions. In addition to class reports, students will write a short response about every other week, and two papers of about 10-12 pages in length.

 

ENGLISH 516 RESTORATION AND 18 TH CENTURY STUDIES Professor Chandler

Topic: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Gothic Fiction Before Frankenstein

Walpole . The Castle of Otranto . Oxford University Press.

Beckford. Vathek. Penguin.

Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford University Press.

Lewis. The Monk. Oxford University Press.

Radcliffe. The Italian. Oxford University Press.

Godwin. Caleb Williams. Penguin.

---. St. Leon . Oxford University Press.

The development of the gothic strain in British fiction has clear ramifications for many later branches of literature and film. Its inward ramifications, however -- what motivated it, and how it should be characterized relative to the politics and aesthetics of its own era -- are harder to delineate. Since the gothic plot usually displaced troublesome social issues to pseudo-historical past (and, usually, to continental Europe ), it could be used as a safe testing-ground for radical ideas and transgressive desires. Yet many gothic novels that move boldly in such directions seem equally invested in reassuring us that the very problems they have so convincingly posed (rationalist and nationalist smugness, gender- and class-based oppression, familial strife, the silencing of political opposition in England after the French Revolution) really don't exist in the enlightened present. One challenge facing gothic studies today is to break free from simply replicating this conundrum in our own arguments. This course will seek to promote fresh critical thinking about the early British gothic, while also offering a workable genealogy that can inform our teaching and research in related areas such as the Romantic canon (including Frankenstein), Victorian fiction, and modern horror/fantasy genres.

Requirements:

•  1-2 brief presentations

•  One conference-length paper

•  One longer seminar paper

 

ENGLISH 530 19 TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE Professor McEathron

Topic:18 th and 19 th Century Scottish Literature

Robert Burns: Selected Poems. Ed. McGuirk. Penguin.

Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oxford University Press.

Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Weir of Hermiston. Ed. Letley. Oxford University Press.

Scott. The Antiquary. Oxford University Press.

Before Burns: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Poetry. Ed. MacLachlan. Canongate.

This course will offer a survey of the great works of the Scottish literary revival that began in the middle of the eighteenth century. Though several of these works were among the most popular and critically admired of their era, they have been edged out of the teaching canon over time, partly because the dominance of English Romantic poetry as the conceptual center of the period. Many of these texts can be linked to Romanticism in some way or other, but we will be more concerned with the Scottish tradition on its own terms, encompassing matters of geography, church and state, and dialect. On the subject of dialect, it should be noted that the course will not assume any familiarity with Scots, only a willingness to engage it when it is present. (Several of these texts contain little or no dialect.)

We will begin with the Ossian ‘translations' by James Macpherson, and will also discuss Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and other Scots poets who inspired Robert Burns. The bulk of the course, however, will revolve around three giant figures: Burns, who is essentially the patron saint of Scottish literary culture; Walter Scott, far and away the best-selling novelist of the period; and James Hogg, perhaps the most unjustly neglected writer of the nineteenth century. We will also glance at some famous Scottish tours, probably including those of James Boswell and Dorothy Wordsworth. The course will conclude with Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novel inspired in large measure by Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Please note: This course will satisfy distribution requirements for nineteenth-Century British, but not for eighteenth-century British.

Requirements:

One in-class presentation

Two 8-12 pp. papers

 

ENGLISH 533 AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1900 Professor Wells

Topic: Empire and the Literatures of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Irving . A Tour on the Prairies. University of Oklahoma Press.

Apess. On Our Own Ground. University of Massachusetts Press.

Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Penguin.

Hawthorne . The Scarlet Letter. Revised Ed . Penguin.

Burton . The Squatter and the Don. 2 nd ed. Arte Publico Press.

Dixon . The Leopard's Spots. Firebird Press.

Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk. Reprint ed. Penguin.

Child. Hobomok. Rutgers University Press.

Delany. Blake. Reprint ed. Beacon Press.

In the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois asked his turn-of-the-century reader to acknowledge that “[y]our country” had been built largely by African-American labor and that “mingled . . . with you[r]” contributions had been their “gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it. . . .” Much can be made of the passage—its revisionary historiography, its construction of its reader as “weak,” its appropriation of a manly rhetoric of nation- building—but perhaps most interesting is that it hinges on the word “empire.” Like many of the nineteenth-century figures he was writing about, even against, in his 1903 text, Du Bois seeks membership here in something greater than a nation. He asks to be seen as part of an expanding entity that, for all of its recent territorial increase, had not yet grown large enough to accommodate African Americans and other non-white groups within its symbolic boundaries. As a figure of speech, at least, “empire” seemed to provide a solution to a national problem.

