Current English courses are described below and future course descriptions are available as schedules are finalized. For descriptions of all English courses, refer to the Undergraduate Catalog.
Spring 2012 Course List:
ENG 260: British Literature 1
ENG 310: Screenwriting (Sections 1 & 4)
ENG 320: Introduction to Linguistic Science
ENG 328: Language and Gender
ENG 346: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
ENG 400: Remembering the Holocaust
ENG 405: Special Topics in Creative Writing (Section 2)
ENG 405: Special Topics in Creative Writing (Section 3)
ENG 406: Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop
ENG 407: Advanced Fiction Writing (Section 2)
ENG 407: Advanced Fiction Writing (Section 3)
ENG 409: Creative Writing in the Community
ENG 410: Advanced Screenwriting
ENG 412: Reading Printed Materials in the English Classroom
ENG 414: Young Adult Literature
ENG 422: Author Studies - Virginia Woolf
ENG 422: Author Studies - Kurt Vonnegut
ENG 431: Rhetoric, Writing, and Emerging Media
ENG 435: Issues in Rhetoric and Writing
ENG 444: Senior Seminar (Section 3)
ENG 444: Senior Seminar (Section 4)
ENG 444: Senior Seminar (Section 5)
ENG 457: Practicum in TESOL
ENG 464: Shakespeare
ENG 492: Native American Literature
Spring 2012 Course Descriptions:
ENG 260:
British Literature 1 -
Narratives and Power
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Prof. Miranda Nesler
This course will introduce you to major British writers and texts before 1700. In examining canonical texts by authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wroth, and Milton, we will narrow our focus by considering the role of narrative in early literature:
-
Who or what controls narratives—whether they are individual, familial, political, or gendered?
-
In what way does narrative bestow power or authority? How might it disempower?
- How might we, as active writers and readers of social narrative, attempt to create our own narratives?
ENG 310
:
Screenwriting
~Section 001~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
~Section 004~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Prof. Matt Mullins
PREREQUISITE: ENGLISH 285: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING
Students who have not taken this prerequisite are ineligible to take English 310 and will be asked to drop the course.
Course Description: English 310 is an introductory course in the theory and practice of screenplay writing. Students will be asked to write short screenplays or and/or short screenplays and the first act of a feature-length screenplay. In addition, they will complete a number of screenplay writing exercises, view films, and read material related to the craft of screenplay writing. Much of this course will focus on the workshopping and collective critique of student screenplays and the reading and analysis of screenplays and screenplay excerpts considered from the perspective of craft. Focus will be on the discussion, analysis, and practice of the techniques and processes of screenwriting. This includes matters of format, content, structure, style, drafting, and revision, among other things. In sum, this course is intended to give students an understanding of what good screenwriting and cinematic storytelling are all about while also giving them the opportunity to apply that understanding to their own screenplays. To this end, student work will involve the following:
· Understanding and manipulating the essential techniques of cinematic storytelling.
· Understanding and utilizing the major structural elements of screenwriting form.
· Developing original story ideas into coherent scenes and/or complete screenplays.
· Receiving and incorporating into their work feedback about structure, content, and style from their professor and peers.
· Reading, evaluating, and offering constructive criticism on the work of their classmates.
· Reading material related to the craft of screenplay writing and screenplays written by established screenwriters
· “Reading” films to better understand the craft of screenplay writing.
ENG 320:
Introduction to Linguistic Science
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Prof. Lynne Stallings
The aim of this linguistics course is to raise your awareness of the complex organization and systematic nature of language, the primary means of human communication. In a sense, you will be studying yourself since you are a prime example of a language user. Most of your knowledge of language, however, is unconscious, and the part of language that you can describe is largely the result of your earlier education, which may have provided you with confusing or misleading notions about language. This course is intended to clarify your ideas about language and bring you to a better understanding of its nature by introducing you to the basic principles of linguistic science and the major areas of the field, including, but not limited to, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. This is not a course about just one particular language, but about human language in all its aspects. Some of the data to be analyzed will come from languages with which students are familiar, but students will also work with data from languages with which they have no prior familiarity.
