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English

Current Courses

Fall 2013

Here are the English courses being offered in Fall 2013 and the different ways in which they can be used to fulfill the English major and the Creative Writing minor. For a full description of each course, including the Special Topics courses, click on the course numbers below.

  • ENG 101 (10-25): Literature and Composition

    ENG 101 10: Lit & Comp            MWF 8:30-9:20          Kurzen 

    ENG 101 11: Lit & Comp            MWF 9:30-10:20        Walsh 

    ENG 101 12: Lit & Comp            MWF 10:30-11:20      Kurzen  

    ENG 101 13: Lit & Comp            MWF 11:30-12:20      Knight

    ENG 101 14: Lit & Comp            MWF 12:30-1:20        Walsh

    ENG 101 15: Lit & Comp            MWF 1:30-2:20          Hall 

    ENG 101 16: Lit & Comp            MWF 2:30-3:20          Staff   

    ENG 101 17: Lit & Comp            TTH 8:30-9:45           Staff   

    ENG 101 19: Lit & Comp            TTH 8:30-9:45           Daley 

    ENG 101 20: Lit & Comp            TTH 10-11:15            Daley

    ENG 101 18: Lit & Comp            TTH 10:11:15             Staff

    ENG 101 22: Lit & Comp            TTH 11:30-12:45       Boyd

    ENG 101 21: Lit & Comp            TTH 1-2:15                Wagner

    ENG 101 23: Lit & Comp            TTH 2:30-2:45           Staff

                           

    This course is intended to develop the student’s capacity for intelligent reading, critical analysis, and writing through the study of literature.  There are frequent writing assignments, as well as individual conferences on the student’s writing.

     

    Counts for:  First-Year Graduation Requirement

  • ENG 103 (10-13): Intro to Creative Writing

    ENG 103 10: Intro to Creative Writing     MWF 9:30 -10:20         Hall

    ENG 103 11: Intro to Creative Writing     MWF 11:30                  Dubrow  

    ENG 103 12: Intro to Creative Writing     TTH 11:30-12:45         Wagner

    ENG 103 13: Intro to Creative Writing     TTH 1-2:15                  Mooney

                           

    A workshop on the forms of creative writing—primarily poetry and fiction—as practiced by the students themselves. Readings in contemporary literature and craft.

     

    Restriction:  First-Year students only (fall semester). 

    Counts for:  Creative Writing minor

  • ENG 205 10: Shakespeare I

    ENG 205 10: Shakespeare I     TTH 2:30-3:45     Moncrief

    This course will examine some of Shakespeare’s best known earlier plays (those written before the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603) both in the context of early modern English culture and as play scripts/performances.  Class discussions, with significant contributions from student papers, will explore Shakespeare’s writings as products/producers of early modern culture through the consideration of issues including identity, politics, monarchy, religious conflicts, crime and justice, play and festivity, enclosure and urbanization, world exploration and colonization, nation and national identity, theatricality and theatre-going, religion, family, sexuality, and gender.  Using films and live productions (if available) we will also consider the plays as they have been interpreted for performance.

     

    Counts for:  Pre-1800, Humanities distribution

    Also counts for: Drama major

  • ENG 207 (10-11): History of English Lit I

    ENG 207 10: History of English Lit I         MWF 10:30-11:20      Gillin              

    ENG 207 11: History of English Lit I         TTH 1:00-2:15            Gillin              

    A survey of the development of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the present with attention to the historical background, the continuity of essential traditions, and the characteristic temper of successive periods. The second semester begins approximately with the Restoration in 1660.

     

    Counts for:  200-level, Humanities distribution

  • ENG/AMS 209 (10-11): Intro to American Lit I

    ENG/AMS 209 10: Intro to American Lit I      TTH 11:30-12:45      De Prospo      

    ENG/AMS 209 11: Intro to American Lit I      TTH 1:00-2:15          De Prospo      


    Taught in the fall semester, the course is concerned with the establishment of American Literature as a school subject. Texts that have achieved the status of classics of American Literature, such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, will be read in the context of the history and politics of their achieving this status. Texts traditionally excluded from the canon of American literature, in particular early Hispano- and Franco-American texts, will be considered in the context of their relative marginality to the project of establishing American Literature as worthy of being taught and studied in the American academy. Other-than-written materials, such as modern cinematic representations of the period of exploration and colonization of North America, as well as British colonial portraits and history paintings, will be studied for how they reflect on claims for the cultural independence of early America. Other-than-American materials, such as late medieval and early Renaissance Flemish and Hispanic still lifes, as well as the works of nineteenth-century European romantic poets and prose writers, will be sampled for how they reflect on claims for the exceptional character of American culture.