As we will observe in this course, similar images of empire (as a grand idea, an expression of self, an extension rather than repudiation of the ideals of the republic, a solution to domestic conflicts) can be found throughout nineteenth-century U.S. Literature. If recent commentators have struggled over whether the United States should rightly be called an empire, many nineteenth-century writers found the question less vexing. The issue was not so much whether the United States was an empire but more often what kind of empire it ought to become. We thus see in Jefferson's early writings a celebration of the United States as “an empire for liberty”; in Cooper's and Child's novels a vision of culture of sentimentality overspreading and civilizing Native-American lands; in Whitman's mid-century poetry the belief that “[t]hese States tend inland . . . toward the Western sea, and I will also”; and in Sutton Griggs' 1899 protest novel Imperium in Imperio a fantasy that African Americans ought to colonize Texas and establish a sovereign nation within the United States.

Even in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a body of work seemingly unconcerned with questions of territorial expansion, we see references to the soul as “an imperial friend” and images of flower petals scattering into the “South and West expanding.” One of the central questions we will pursue in this course will concern what writers mean—what they (and what we) understand empire to be—when they deploy such metaphors throughout the nineteenth century. How were their understandings shaped by specific historical events (the Louisiana Purchase , the buildup to the Spanish-American War, etc.) as well as by larger questions of race, region, gender, and class? What forms of anti-imperial protest developed in response to these events? What forms of postcolonial address?

 

ENGLISH 539 AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER 1900 Professor Bogumil

Topic: Cultural Diversity in American Drama

Cruz. Anna in the Tropics . Theatre Communications Group.

Rivera. Marisol. Dramatists Play Service.

O'Neill. A Long Day's Journey into Night. Yale.

Hwang. The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions. Dramatists Play Service.

Ives. Polish Joke. Dramatists Play Service.

Mamet. The Old Neighborhood. Samuel French.

Sandler. Crossing Delancey Street . Samuel French.

Gotanda. The Wash. Heinemann Drama.

Wilson . Seven Guitars. Samuel French.

Parks. In the Blood. Dramatists Play Service.

Objective: In this course, we will attempt to explore the topic of cultural diversity within American drama. By studying a select group of plays within their historical, philosophical, socio-political, and narrative contexts, perhaps we will understand that culture's interpretation of what it means to be an American or Americanized and, in turn, question the stereotypes perpetuated about a particular ethnic culture in the United States .

Initially, we will begin this course by examining definitions of what it means to be an American or Americanized by reading and discussing the following: an abridged selections from Werner Sollor's Beyond Ethnicity , Donald Davidson's theory of “Language and Culture,” Henry Louis Gates's “The Debate Has Been Miscast from the Start,” Ronald Takaki's A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity with Voices and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America , Kevin Kenny's The American Irish: A History , and Langston Hughes's political play Angelo Herndon Jones: A One Act Play on Negro Life. Then, we will read those who specifically focus on issues in the theater: Susan Bennett's Theatre Audiences , Herbert Blau's The Audience, Critical Theory and Performance , August Wilson's “The Ground on which I Stand,” Henry David Hwang's response to Wilson, Donald Marguilies's rationale for a new adaptation of Sholom Asch's 1906 Yiddish play The God of Vengeance , and David Mamet's Make Believe Town and The Playwright's Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing and the Culture of Politics.

Requirements: written analysis of each play, critical paper with annotated bibliography, and an oral presentation on one play. Choice of topics will be offered or subject to my approval.

 

ENGLISH 592 CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR Professors Jones and Westmoreland

Jones' section: Poetry

Westmoreland's section: Fiction

 

ENGLISH 594 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE SEMINAR Professors Joseph and Magnuson

Magnuson's section: Forms of Fiction

Lanham. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2 nd Ed. University of California Press.

Kolln. Rhetorical Grammar. 4 th ed. Longman.

Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five. Dell.

Danielewski. House of Leaves: A Novel. Pantheon.

Crews. A Feast of Snakes: A Novel. Touchstone

Beckett. Stories and Texts for Nothing. Grove.

Hannah. Bats out of Hell. Grove.

This course is a rigorous study of grammar and rhetoric and prose style in contemporary fiction. The focus will be on analyzing technique and prose style and applying it to fiction composition. Students will be required to do a variety of exercises and will be required to take several examinations on English grammar.

Joseph's section: Traditional Poetic Forms in Contemporary Practice

Pinsky: The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Strand and Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. W. W. Norton.

Myers and Wukasch. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. University of North Texas Press.

Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster's Pocket Rhyming Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.

This class will stress the writing of fixed forms. We will learn about prosody and meter, and will write many different forms of poetry, among them blank verse, sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, rondeaus, ghazals, pantoums, blues poems and occasional poems. We will read both classic and contemporary examples of these forms. A portfolio of poems in these forms will be due at semester's end.

 

ENGLISH 596 LANGUAGE STUDIES Professor Nelms

Topic: Classical Rhetoric

Kennedy. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1998.

---. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Enos. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. Waveland Press, Inc., 1993.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Nehamas and Woodruff. Hackett Publishing Co., 1995.

Aristotle. Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse. Trans. Kennedy. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Readings on Electronic Reserve through Morris Library.