ENG 328:
Language and Gender
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Prof. Mai Kuha
In this course, we investigate in detail how language and gender are related. In Sally Mc-Connell-Ginet's words, how are linguistic resources used in constructing ourselves and others as 'women' or as 'men'?
-
Language about men and women
We can see how language reflects gender, and also constructs it, in labels and descriptions applied to people (for example, address terms and the linguistic representation of gender roles in pop culture).
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Language by men and women
After loking at how gendered identities are constructed, we will focus mostly on conversational style, and examine how people use language for purposes such as claiming authority or solidarity in various contexts, such as the workplace and the family.
We will also look at cultural variation in the interaction of language and gender.
Readings will consist of articles and chapters on electronic reserve. Course requirements will include observing how language and gender interact in various arenas.
ENG 346:
Studies in Nineteenth–Century American Literature –
Romance and Social Reform
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Dr. Robert D. Habich
rhabich@bsu.edu
Romantic writers of the mid-nineteenth century are too easily seen as aloof artists disengaged from the great social issues of their day. But not in this class. Together we will read a selection of fiction and creative non-fiction that explores the connections between Romanticism and social issues, focusing on some key questions in the American reformist agenda: industrialization and technology, the “woman question,” slavery and race, and war and peace.
Part biography, part literary history, part archival detective work, and part interpretation, this course will include some works you have likely heard of (Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861], Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” [1848] and selections from Walden [1854], Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” [1843], and others) and some that may be unfamiliar to you, such as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1851), Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), and John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). Be prepared to read a lot: in addition to five full-length narratives, the syllabus includes a generous selection of essays, chapters, and short stories, all on-line.
Requirements, besides the reading and class preparation:
Analytical essay of 5-6 pages (20%)
ENG 400:
Special Topics in English -
Remembering the Holocaust
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Prof. Frank Felsenstein
Almost three quarters of a century after the start of World War 2, should the Holocaust still hold meaning for those growing up at the advent of a new Millennium? When witnesses to the Holocaust are no more, will there be an obligation to preserve and make iconic the memory of such a flagrant crime against humanity? What, if anything, should we remember? What should be learned? Is it not best to forget -- and forgive? If so, why has the State of Indiana (along with some other states) now mandated the teaching of the Holocaust in its schools? Can we make any sense of our fascinated fear of the unspeakable?
Through the study of literary texts and documents, the seminar will interrogate the impetus to promulgate the Holocaust as for many the single most defining catastrophe of the twentieth century. It will investigate the disparity between the comparative silence in the years immediately after World War 2 and the cultural spotlighting in recent times of the atrocities and sufferings of the Nazi era (called by some the "Americanization of the Holocaust"). It will also explore the question of "authenticating" the trauma of the Holocaust, and why there are many individuals who describe themselves as second or third generation survivors. We shall consider the continuing influence of the Holocaust and of acts of genocide on religious belief (where was God?), on education (have we learned any lessons? how do we explain to the next generation?), on Jewish and Christian relations, and more broadly, on the cultural imagination. Particular aspects that will be given prominence are the documentation of the Holocaust by witnesses through letters, diaries, and memoirs, and its literary and cinematic representations. We are planning to have at least one immediate witness meet with the colloquium, and it is hoped to include a class visit to a Holocaust museum. Although this does not purport to be a sequential study of the history of the Nazi era, students will be encouraged to keep a course journal in which they should chart the progression of their thinking about the Holocaust and its significance. Please feel free to contact me at felsenstein@bsu.edu with any questions.
ENG 405:
Special Topics in Creative Writing –
Prose Scaffolding
~Section 002~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Prof. Sean Lovelace
Writers must know architecture. They must know scaffolding, design—we’re talking blueprints here. And then we must know even more: If your text is a house (or even a room), it isn’t good enough to simply develop a blueprint. We must also build the thing ourselves; we’re craftsmen, right? So we won’t forget the jambs, studs, wainscoting, shutters, chimney flashings, cripples, girders, sashes, balusters, risers, shoes, downspouts, and so on. In this class, from micro to macro, we are going to explore structure.