     

    Counts for:  200-level, Humanities distribution

    Also counts for:  American Studies major

  • ENG/AMS/BLS 213 10: Intro to African American Lit I

    ENG/AMS/BLS 213 10: Intro to African American Lit I      MWF 10:30–11:20      Knight

     

    This course is a survey of African American literature produced from the late 1700s to the Harlem Renaissance. It is designed to introduce students to the writers, texts, themes, conventions and tropes that have shaped the African American literary tradition. Authors studied in this course include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. There are no prerequisites for this course; however, students are encouraged to take HIS 319 “African American History to 1865” as a co-requisite.

     

    Counts for:  200-level, Humanities distribution

    Also counts for:  American Studies major, Black Studies minor

  • ENG 220 (10-11): Intro to Fiction

    ENG 220 10:  Intro to Fiction                    MW 2:30-3:45            Mooney

    ENG 220 11:  Intro to Fiction                    MWF 12:30-1:20        Staff

     

    This course will survey the rich tradition of prose fiction largely, but not exclusively, in English. Emphasis will be placed on the enduring features of this genre as it evolved throughout the centuries as well as to the innovations introduced by individual writers.  The literary works selected for this course will draw upon a variety of fictional forms and styles.  Class discussions will include, along with close readings of the works themselves, an appreciation of the historical and cultural contexts out of which they arose and to which they gave a fictional rewriting.

     

    Counts for:  200-level, Humanities distribution

  • ENG 222 10: Intro to Poetry

    ENG 222 10: Intro to Poetry          TTH 10-11:15          Hall                                        

     

    This course will provide an introduction to the study of various styles and forms of poetry. By reading a wide range of poetic styles from a number of aesthetic schools, students will consider the ways in which poetry has become a conversation across centuries, how the genre may act simultaneously as a personal and a political voice, and how it may be interpreted not only as intimate confession but also as “Supreme fiction.”

     

    Counts for:  200-level, Humanities distribution

  • ENG 300: Medieval Literature

    ENG 300:  Medieval Literature            MWF 11:30-12:20                  Staff

     

    This course explores some of the texts and ideas that dominated the cultural landscape of Europe for centuries. We will consider many of the themes and topics that occupied the imagination of medieval writers, such as courtly love, the ways of Fortune, allegory, and authorship itself. We will sample many of the great authors of the Middle Ages, including Augustine, Boethius, Dante, and Chaucer. Most importantly, we will seek to come to a clearer understanding of how medieval readers looked at the world and how medieval writers expected their texts to be read.

     

    Counts for:  Pre-1800, Elective

  • ENG/GEN 310: The Renaissance: The Age of Elizabeth

    ENG/GEN 310: The Renaissance:  The Age of Elizabeth           TTH 1-2:15    Moncrief

     

    Early Modern England saw an enormous range of popular printed materials– many types of poetry, prose, and drama, of course, but also pamphlets, ballads, broadsides, sermons, conduct books, medical manuals, domestic guides, woodcuts, and more– available for public consumption.  This course will examine a diverse range of “literary” (Shakespeare, Kyd, Dekker, Sidney, etc.) and “non-literary” texts in relation to sixteenth-century early modern culture.  Class discussions– with significant contributions from student writing– will explore print materials as products/producers of early modern culture through the consideration of politics, monarchy, the city, enclosure and urbanization, magic and revenge, nation and national identity, theatricality and theatre-going, religion, family, the body, sexuality, and gender. 

     

    Counts for:  Pre-1800, Elective

    Also counts for:  Gender Studies minor

  • ENG 323/GEN: 19th-Century English Novel

    ENG 323/GEN: 19th-Century English Novel         TTH 11:30-12:45      Gillin

     

    Major writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy will be studied. Attention will be given to the cultural and literary context of the novels.

