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Fall Courses

English Department Fall 2017 Course Descriptions

A&S 110/ENG 100-001: ORIENTATION TO THE ENGLISH MAJOR

F 1:00:00 PM-1:50:00 PM

Instructor: Pearl James

All incoming freshmen with a declared English major should take this course, which serves as an introduction and orientation to the major.  You will meet professors, hear about our various fields and the Creative Writing Option, learn about honors, internships, and study abroad options for English majors.  This class will put you on a track to excel and get the most out of your major. The major assignments are attendance, participation, and a custom-designed 4 year plan.

 

ENG 107-001: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING

MW 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: John D Howell

This is an introduction to the craft of imaginative writing and to three of its genres:  fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.  Students will read and practice writing in those genres, and work frequently in small groups to develop and critique the writing.   Small group work and frequent exercises aside, this is primarily a large lecture class.   Our main text will be Burroway's Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (4th ed.).  This course fulfills the UK Core requirement for Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity.

 

ENG 107-002: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING

MW 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Janet Carey Eldred

People often say, “I’m not creative,” but this section of ENG 107 begins with the premise that everyone can learn to write and think creatively. It’s not magic: It’s a combination of ART, which you can appreciate, and CRAFT, which you can practice. The textbook for the class is Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing  (4th edition). Expect to write three short pieces (poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction/drama) and to take three exams.  There is an attendance policy for this course.

 

ENG 107-003-008: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING

MW 2:00:00 PM-2:50:00 PM

Instructor: Hannah Pittard

Welcome to college. This class will break your heart, blow your mind, and show you what it means to be a creative reader and writer. This is an introduction to the craft and genres of imaginative writing, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students will study and practice writing in various modes through composition, peer critique, and research. Attendance and participation are required.

 

ENG 107-009: INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Michael W Carter

This introductory course in creative writing will explore the various genre: we will play with poetry, fiddle with fiction and nonfiction, as well as grace our souls with other genre. The class will read and discuss literature in various delightful forms to help us understand technique and voice, and practice writing and critiquing our own writing. We will often work in small groups (depending on the number enrolled) as a workshopping method for finding our voices as writers, and for helping our classmates find theirs. By the semester's end, we will have a mini portfolio of writing

 

ENG 130-001: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS

MWF 9:00:00 AM-9:50:00 AM

Instructor: Cheryl E Cardiff

 

ENG 130-003: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS: Revenge!

MWF 12:00:00 PM-12:50:00 PM

Instructor: Frederick K Bengtsson

Revenge: A kind of wild justice, a way of getting retribution when society has failed you, or part of an unending cycle of bloody violence that threatens to destroy society itself? Writers and artists have asked this question for thousands of years, making revenge one of the most enduring literary and artistic themes. From the familial, mythical dramas of the ancient Greeks where wives kills husbands and children kill their parents, to the spectacular violence of Renaissance revenge tragedies where blood flows freely and body parts litter the stage, to the frontier justice of the American Western where the good guys go after the bad guys, this class will consider revenge stories in all their variety, seeing how different times and cultures respond in different ways to this fundamental theme, but also trying to trace similarities and echoes between different periods.

 

ENG 130-004: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS: Banned Books: From Mid-19th Century to Today

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: Michael W Carter

Why are school districts and some parents afraid of Harry Potter, Huckleberry Finn or others? Why are certain works and their characters’ words either avoided or expurgated to gain admittance into the corridors of high schools and libraries? This course will read these works and examine the historical and cultural reasons for the books’ being challenged in the past or today. Poems such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Ginsberg's Howl have rallied opponents to suppress their inclusion in anthologies. We'll try to redeem or reject these texts through close readings and research into the complaints about the books and into the themes of the texts. Coursework will include readings and two 5-7 creative non-fiction/fiction pieces, one collaborative project, as well as shorter writing assignments.