We will also write from the world around us. Anything can provide a model for structure, as
you will see in our readings: John Mcphee uses the game of Monopoly; Gail Griffin uses shapes; Nancy Williford uses a deck of Tarot cards; Nicole Lamy uses photographs; Wendy Rawlings uses email; Michael Martone contributor notes; and Georges Perec uses the buildings, shops, gardens, and cobblestone alleyways of Paris. What will you use?
Reading is an element of writing, so we will read voraciously in this class. Our reading list will include The Next American Essay edited by John D’Agata, Reality Hunger by David Shields, Making Shapely Fiction by Jermone Stern. Additional material will be distributed via handout and online. As we read, we will focus on structure in two ways: analyzing professional examples, and then creating our own work, using many of our readings as guides.
Requirements:
Over the course of the semester, you will write multiple flash fiction pieces, two short nonfiction pieces (3 pp), and one longer work. One of these texts will be work-shopped, and revised. Other requirements will include: quizzes, exercises, short writing exercises, and critical reading responses.
ENG 405:
Special Topics in Creative Writing –
The Everyday Made Lyric
~Section 003~
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 9:00-9:50 a.m.
Prof. Todd McKinney
This special topics course will focus on the lyric essay. What is it? Where did it come from? Why is it a useful mode of expression? What makes a lyric essay? How do we write one? How is a lyric essay different, if at all, from a prose poem? Or a (flash) fiction piece? Or a free verse poem? Of course, behind each of those questions are a hundred others regarding the use of lyrical writing, and we will use this class to explore those and, I hope, find many more as we navigate the dissonant borders between nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, our lyres tuned (or not), readied to accompany our voices as we essay our songs and sing our stories. Or something like that.
To aid our exploratory study, we will read an armful of texts. While I am still putting the reading list together, some possibilities include: “The Lyric Essay” Issue by Seneca Review; Bluets by Maggie Nelson; The Most of It by Mary Ruefle; My Life by Lyn Hyjenian; On Looking by Lia Purpura; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deveare Smith; Griffin by Albert Goldbarth, and/or others as well as handouts via electronic reserves.
Course requirements will include drafts and a final portfolio, reading responses, workshop critiques, in-class writing exercises, a presentation, etc.
ENG 406:
Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Prof. Jill Christman
This advanced writing workshop will focus on the writing of real lives and the navigation of those slippery spaces between remembering and forgetting, truth and invention, what to put in and what to leave out. In order to write well, we must read, and so we will divide our time between workshops of student work and the discussion of published texts. Rather than using a thematic approach to organizing this semester’s booklist (e.g., childhood, crisis, or nature), we’re going to diversify our reading according to the authors’ handling of structure and time. We’ll read essays, full-length memoirs, and flash nonfictions (mini true things?) with a close attention to style and technique. We’ll practice asking the questions that are essential in the crafting of real-life material, including From what point in time is this story being told and why?
Because the author will be visiting for our 2012 In Print Festival of First Books, we’ll definitely be reading Bonnie Rough’s Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, and because we’ll be talking about time, we’ll include Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir; also, through CLMP’s Lit Mag Adoption program, we’ll get current issues of Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative for an up-to-the-minute look at what’s getting published. The rest of our book list is still under development, but I promise to make it good.
Course requirements will include two long essays or chapters (and a final revision), a series of flash nonfictions, reading quizzes, regular creative/critical responses to the reading assignments, workshop critiques, and a class presentation.
ENG 407:
Advanced Fiction Writing
~Section 002~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Prof. Sean Lovelace
In this class we will continue many of the concepts of English 307, with an expectation of advanced complexity. The class will focus on student and professional manuscripts in the genre of FLASH FICTION (complete stories—with interest in structure, language, and theme—with a word count under 750 words). We will read a wide variety of flash fiction texts and critical essays on the genre by professional authors. We will create many of our own flash fiction drafts, in a wide variety of schools, from realism to surrealism. And we will workshop those drafts, focusing on constructive feedback and considered revision.