     

    Counts for:  Post-1800, Elective

    Also counts for:  Gender Studies minor

  • ENG 330 Modernist Fiction I

    ENG 330 Modernist Fiction I          MWF 10:30-11:20      Staff

     

    A study of the major novels of such early modernist writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf.

     

    Counts for:  Post-1800, Elective

  • ENG 351 10/DRA 351 (Playwriting I)

    ENG 351 10/DRA 351 (Playwriting I):     W 1:30-4     Volansky

     

    Analysis and practical application of techniques and styles employed in writing for the stage.

     

    Counts for:  Elective

    Counts for:  Creative Writing minor

    Also counts for:  Drama major

  • ENG 377: AMS/ BLS/ GEN 2PACalypse Now!

    ENG 377: AMS/ BLS/ GEN 2PACalypse Now!      W 7-9:30           De Prospo  Smith 222

     

    There’s something about Heart of Darkness—neither the most readable nor the most teachable of books, even of Conrad’s books. And there’s something about Conrad, too, a native Pole for whom English was a third language, a third language that he evidently spoke so poorly that when conversing with his American literary friend Henry James they both reverted to what was for both of them a second language: French. The course will try to explore what it is that has attracted so many white male Anglophone intellectuals—and prompted the condemnation of one African writer, the mockery of one black rapper, and, perhaps, the rivalry of a prominent, brown, novelist—over the more than hundred years now since the original publication of Heart of Darkness in 1899 in England in Blackwood’s Magazine. Class texts will include Conrad’s novella, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Tupac’s 2PACalypse Now, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (which contains a prominent allusion to Heart of Darkness), Chinua Achebe’s essays, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, a sampling of the blizzard of journalistic quotations of the novel’s title and of its most famous, four-word, speech, plus some theorizings of race and gender that might shed some light on why the book has managed to appeal so strongly to a relatively homogenous cohort of readers and adaptors.

     

    Counts for:  Post-1800, Elective

    Also counts for:  American Studies major, Black Studies minor, Gender Studies minor

  • ENG 390: Internship Journalism

    ENG 390: Internship Journalism         TBA                                          McIntire                                                                           

    This course teaches basic news reporting and writing – the who, what, when, where, why & how of story organization; getting quickly to the point; conciseness; straightforward exposition; accuracy, fairness and balance, and ethical issues.

     

    This is a two-credit course. Students may count no more than 4 journalism credits toward the English major.

     

    Counts for: Elective

  • ENG/PHL/HUM/ILC 394 10: SpTp: Literature of Ideas

    ENG/PHL/HUM/ILC 394 10:  SpTp: Literature of Ideas             MWF 1:30-2:20          Walsh

     

    “A Literature of Ideas” will explore key questions in literary criticism and theory, intellectual history, philosophy, and the creative arts. Since antiquity, scholars, poets, and others have sought to define what literature is, as well as its virtues and limitations; the relationship between art, the individual, and society; the role and function of the author; and the affective experience of the reader, viewer, and/or audience. These threads remain vital today, and surveying their history through time, culture, and space will allow us to understand our own assumptions and practices when interpreting texts and images. Topics to be discussed include mimesis, beauty, the sublime, the irrational, rhetoric, influence, and translation.

     

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Philosophy major, Humanities major, ILC major

  • ENG 394 11/AMS: SpTp: Chicana/os in Literature and Popular Culture

    ENG 394 11/AMS: SpTp: Chicana/os in Literature and Popular Culture
    MWF 12:30-1:20        Kurzen    

     

    This course is designed to introduce students to the literary and cultural productions created by and about Mexican Americans or Chicana/os. Generally, we will approach these works from cultural, formal, and historical perspectives while also focusing on the political and social contexts that inform the events narrated in our course texts. In this class, students will read, analyze, and write about representative works of various genres within particularized cultural contexts. Over the course of the semester, students will consider such topics as identity construction; struggles for self-determination and self-representation; immigrant experiences; language and bilingualism; the marketing of and to Latina/os; and the relationship of the author to his or her communities. While studying how these texts negotiate issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nation we will ultimately discuss how they enrich and enliven conversations surrounding American popular culture. 