 

ENG 130-005: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS: Foundling Narrative from Pastoral to Parody

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Lisa Zunshine

What do Luke Skywalker, Hercules, Moses, Oedipus, and Superman have in common? They are all fictional "foundlings”brought up by people other than their parents and discovering that their fate (glorious or ignominious) is bound up with their true heritage. This course will introduce students to literary analysis by following the development of the "foundling narrative" in fiction, from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders to Jane Austen's Emma and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

 

ENG 168-001: JAZZ AND DEMOCRACY: All That Speak of Jazz: An Intellectual Inquiry in Jazz and Democracy

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: DaMaris B. Hill

This course is designed to be a hybrid cultural studies seminar and creative composition course that explores jazz theory as a philosophical artistic practice rooted in American democracy. This course will explore jazz aesthetics as a literary, visual, and musical art form. It will also examine theories of jazz composition as philosophical statements that are in direct conversation with the principles of US democracy. The course will also discuss the philosophical and aesthetic relationship that connects jazz literature to surrealist and existentialist artistic movements in modern and postmodern cultural contexts. Artists, some of who may be considered marginalized citizens, to be discussed include James Baldwin, Harryette Mullen, and others. The theoretical aspects of this course will demonstrate how jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures and theoretical practices. The readings will be selections of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays with emphasis on jazz literary modes, creative trends, and political connotations specific to African American literature and culture.

 

ENG 168-002: JAZZ AND DEMOCRACY: All That Speak of Jazz: An Intellectual Inquiry in Jazz and Democracy

MWF 12:00:00 PM-12:50:00 PM

Instructor: DaMaris B. Hill

This course is designed to be a hybrid cultural studies seminar and creative composition course that explores jazz theory as a philosophical artistic practice rooted in American democracy. This course will explore jazz aesthetics as a literary, visual, and musical art form. It will also examine theories of jazz composition as philosophical statements that are in direct conversation with the principles of US democracy. The course will also discuss the philosophical and aesthetic relationship that connects jazz literature to surrealist and existentialist artistic movements in modern and postmodern cultural contexts. Artists, some of who may be considered marginalized citizens, to be discussed include James Baldwin, Harryette Mullen, and others. The theoretical aspects of this course will demonstrate how jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures and theoretical practices. The readings will be selections of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays with emphasis on jazz literary modes, creative trends, and political connotations specific to African American literature and culture.

 

ENG 171-001: GLOBAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

MWF 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: Peter J. Kalliney

In 1827, JW von Goethe famously said, "National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach."  Despite Goethe's demand that we read literature in a global context, the study of literature in English continues to be dominated by British and American examples.  What would a course on global literature in English look like?  To what extent is English now a global language, no longer the property of any national group?  How has fiction contributed to this process?  This experiment in reading extra-national literature turns to some of the language's most compelling writers of fiction--such as Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, and Sam Selvon--to explore the idea of global citizenship and cosmopolitan English.  The course will consider how 20th- and 21st-Century writers approach the problem of belonging to, and being excluded from, national territories and nationalist affiliations.  Examinations, quizzes, writing assignments, attendance and participation, and level of preparedness will be used to evaluate student performance.

 

ENG 180-001: GREAT MOVIES: The American 70s

MW 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: John D Howell

The decade of the 70s was certainly one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- in American film history. This course will feature a dozen movies from that amazing decade, ranging from familiar hits like The Godfather and Chinatown through lesser-known early masterpieces by directors such as Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, as well as wonderful work from Terence Malick, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and others. Obviously you'll need to know some historical context for the films -- the emergence of youth counter-culture and the war in Vietnam, e.g. -- as well as some film history, and you'll need to learn some basic terms of film art. But primarily we'll be watching great movies, and talking about what we're seeing, and thinking about how and why the movies work as they do. Class attendance and participation; weekly short quizzes and short responses. Final Exam.

 

ENG 180-002: GREAT MOVIES: Pages to Screen

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Juan Manuel Gonzales

When adapting a short story or novel for film or television, how does a scriptwriter determine what stays in, what gets cut, how the pacing should work, what is the core idea that should be translated from page to screen? In this course we will be exploring the ways novels and short stories are adapted for film and television, and then students will work on adapting a story or novel of their own choosing. Works to be considered include THE PRINCESS BRIDE, THE HUNGER GAMES, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, among others. Students will be responsible for out of class reading and screening of movies and episodes. The course will furthermore both a critical and creative response to adapting fiction to film.