Texts:
· Oh Baby by Kim Chinquee
· Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
· High Water Mark by David Shumate
· The Most of It by Mary Ruefle.
· Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories by Thomas, Thomas, Hazuka.
· We will also have handouts and online texts.
Contact Professor Lovelace (salovelace@bsu.edu) with any questions.
ENG 407:
Advanced Fiction Writing
~Section 003~
Mondays, 6:30-9:10 p.m.
Prof. Cathy Day
In this class, all students will be required to produce at least 50,000 original words, the first draft of a new work. This will not be done only during November’s “National Novel Writing Month,” but rather over the course of the entire semester. The course will be characterized by: focus on the writing process, weekly word count check ins, “studio” in-class writing time, practice in creating a blueprint, outline, or storyboard of a book, small peer groups for feedback, and analysis of a few contemporary novels that will serve as models. Possible texts will include Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
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ENG 409:
Creative Writing in the Community
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:00-6:15 pm
Prof. Sean Lovelace
Prerequisite: English 306 or 307 or 308 (not to be taken concurrently)
This course is designed for writers to practice the techniques of characterization, point-of-view, setting, & conflict so that in any genre or form, language takes on new meaning, intensity, and originality. Students will work with participating social services agencies (Big Brothers Big Sisters, Hillcroft Services, Inc. and Motivate Our Minds), meeting at least five times with a partner from one of these agencies in order to develop a broader perspective of the complex ways through which individuals cope with their situations and environments. Through the student’s assistance, an often-unheard voice will shape a story that will be read and heard. Storytelling involves all of the techniques of fiction writing mentioned above and also applies to poetry and creative nonfiction. All written work will be published in Writing Out of the Margins Vol. 9. We will also hold a public community reading. This immersive experience offers the opportunity for the students to learn about themselves through others and to become more productive citizens of the local and academic communities.
ENG 410
:
Advanced Screenwriting
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:10 p.m.
Prof. Matt Mullins
PREREQUISITES: ENG 285: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING, ENGLISH 310: SCREENWRITING
Students who have not taken BOTH of these prerequisites are ineligible to take English 410 and will be asked to drop the course.
Course Description: English 410 is an advanced course in the theory and practice of screenplay writing; therefore, it is critical for students who take this course to have taken the prerequisites. English 410 Students will be asked to write short screenplays, a team-written short screenplay, and possibly the second or third acts of a feature-length screenplay (providing the previous acts were developed under my direction in ENG 310). In addition, they will complete a number of screenplay writing exercises, view films, and read material related to the craft of screenplay writing. The bulk of this course will focus on the workshopping and collective critique of student screenplays and the reading and analysis of screenplays and screenplay excerpts considered from the perspective of craft. Our focus will be on a higher level of discussion related to the practice and analysis of the techniques and processes of screenwriting. This includes matters of genre, content, structure, style, drafting, and revision, among other things. One of the major goals of this course, especially during Fall Semester, is to help students develop short scripts for potential production in Ball State’s Cinema Entertainment Immersion program (CEI). Therefore, much emphasis will be given to the development of short screenplays suitable for production here at BSU. This course is intended to build upon the understanding of concepts developed in English 310 while also giving students the opportunity to further apply that understanding to their own screenplays. To this end, student work will involve the following:
· Utilizing the essential techniques of cinematic storytelling.
· Utilizing the major structural elements of screenwriting form.
· Further developing original story ideas into coherent scenes and/or complete screenplays.
· Incorporating into their work feedback about structure, content, and style from their professor and peers, and revising accordingly
· Reading, evaluating, and offering constructive criticism on the work of their classmates.
· Reading material related to the craft of screenplay writing and screenplays written by established screenwriters
· “Reading” films to better understand the craft of screenplay writing.
