Spring 2010 courses

ENGL 101. Seminar in Rhetoric & Culture

A writing-intensive introduction to cultural inquiry and the art of persuasion. Through the analysis of texts in various genres and through the production of their own written arguments, students will learn to recognize and employ appropriate strategies for effective communication. Students will also attend and respond critically to co-curricular cultural events, including art exhibits, concerts, films, lectures, and plays.

ENGL 102. Introduction to Literature (Havird)

This course is an introduction to literary appreciation and interpretive techniques, with emphasis upon creative reading followed by analysis and synthesis in classroom discussion and essay-writing. The principal aim in this course (in addition to honing writing skills) is to develop an educated appreciation for literature as art, an appreciation based upon understanding, and an understanding derived from the following: 1) close, sensible reading of the text; 2) structural and textural analyses of individual literary works; 3) study of the major genres of belletristic literature: the short story, the novel (or novella), poetry, and drama; 4) an introduction to significant critical theories and familiarization with some of the main approaches of literary criticism: e.g., traditional, formalistic, psychological, mythological and archetypal, feminist, etc.

ENGL 172. Introduction to Visual Culture (Hendricks)

In this course we think about the meaning and value of visual culture in terms of the historical and social context of its production, distribution and consumption. We will look at and read about a wide range of examples from the traditional visual arts, as well as photography, film and video, and digital arts. Texts include Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture; Clarke, The Photograph; Tucker, Visual Literacy: Reading and Responding to Art; Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing About Film.

ENGL 212. Advanced Rhetoric, Grammar and Composition (Strange)

In this advanced writing class, students develop their writing through the careful study of grammar and composition. You will read fine essays and craft your own in order to better understand and practice the art of rhetoric in the contemporary world.

ENGL 217. Communication for Business and the Professions (Laffey)

This course investigates the various methods of communication professionals enjoy day-to-day. We will practice the basic business letter and memo so that they can become second nature as we investigate negative messages, research skills, and business proposals. We will use electronic media like PowerPoint to aid concrete and clear oral communication, and we will read Lanham's Revising Business Prose to clean and clarify written communication.

ENGL 242. Studies in Representative American Authors (Hendricks)

An introduction to a rich variety of works by some of this nation's most interesting writers, the course begins with Anne Bradstreet and continues through such noteworthy figures as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, James, Crane, Chopin, London, Wharton, Anderson, and Alice Walker.

ENGL 290. Screen/Play Writing (Kallenberg)

ENGL 291. Literature and the Environment (Hamming)

This course offers a window into the sub-canon of American writing that takes as its primary subject, the natural world. Taking our cue from Lawrence Buell and starting with Henry David Thoreau, we will consider how writers have reflected on new conceptions of humankind's relationship to nature. Some specific issues addressed in our readings will include: ecocriticism, gender and ecology, postmodernism, technoculture, consumerism, urban space, and ecological apocalypse.

ENGL 315. The Essay (Newtown)

This course will be run as a workshop for the production of literary nonfiction. It places student efforts within the context of readings selected from classical, modern, and contemporary essays.

ENGL 326. Studies in 19th & 20th Century British Literature (Havird)

A topical consideration of representative works of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, fiction, drama, and intellectual prose. Topics may include Faith and Doubt, Love and Marriage, Versions of Pastoral, Matters of Empire. The seminar may also explore a theme within a single genre (Novels of Repression and Release) or examine the transition from one literary movement to another (Decadence to Modernism).

ENGL 342. Shakespeare (Shelburne)

A study of the poems and plays of Shakespeare and their place in English Renaissance and in contemporary culture, organized by chronology or topic. The focus of the course is the Shakespearean text and its 400-year history, though considerable attention is devoted to techniques of reading that recuperate performance.

ENGL 357. Sexual Diversity in Literature and Film (Hamming)

ENGL 399. Seminar in Film and Television Studies (Glaros)

Television, as cultural critics learned in the 1980s, differs in significant ways from film. For some time, film (the magical art that tickles our creative faculties) overshadowed television (the boob-tube that numbs our consciousness) relegating TV to the role of redheaded stepchild, a cultural form too degraded to be worthy of serious study. Unlike film, which has historically been viewed in the cathedral of the movie theater, television enters our homes, and thus our humdrum domestic lives. Yet, in the last thirty years, television has been brought into greater focus as the rise of cultural studies facilitated the investigation of television’s role in these everyday lives. This course, designed to introduce students to the serious, critical study of television, is part of that legacy.

With this course, then, we will aim to estrange this overly familiar cultural form. Because the goal of this course is to teach you how to become more intelligent, alert, critical viewers of television, we will seek, first of all, to understand television as a unique meaning-producing medium—examining television's narrative and non-narrative structures as well as its uses of mise-en-scene, cinematography/videography, editing, and sound. We will then look closely at different ways we might conceptualize television's formal structures by considering TV’s genres and narrative forms and by analyzing the medium's different modes of address. We will conclude by conducting a case study, examining television’s representations of the family throughout the history of the situation comedy. In this final section of the course we will examine questions about TV's social and cultural impact, looking at how television helps shape our notions of home, nation, gender, and race. Throughout this course you will be required to read critical, theoretical and historical essays on American television as we confront the methods of study that have been applied to the medium over the past thirty years: semiotics, reception theory, ideological criticism, cultural studies, and so on.