 

ENG 191-001: LITERATURE AND THE ARTS OF CITIZENSHIP

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Armando J Prats

This section of ENG 191 examines literary expressions of Western civilization’s ideals of JUSTICE and compares and contrasts them with events unfolding in the more recent time, including this now, during the angry and contentious period in American and world history. We will read literary texts that articulate ideals and visions of citizenship, political liberty, and justice in major literary texts and authors.  

 

Our readings for background will come from: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plato. We will, however, consider several of the following authors: Shakespeare, Dickens, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Douglass, Lincoln, Orwell, Arendt, M. L. King, Morrison, and Coates. Along with these various texts and contexts, we will consider events in American history and culture, from the period immediately following the Second World War and question whether—and why or why not—post-World War II America has lived up to the promise and the vision of citizenship articulated by the ages. You will be responsible for short multi-modal presentations, two short papers, and class participation.  NO CELL PHONES. NO LAPTOPS.

 

 

ENG 207-001: BEG WKSP IMAG WRIT: Poetry

MW 12:00:00 PM-12:50:00 PM

Instructor: Janet Carey Eldred

O.k., you know you want to…Release your inner poet!  This beginning workshop will cover strategies you can adapt to create poems that are meaningful to you and that move others.  It will also prepare you for intermediate and advanced workshops should you choose to strike out confidently in that direction. At the core of this course?  Reading & writing poems...No exams, weekly writing practice, 3 polished sequences of 5-7 poems.  There is an attendance policy for this course.

 

ENG 207-002: BEG WKSP IMAG WRIT: Nonfiction

TR 3:30:00 PM-4:45:00 PM

Instructor: Krystin Santos

Creative nonfiction employs literary styles and techniques to craft factual but engaging narratives from our own lives and the lives of those around us. In this class, we will explore different types of creative nonfiction and learn to shape our experiences into works of art. Reading assignments will focus on exploring the variety and techniques of creative nonfiction as a genre, while writing assignments will ask you to employ those techniques in crafting your own unique stories.

 

ENG 207-003: BEG WKSP IMAG WRIT: Digital Spaces

MW 3:00:00 PM-4:15:00 PM

Instructor: DaMaris B. Hill

Beginner's Workshop in Imaginative Writing: Creative Writing in Digital Spaces is a creative writing workshop and course that explores creative composition and literary arts in digital spaces. This course will introduce or reintroduce students to the intersections of technology and literature by surveying literature and creative expression in digital spaces. This class will create and explore the different theories and mediums authors may employ in digital spaces. The course will challenge students to critique and create works of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction in digital spaces. The course will also discuss how and why authors choose to express themselves using multimedia and texts in digital environments. The course will emphasize the constraints and freedoms associated with digital composition and literary practices. Mediums and genres to be discussed include digital story telling, online literary journals, blogs, vlogs, twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and electronic literature source. The course will also require students to create a portfolio of digital writing. The theoretical aspects of this course will demonstrate how digital writing and tools serve as a source of inspiration for a variety of twenty-first century literatures.

 

ENG 207-004: BEG WKSP IMAG WRIT: Fiction

T 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Kate Tighe-Piggott

Have you read ever something and wondered: how did the writer do that? In this course, we will swan dive into imaginative writing by reading (and listening to) some of literature's most seminal, envelope-pushing, contemporary short stories, and by writing one of our own. In the first part of the course we will try to understand how literature's most esteemed writers elicit response from us using the structure, style, dialogue, description, characterization, and other elements of craft. You will also write your own story for workshop. The second half of the class will be spent in workshop, where you and your peers will give each other honest, respectful, constructive, feedback. Workshops are usually fun, creative, supportive environments where lifelong friendships are made. By the end of the term, students will have a draft of a short story they can revise and submit for publication. Even if you do not plan to become a writer, you will develop a deeper appreciation for literature in this course, and the skills you will practice—reading and analyzing texts, seeing and understanding the world in new ways, developing empathy, responding critically and constructively to peers, and being objective about the quality of your own work will be useful in any field.

 

ENG 230-001: INTRO TO LIT: In Pursuit of Happiness

MWF 9:00:00 AM-9:50:00 AM

Instructor: Rebecca Wiltberger

Love, sex, freedom, money, travel, justice, mercy. This course is a journey into what writers and thinkers consider essential to pursuing and finding happiness.  This class explores a wide variety of writings, from plays to short stories, graphic novels to film. What does it mean to be happy?  How can you pursue happiness during times of war? Under slavery? In the face of injustice or loss? What is the relationship between happiness and freedom?  Happiness and love?  Happiness and wealth or property?  Come join us as we read and write together in the hunt to find happiness.