· Developing scripts for potential production via Ball State’s CEI program
ENG 412:
Reading Printed Materials in the English Classroom
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00 – 3:45 p.m.
Prof. Pamela Hartman
Readers today face the difficult challenge of choosing between and making sense of numerous competing texts, in many different forms. In this course we will investigate theories concerning both what we should read as well as how these texts should be read. We will also look at our beliefs concerning the very nature of literature and literacy. For instance, we will consider such questions as the following: What is literacy? How is it acquired? Is their a difference between print literacy and multimedia literacy? How do broader contexts, such as family and community, affect our literacy or literacies? While this is not a course in teaching methods, we will develop practical suggestions for analyzing and interpreting texts, including literary and popular materials frequently used in the English Language Arts classroom. (Prereq. ENG 230 or 150 for teaching majors).
ENG 414:
Young Adult Literature
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:10 p.m.
Prof. Darolyn “Lyn” Jones
This course will focus on recent young adult literature, representing multiple genres, suitable for students of varying ability in secondary schools (middle/junior high school and high school). The emphasis is primarily on the reading and analysis of literature with some attention given to methodology. In this course, we create a community of learners who will:
• Respond both aesthetically and analytically to literature
• Develop an appreciation of Young Adult Literature (YAL) as a genre of study
• Explore the value of YAL as a means to stimulate young adult’s interests in reading
• Understand how to bridge children’s and adult literature and to encourage the habits of lifelong reading.
ENG 422:
Author Studies -
Virginia Woolf
~Section 001~
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 2:00-2:50 p.m.
Prof. Patrick Collier
Over the last twenty years, Virginia Woolf has become one of the most widely studied and written about authors of the twentieth century. Woolf’s popular image as a feminist, a pacifist, and a stereotypically troubled genius has resulted in her emergence as an “icon,” as critic Barbara Silver has noted. Today one can buy coffee mugs and tote bags bearing Woolf’s image; until recently one could have lunch at “Virginia Woolf Burgers and Pizza” in Bloomsbury. In this class we will look behind the icon, at the historical Woolf and her writings in many genres (novel, literary criticism, diaries, letters). We will work collaboratively to reconstruct the social and historical milieu in which Woolf functioned. We will explore the theoretical problems of organizing an inquiry around the “Great Author,” and we will probe Woolf’s writings, private and public, to see how historical and aesthetic realities confirm or question the iconic Woolf. Assignments will include short presentations, short essays, and a research project.
Texts will include most of Woolf’s eight novels, at least one volume of the diaries, excerpts from the letters, and a volume of essays.
Questions? Contact pccollier@bsu.edu
ENG 422:
Author Studies -
Kurt Vonnegut
(Provost’s Initiative Immersive Learning Seminar)
~Section 003~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Prof. Rai Peterson
Students will read 13 books by Kurt Vonnegut, a biography of the author, and a collection of critical essays about his work. Each student will participate in writing a 5-year marketing plan for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and will be assigned to one of the following working groups:
· Archival research and digital humanities database development
· Film archive and oral history filming project
· Product design for the KVML gift shop
· Traveling museum design and fabrication
Students will be mentored by English and marketing faculty as well as Community Partners including the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Indianapolis Historical Society; WFYI Television; Creative Street Media Group; Floyd and Stanich, Inc.; Eye on Art; Seven Stories Press; Hamilton Exhibits; and Lilly Library, IU, Bloomington.
Co-registrations are required. This seminar requires registration for ENG 422 and MKTG 497 during Spring Semester 2012, and ENG 400 and MKTG 497 during summer semester 2012. These courses are available by permission only. Prospective students must apply for admission to this seminar. Only students who are able to take all four courses need apply.
Applications are available from Dr. Rai Peterson, Department of English: rai@bsu.edu
ENG 431:
Rhetoric, Writing, and Emerging Media
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Prof. Brian McNely
HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, Processing, et al.: these markup and programming languages drive and support the content we see on the web, shaping our interactions with emerging media applications and, much more importantly, each other.