     

    Counts for:  Post-1800, Elective

    Also counts for:  American Studies

  • ENG/ENV 394 12: SpTp: Ecopoetry: Writing on Water

    ENG/ENV 394 12: SpTp: Ecopoetry: Writing on Water      M 1:30-4         Hadaway       

     

    In this experiential workshop, we will delve into the emerging discipline of ecopoetics, examining and crafting poetic response to our environment. Much of the class will be conducted on or around the Chester River to take full advantage of our natural laboratory. Class assignments will include both critical and creative writing with an emphasis on poetry and poetic forms.

     

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Environmental Studies major, Creative Writing minor

  • ENG 394 13/DRA 394: SpTp: Poetry in Performance urb

    ENG 394 13/DRA 394: SpTp:Poetry in Performance      TTH 10-11:15                 Price   

     

    This course examines aspects of recitation and the oral traditions of poetry emphasizing America’s long history of memorizing and reciting favorite poems. The influences of African, European and other traditions on the performance of poetry will be considered, as well as the growing popularity of ”spoken word”, the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the blues and jazz poetry of Langston Hughes and Ted Joans, the improvisational recitation of the Beats, the influence of Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyoricans and contemporary Slam Poetry. Class assignments will incorporate students reading, writing, analyzing and reciting their original work and the works of assigned poets.

    “There is much to learn from concentration on the oral side of poetry. In particular, the element of performance, or oral presentation, is of such obvious and leading significance in oral poetry that, paradoxically, it raises the question whether this element is not also of more real importance in the literature we classify as ‘written’ than we often realize.” “Is there not an auditory ring in most poetry? Is reading aloud declaiming aloud, not in practice an important part of our culture? How many people only appreciate poetry through the eye? Is ‘literature’ not something more than a visually apprehended text? I suggest that something can be learned about the written word by considering the ‘oral performance’ element in oral poetry.”  Source unknown.

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Drama major, Creative Writing minor

  • ENG 394 14/DRA 394: SpTp: Adapting Non-Dramatic Literature for the Stage

    ENG 394 14/DRA 394:  SpTp: Adapting Non-Dramatic Literature for the Stage
    TTH 4-4:15           Fox

     

    Theater practitioners around the country are constantly exploring ways to bring poetry, short stories, and novels to life onstage. What happens to a story when it takes on three-dimensional life? Students will explore their answer to this by writing their own adaptations and exploring them on their feet.  

     

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Drama major

  • ENG/PHL 394 10: SpTp: Existentialism and Literature

    ENG/PHL 394 10:  SpTp: Existentialism and Literature          TBA                          Weigel

     

    This course introduces students to the nature and development of Existentialist thought in select literary and philosophical texts. Characteristic themes include: the problem of meaning, facing apparent absurdity in life, alienation and despair, the struggle for authenticity, the centrality of the God question, and an emphasis on individual freedom. Readings are from Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Kobo Abe and others. No prerequisite. Strong writing background and permission of instructor is recommended for entering freshmen.             

     

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Philosophy major

  • ENG 452: Creative Writing Workshop

    ENG 452:  Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction        W 4-6:30               Mooney

     

    This workshop offers guided practice in the writing of short fiction.  Using the work of established writers as models, considerable effort is put toward the objective of learning to read as writers and, in the process, becoming better critics of the student’s own work and the work of others in the group.  By offering a more intimate familiarity with the elements of fiction, students write and revise prodigiously and, in the process, learn and practice a repertoire of literary strategies in preparation and in support of short stories of their own composition. 

     

    Prerequisite:  ENG 103 Introduction to Creative Writing. 

    Counts for:  Elective

    Also counts for:  Creative Writing minor

  • ENG/BLS 494: Toni Morrison MWF 9:30-10:20

    ENG/BLS 494:  Toni Morrison       MWF 9:30-10:20             Knight

     

    In this seminar, we will study the works of Toni Morrison, the first African American and the eighth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). We will examine important motifs, tropes and themes of a selection of Morrison’s novels, along with a few of her notable critical essays and lesser known short fiction. By the conclusion of this course, you should be well versed in Morrison’s writings, have a clear understanding of her perspective of American society, and have a basic understanding of contemporary critical approaches used to interpret her oeuvre. As with other courses offered in the English department, this course will also help you develop close reading, critical thinking and analytical writing skills.    

     

    Counts for: Post-1800, Elective

    Also counts for:  American Studies major, Black Studies minor

     

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