 

ENG 230-2: INTRO TO LIT: In Pursuit of Happiness

MWF 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: Rebecca Wiltberger

Love, sex, freedom, money, travel, justice, mercy. This course is a journey into what writers and thinkers consider essential to pursuing and finding happiness.  This class explores a wide variety of writings, from plays to short stories, graphic novels to film. What does it mean to be happy?  How can you pursue happiness during times of war? Under slavery? In the face of injustice or loss? What is the relationship between happiness and freedom?  Happiness and love?  Happiness and wealth or property?  Come join us as we read and write together in the hunt to find happiness.

 

ENG 230-003: INTRO TO LIT: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma: Mystery in Literature

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Jonathan Tinnin

Why do we love mysteries? Is it the thrill of seeing justice served? Is it a need to solve problems? One of the most common ways of maintaining a reader's interest is to provide him or her with an unsolved mystery. Until fairly recently, mysteries have, unfortunately, been discounted as serious literature, seen only as brain candy. However, the genre provides an important window into the cultural norms and anxieties of society. In this course, we will be investigating a play, novels, short stories, poems, and a film that all contain some element of mystery. Our primary questions as we move through the course will include the following: with the formula of mysteries so apparent to us, why do we continue to be attracted to tales of murder and mayhem? Why do the majority of detectives have unusual personalities and/or illnesses? How does the mystery contribute to maintaining the cultural status quo? So, join the search for answers as we peer through the magnifying glass of literary criticism at fascinating pieces of literature.

 

ENG 230-004: INTRO TO LIT: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma: Mystery in Literature

MWF 12:00:00 PM-12:50:00 PM

Instructor: Jonathan Tinnin

Why do we love mysteries? Is it the thrill of seeing justice served? Is it a need to solve problems? One of the most common ways of maintaining a reader's interest is to provide him or her with an unsolved mystery. Until fairly recently, mysteries have, unfortunately, been discounted as serious literature, seen only as brain candy. However, the genre provides an important window into the cultural norms and anxieties of society. In this course, we will be investigating a play, novels, short stories, poems, and a film that all contain some element of mystery. Our primary questions as we move through the course will include the following: with the formula of mysteries so apparent to us, why do we continue to be attracted to tales of murder and mayhem? Why do the majority of detectives have unusual personalities and/or illnesses? How does the mystery contribute to maintaining the cultural status quo? So, join the search for answers as we peer through the magnifying glass of literary criticism at fascinating pieces of literature.

 

ENG 230-005: INTRO TO LIT: The Walking Cure

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Alex Menrisky

What good are forests? Mountains? The travelogue or the high adventure? One argument over the years has been, quite simply, that they're good for your health. This section of ENG 230 will focus on the literary theme of walking, across a variety of genres and contexts, especially as it has been used as a therapeutic exercise to salve a multitude of ills. While walking, hiking, and adventuring out the front door are today widely accepted in the United States as healthy practices, the meaning, purpose, and implications of retreat "away from the urban, the social, the industrial”have varied widely over the past few centuries. This course will examine the cultural practice and literary representation of adventure's curative aspects in several contexts, from the mundane to the fantastical, and will trace its historical transformation (or lack thereof) from the mid-19th century to today. How do different genres, from journal to modernist novel to high fantasy, represent the walking cure? How do various figures, such as the fleur or the beat, understand the therapeutic aspects of movement? Who is able to benefit from walking's curative aspects, who is not, and why? Some of the texts we will read this semester include Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and Henry David Thoreau's (you guessed it) Walking. Assignments include regular reading logs, a group presentation, and an essay of analytical literary criticism. Through this conversation, this course will introduce students to various literary genres and the discipline of literary studies (its disciplinary vocabulary and influential analytic models). We will explore the value of complexity in literature through close, active reading and consider how information such as cultural context can affect such readings.