At a fundamental level, emerging media applications rely on writing work that is carefully and strategically designed for specific audiences to produce and enable a range of specific human activities. This course will demystify many of those strategies and much of this writing work, taking a critical perspective on people acting with technology (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006).
ENG 431 explores and then puts into practice critical theories and approaches to networked writing activity inherent in emerging media platforms and applications.
This course has an applied focus, such that students will produce professional and public content for the web, sometimes in collaboration with others. 431 extends ideas and practices introduced in ENG 213 and ENG 231, and serves as the capstone course for the Minor in Professional Writing.
ENG 435:
Issues in Rhetoric and Writing -
Responding to Writing
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Prof. Jennifer Grouling Cover
Responding to another person’s writing, whether to a student, a peer, or an employee, is not an easy task. In this course, we will engage with research on response and writing. From the Writing Center tutoring session to the creative writing workshop to writing in the workplace, we will read about and research issues relating to response. The goal of this course is for you to think critically about responding to others’ work and to improve your own response practices. You will gain the skills needed to respond to student papers as well as to peer review creative and professional documents.
Throughout the course we will address questions such as:
· What does it mean to respond to writing?
· How does response influence writing?
· How is response socially influenced?
· How is response rhetorical?
· How does response vary among settings?
This course will also give you experience with qualitative research. We will collect and analyze responses to various types of writing. The final project will allow you to delve into the response practices in a community that interests you. This could be anything from the analysis of peer response in an online community to the dynamics of a Writing Center tutoring session.
ENG 444:
Senior Seminar -
Hideous Progeny: The Children of the Gothic
~Section 003~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Prof. Joyce Huff
Subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, and graveyards: these, according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, are some of the standard motifs of the Gothic. Although the Gothic form arose in eighteenth-century Britain, its influence was felt long after the first wave of Gothic fiction ended in the 1830’s. Echoes of the Gothic have continually resurfaced in British and American fiction and can be seen in the horror movies and Stephen King novels that we enjoy today. In this course, we will explore the uses to which Gothic motifs and themes were put in nineteenth-century Britain, and we will chill our blood by reading a selection of Gothic-inspired novels of the period.
Although I may begin with a classic 18th-century example and end by looking at a current manifestation of the genre, such as a film, we will focus primarily on nineteenth-century novels and short stories. Possible works for study include: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and short stories by Poe, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, Kipling, Stevenson, Hardy, Gaskell, Braddon, Nesbit, Freeman and others. There will also be critical readings on the Gothic, focusing on theorists who tackle the question of why we find certain motifs frightening. Course requirements will include a short paper, a substantial research project, reading quizzes, presentations and participation in discussion, both in class and on-line.
ENG 444:
Senior Seminar -
Book Binding/Manifestos!
~Section 004~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Prof. Rai Peterson
This course will survey the grand tradition of manifesto-writing in European and American literature, emphasizing the bold, non-traditional work of the early Modernist writers. Students will also receive instruction in artist’s book binding techniques. Each student’s term project will be writing and binding, in an edition of four, his or her personal manifesto. Learn new skills! Discover what really matters to you! (This will probably be your last chance in your whole education to make your friends’ graduation present using paper and glue in school.)
ENG 444:
Senior Seminar –
“Emergency” Fictions after 1945: Literature, Film and Catastrophe
~Section 005~
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:00-6:15 p.m.