This seminar provides an excellent background for understanding the diverse, competing rhetorical theories that continue to inform contemporary rhetorical and composition teaching and practice. The course will begin with a thorough study of Aristotle's Rhetoric as a baseline for our discussions of other classical rhetorics and modern adaptations of classical rhetoric. We will survey other non-Greek historical rhetorics, such as North American Indian rhetoric; rhetoric of aboriginal Australian culture; and rhetoric of the ancient Near East, ancient India , and ancient China . We will read about ancient Greek rhetorics before Aristotle and about the role of women in classical rhetoric. And we will read representative texts and portions of texts of the primary ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians, including Plato, Isocrates, Gorgias, Cicero, and Quintilian. We also will read Chapter 4 of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana for a glimpse into Medieval representations of the classical tradition. Later in the semester, we will turn to modern adaptations of classical rhetoric for the study of writing. We will read scholarship by Edward P. J. Corbett, Frank D'Angelo, and others.

Assignments:

Participants in this seminar will complete two major assignments:

•  A summary and analysis of a rhetorical text (classical or non-classical) that has

connections with the study of classical rhetoric. Students might choose from historical texts, such as those written by Boethius, Francis Bacon, Hugh Blair, or Thomas De Quincey, or from modern texts, such as those written by Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, Chaim Perelman, or Helene Cixous.

•  One of the following:

•  An analysis of a composition textbook, evaluated through the lens of classical rhetoric; or

•  An original paper examining or applying some aspect of classical rhetoric.

ENGLISH 598 LITERARY THEORY Professor Zimra

Topic: Mastering the Postcolonial: the Poetics of Empire

Primary Tests:

Since this is a research seminar, we start with the assumption that everyone will have already read the primary texts (Brontë; Defoe &c..) at least once over lightly.

Brontë. Jane Eyre. Norton Classics. W. W. Norton, 1996.

Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea and Backgrounds. ed. Raiskin. Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, 1998.

Brontë. Wuthering Heights . Houghton Classic. New Riverside , 2002.

Conde. Windward Heights . trans. Philcox. Soho Press, Inc, 2000.

Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. Modern Library Classics.

Coetzee. Foe . Penguin, 1988.

Conrad. Heart of Darkness. (Critical Case Book) W. W. Norton.

Naipaul. A Bend in the River. Vintage. Random House.

Loomba. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2001.

Recommended Texts:

Lenricchia, ed. Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2 nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Williams & Chrisman. Postcolonial Discourse. Columbia University Press.

This research seminar will examine the strategies whereby colonial and postcolonial writers engage the center and challenge a literary canon shaped by a specific historical encounter: i.e., the colonial experience in Africa and the Caribbean . 598 (A) thus fulfills the theoretical requisites of the doctoral program and stands as a logical companion to 598 (B), a seminar oriented toward cultural poetics. The writers are paired (master-text vs. post/colonial response). Among the issues we explore are geographies as epistemologies; the mutual construction of space and subjectivity between margins and centers (plural advised); Empire as a place of connection, alienation, and fragmentation; the female body as text; the postmodern transformation of the Romantic self; and what such textual negotiations may tell us about historically, politically, and culturally contentious areas. The aim is to generate a reading paradigm appropriate to the “creolized,” or “dialogic” nature of such cross-cultural poetics. Any textual approach is welcome as long as it does not do violence to the text.

Work Expected

Students will be teamed for collective research. Class participation is taken for granted. Expect to present your research-in-progress at regular intervals with a view to evolving a reading paradigm (20% of the class grade). Thus, each oral presentation will be preceded by a one-page position statement and followed by a short position paper (5pp. each for 25% of the grade). An analytical book review on a methodological issue (15%) is due by mid-term. The final research paper (25%) must be accompanied by an annotated bibliography (15%).

Since our investigation straddles disciplines and periods, participants are encouraged to devise their research project with a view to their own area of expertise or interest (such as, Romanticism; Black Studies; Gender Studies; Cultural Poetics; Textual Poetics; Linguistics; Comparative Theory &c..). Feel free to see me any time beforehand ( czimra@siu.edu or TR noon to 3:00pm in 4344). I shall be glad to help you map out a preliminary area of investigation that dovetails with, or makes use of, a current research project.

The super-ambitious or the super prepared may start browsing through any or all of these basic secondary texts to be found in the library.

Secondary Texts:

Cesaire. Discourse on Colonialism.

Fanon. “On National Culture” and Bhabha's intro to Black Skins, White Masks.

Achebe. “An Image of Africa ”.

Said. Orientalism and “Orientalism Reconsidered”.

Spivak. “Three Women's Texts”.

Bhabha. “Race”, Time and the Revision of Modernity: and “Location of Culture”.

JanMohammed & Lloyd. Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse.

Ahmad. In Theory.

Harvey . The Condition of Postmodernity.

Leach. Rethinking Architecture.

Butler . Performing Gender.

Guattari-Deleuze. Kafka.

 

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