 

ENG 230-006: INTRO TO LIT: Monsters, Freaks, and Geeks

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: Michelle R. Sizemore

This semester we’ll be gripped by texts that turn the spotlight on individuals who, by either choice or force, inhabit the margins of mainstream society. Through an ensemble of texts that mix horror, fantasy, tragedy, and humor, we will explore how writers over the past two centuries have used stories of monsters, freaks, and geeks to ask profound questions about differences among humans, as well as differences between humans and other beings: What are the limits and excesses of the human? How have bodies been markers of otherness? How are feelings of strangeness and wonder connected with social othering? In this class we will pay special attention to how cultures have constructed anomalous social categories in order to define or secure membership in a common group. We will be equally concerned with how race, class, sexuality, gender, and disability factor into these designations and divisions. Along the way we will carefully consider similarities and differences among those who have been disparagingly categorized as monsters, freaks, and geeks. Two essays, presentation, class participation, take-home final.

 

ENG 230-007: INTRO TO LIT: (SR)

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Alex Menrisky

What good are forests? Mountains? The travelogue or the high adventure? One argument over the years has been, quite simply, that they're good for your health. This section of ENG 230 will focus on the literary theme of walking, across a variety of genres and contexts, especially as it has been used as a therapeutic exercise to salve a multitude of ills. While walking, hiking, and adventuring out the front door are today widely accepted in the United States as healthy practices, the meaning, purpose, and implications of retreat "away from the urban, the social, the industrial” have varied widely over the past few centuries. This course will examine the cultural practice and literary representation of adventure's curative aspects in several contexts, from the mundane to the fantastical, and will trace its historical transformation (or lack thereof) from the mid-19th century to today. How do different genres, from journal to modernist novel to high fantasy, represent the walking cure? How do various figures, such as the fleur or the beat, understand the therapeutic aspects of movement? Who is able to benefit from walking's curative aspects, who is not, and why? Some of the texts we will read this semester include Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and Henry David Thoreau's (you guessed it) Walking. Assignments include regular reading logs, a group presentation, and an essay of analytical literary criticism. Through this conversation, this course will introduce students to various literary genres and the discipline of literary studies (its disciplinary vocabulary and influential analytic models). We will explore the value of complexity in literature through close, active reading and consider how information such as cultural context can affect such readings.

 

ENG 242-001: SURVEY OF BRITISH LITERATURE II

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Jonathan M Allison

A survey of British literature from the 18th century to the 20th century, with emphasis on different genres, periods, and cultural characteristics of the later English literary tradition. Authors covered may include the early and later Romantic movements; novelists and poets of the Victorian period such as Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the early twentieth-century Modernism of T.S. Eliot and other authors; and more. Lecture. Fulfills ENG major Historical Survey Requirement. Provides ENG minor credit. Credit will not be given to students who already have credit for ENG 332.

 

ENG 251-001: SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE I

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Andrew V Doolen

How did American authors capture and express the social and political pressures of a robust period of nation building? What sorts of stories, subjects, and genres captivated their audience and attempted to define a American identity? In this course, you will develop answers to these essential questions. We will read novels, short stories, poems, autobiographies, slave narratives, and historical essays from a multicultural mix of authors. We will pay special attention to the larger cultural history and the links between specific pieces of literature and the historical events that may have shaped them, including conflicts over slavery, the national policy of Indian Removal, and debates about American Empire in the 1850s.

 

ENG 252-001-002: SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE II

MW 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM, Discussion Sections F 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM

Instructor: Pearl James

This course offers a survey of American literature from Walt Whitman's poetry to the present. Some of the course's overarching questions are: What is literature for?  Why do we study it?  What counts as "American" and "Literature"?  What kinds of American identity is literature describing and helping to form?  What are the burdens, benefits, and responsibilities that American institutions create, and that American fiction writers attempt to influence?  We will spend two weeks on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and from there turn to various apparitions of “the modern” and “modernism,” as they appear in representative American texts by James, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, and in the first movie with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer.  From there we will turn to the post-1945 period and to literature that explores contemporary issues of American identity in texts by Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien, Phil Klay, and and Christina Henriquez.