Prof. Amit Baishya
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Fantasies about catastrophic and apocalyptic events (technological, nuclear, biological and chemical holocausts, environmental and health emergencies, invasions and attacks by terroristic and terrorizing “others” and so on) are part and parcel of popular and “high” culture. These fantasies are imaginative responses to some of the deep rooted fears we have about the survival or destruction of humanity and human history in the contemporary world. While fantasies and accounts of catastrophic events have a long history dating back to early antiquity, this course will focus on specific forms of “end of the world” fantasies that have proliferated after 1945. 1945 will be a historical marker for us because of two catastrophic events of world-historical importance—the Holocaust and Hiroshima. If the Holocaust represents a limit event where we come face to face with the horrifying reality of the mass production of human beings as dead bodies, the power to manufacture and use the nuclear bomb, in the philosopher Michel Foucault’s words, “represents the deployment of a…power that kills but…is also the power to kill life itself.” How does the human imagination contend with such nightmarish possibilities? How do we think about ideas like “life” and “humanity” when we are unmoored from worlds that are experienced as safe, familiar or trustworthy? How do we imagine futures when “risk” and “danger” seem to shadow our every move in the present? What “monstrosities” do we encounter when time as we know it seems to have come to an end? How do we think or imagine the promise of “more” life when our thoughts and actions are almost entirely bound up in the sheer facts of “mere” existence? We will begin our exploration of these questions by reading and discussing the Italian author Primo Levi’s Holocaust testimonial Survival in Auschwitz and the Japanese novelist Kobo Abe’s Kafkaesque narrative of survival in a minimalist landscape, The Woman in the Dunes. We will then shift gears to consider “fantastic” fictions based on imaginations of catastrophic events. Texts we will read will possibly include William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men (Vol. 1), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Robert Kirkman (et al) The Walking Dead, P.D. James’s Children of Men and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos. We will occasionally watch movies as well. A possible selection of movies and television episodes, either for collective viewing or individual projects, include Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, France), Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japan), Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, Japan), Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, USA), Shivers (David Cronenberg, Canada), The Host (Bong Joon Ho, South Korea), Thirst (Park Chan Wook, South Korea), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, UK), 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, UK) and The Walking Dead, Season 1 (Frank Darabont, USA).
ENG 457:
Practicum in TESOL
Wednesdays, 4:00-6:40 p.m.
Prof. Lynne Stallings
The aim of this course is two-fold: 1) to provide students with at least 45 hours of direct teaching experience with English language learners and 2) to provide students an opportunity to reflect on and demonstrate the ways that they are meeting and/or exceeding each of the 11 TESOL standards for PK-12 teacher candidates. To achieve these goals, students build on their experiences in ENG 436 and ENG 437 and work directly with English language learners in both pull-out and push-in classroom situations at the elementary and/or secondary levels.
ENG 464:
Shakespeare –
Shakespeare in Conversation
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 11:00-11:50 a.m.
Prof. Miranda Nesler
Shakespeare is a major literary figure whose name and works shape most students’ perceptions of the early modern period. Yet Shakespeare's texts did not exist in isolation; their importance grew out of the complex cultural conversations that they engaged. By encouraging the reading of Shakespeare’s plays within their historical context, this course will familiarize students with a number of those key debates and invite them to locate continuing dialogues about Shakespeare’s work.
ENG 492:
Native American Literature -
Representation, Voice, Authenticity
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Prof. Maria Windell
This course will explore three distinct periods in Native American literary history, from contact through the contemporary moment. The first portion will focus on representations of Native Americans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contact narratives—written almost exclusively by (in this case) Spanish and British authors—asking, to what extent do these narratives represent European (mis)perceptions about Native Americans, and to what extent might we recover an understanding of Native American knowledge, beliefs, and traditions from these European accounts? In the second unit of the course we will examine the ways in which nineteenth-century Native Americans represented themselves, reading around the Cherokee removal from the Supreme Court case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) to the publication of the first Native American novel, Joaquín Murieta (1854), while exploring a variety of topics including Cherokee intermarriage with whites; Native American slaveholding; and tribal dissentions. In the final weeks of the class we will turn to the questions of defining “authenticity” and “Indian-ness” in contemporary Native American fiction, and looking at debates over what and how much information regarding Native American traditions, ceremonies, etc., “should” be “explained” to a non-Native audience. Authors will likely include, among others, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; John Smith; Elias Boudinot and Harriett Gold Boudinot; John Rollin Ridge; Leslie Marmon Silko; and James Welch.
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