 

ENG 260-001: INTRODUCTION TO BLACK WRITERS

MWF 9:00:00 AM-9:50:00 AM

Instructor: Matt Bryant Chaney

This section of Introduction to Black Writers explores the concept of blackness in Twentieth Century American life as expressed in writing from 1900 to the year 2000. Instead of offering a complete overview of Twentieth Century Black Writing in the US, we will instead strive to better understand how several writers balance the weight of African American social history (slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) with the individual, personal experiences of themselves and their characters. We will strive to answer the question: What, exactly, does it mean to be black in America and who decides the limits of American blackness? While examining these different facets of black life in the Twentieth-Century US, this course is also an introduction to literary studies. As such, we will develop and use the different tools of literary analysis to make well-crafted arguments about texts in more traditional forms (essays, short writing assignments) and through digital projects. Course readings will include the following: W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Nella Larsen's Passing, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Octavia Butler's Kindred, August Wilson's Fences, and Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks comic strip, in addition to shorter works and poems by Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, and Frank X Walker.

 

ENG 260-002: INTRODUCTION TO BLACK WRITERS

MWF 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: Matt Bryant Chaney

This section of Introduction to Black Writers explores the concept of blackness in Twentieth Century American life as expressed in writing from 1900 to the year 2000. Instead of offering a complete overview of Twentieth Century Black Writing in the US, we will instead strive to better understand how several writers balance the weight of African American social history (slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) with the individual, personal experiences of themselves and their characters. We will strive to answer the question: What, exactly, does it mean to be black in America and who decides the limits of American blackness? While examining these different facets of black life in the Twentieth-Century US, this course is also an introduction to literary studies. As such, we will develop and use the different tools of literary analysis to make well-crafted arguments about texts in more traditional forms (essays, short writing assignments) and through digital projects. Course readings will include the following: W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Nella Larsen's Passing, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Octavia Butler's Kindred, August Wilson's Fences, and Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks comic strip, in addition to shorter works and poems by Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, and Frank X Walker.

 

ENG 260-003: INTRODUCTION TO BLACK WRITERS

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Matthew W Godbey

This course explores African-American literature since 1975. We will explore how authors use their writing to explore contemporary issues related to race and identity as well as the lingering effects of historical issues such as slavery, Jim Crow, the great migration, and civil rights. Attention will be paid to student writing, particularly to devising a thesis, crafting an argument, and learning how to use supporting evidence. At the same time, as an introduction to literary studies, we will focus on the skills of literary analysis with a special emphasis on close reading and historical context, making original, well-crafted arguments about texts in essay form, using research to support your analyses, and mastering many of the fundamental elements of literary study.

 

ENG 265-001: SURVEY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: Rynetta S Davis

 

ENG 271-001: THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Frederick K Bengtsson

The collection of sacred texts known as the Bible has a long and complex history. Written and shaped over millennia by different people and in different languages, it has played a central role in Western and Judeo-Christian history and culture, not only as a religious text, but as a literary one as well. While religion is central to the Bible, religious interpretation and theology are not our main focus in this class. Instead, we will take a textual approach to these books, exploring them in literary and historical terms: what kinds of techniques, devices, and genres do the writers of these texts employ? how do earlier books and writers influence later ones, and how in turn do these later works reflect and innovate on earlier ones? how are the various historical periods and cultures that produced these books reflected within them? what issues are raised by the history of translation and re-translation of these texts? By asking (and trying to answer) these kinds of questions, we will gain a richer understanding of the literary complexities of these texts, and of their cultural and historical importance.

 

ENG 280-001: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

MWF 9:00:00 AM-9:50:00 AM

Instructor: Frederick K Bengtsson

This course will introduce students to the study of cinema as a medium, and to the tools and vocabulary of film analysis. By learning about and attending to key elements of film production and form (genre, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound and lighting, etc.) in a variety of films, we will consider the ways in which filmmakers shape our experience of their work and create meaning within it. We will move beyond watching films passively toward thinking about them analytically, both in artistic and aesthetic terms, and in terms of the ideas and ideologies they articulate, reinforce, and resist.

 

ENG 280-002: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

MWF 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: Cheryl E Cardiff

 

ENG 280-003: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Genre and the Experience of Watching

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Ben Wilson

This course serves as a broad introduction to both the art and craft of film. The cinema is perhaps the most dominant form of 20th century media, and we will consider a variety of films from across the spectrum of genre, from the silent German expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," to the modern comedy, "Mean Girls," to the genre-bending cult classic "The Big Lebowski." Students will learn to analyze films for their content, techniques, and genre expectations. We will also pay close attention to the historical and social contexts that surround each film. By considering film both as an art form and as a collective, shared experience, we will begin to get a handle on both the meaning of film and the challenge and pleasure in being attentive film viewers.

 

ENG 280-004: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Genre and the Experience of Watching

MWF 12:00:00 PM-12:50:00 PM

Instructor: Ben Wilson

This course serves as a broad introduction to both the art and craft of film. The cinema is perhaps the most dominant form of 20th century media, and we will consider a variety of films from across the spectrum of genre, from the silent German expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," to the modern comedy, "Mean Girls," to the genre-bending cult classic "The Big Lebowski." Students will learn to analyze films for their content, techniques, and genre expectations. We will also pay close attention to the historical and social contexts that surround each film. By considering film both as an art form and as a collective, shared experience, we will begin to get a handle on both the meaning of film and the challenge and pleasure in being attentive film viewers.

 

ENG 280-005: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

MWF 1:00:00 PM-1:50:00 PM

Instructor: Cheryl E Cardiff

 

ENG 280-006: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

MW 3:00:00 PM-4:15:00 PM

Instructor: John D Howell

This is a basic introduction to the study of film, which includes film history as well as elements of film form such as mise-en-scene, editing, cinematography, sound, film genres, and the narrative structures of films. Each of these subjects brings with it an array of terms that we'll use when discussing and anlayzing films; our required text, The Film Experience (3rd ed.) will be the source of those terms as well as a resource for explanations and illustrations, supplemented by the frequent in-class screening of clips, trailers, and shorts (even a cartoon or two). But our primary focus will be 13 feature-length films that range across time -- from the 1920s till recently -- and genres (comedy, horror, musical, crime etc.) There will be at least one silent film, one foreign film, several black-and-white films, and R-rated films.  All films will be screened twice on the day before we discuss them, and all will be on reserve and available to you in the library. Each week will feature a different film, and by the end of the semester you will have seen some great films, plus you'll be acquainted with many film artists and films that are new to you:  you'll be a more knowledgeable, sophisticated filmgoer.

 

ENG 280-007: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: W C Foreman

This section of ENG 280 is an introduction to the study of the movies as a narrative art and a cultural document, with emphasis on the former.  The course will develop students' vocabulary and skills for describing, understanding, and interpreting movies and talking about how film narratives work.  The unifying theme of this section is "Performing to Survive."  We will watch a series of movies in which actors play characters who find that in order to get on in life, to improve their lot, to develop their possibilities for self-expression, to to divert threats or exploit opportunities, to fulfill their desires, or simply to survive they must become actors to an audience, players of roles, performers, people they are not . . . at least at first.  Some succeed and some do not, and the roles have varying relations to their "real" selves.  Sometimes the "real" self is lost to the role.  Sometimes the role becomes the real self.  Sometimes the lines between the role and the self become blurred, with one usurping the other so we can't tell the difference.  Sometimes the performing becomes predatory, a way of victimizing others and thus threatening their survival.  The movies we will cover will be chosen from a variety of genres, styles, and time periods.  

 

ENG 280-008: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: W C Foreman

This section of ENG 280 is an introduction to the study of the movies as a narrative art and a cultural document, with emphasis on the former.  The course will develop students' vocabulary and skills for describing, understanding, and interpreting movies and talking about how film narratives work.  The unifying theme of this section is "Performing to Survive."  We will watch a series of movies in which actors play characters who find that in order to get on in life, to improve their lot, to develop their possibilities for self-expression, to to divert threats or exploit opportunities, to fulfill their desires, or simply to survive they must become actors to an audience, players of roles, performers, people they are not . . . at least at first.  Some succeed and some do not, and the roles have varying relations to their "real" selves.  Sometimes the "real" self is lost to the role.  Sometimes the role becomes the real self.  Sometimes the lines between the role and the self become blurred, with one usurping the other so we can't tell the difference.  Sometimes the performing becomes predatory, a way of victimizing others and thus threatening their survival.  The movies we will cover will be chosen from a variety of genres, styles, and time periods.

 

ENG 280-009: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Of Monsters and Men

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Deirdre Mikolajcik

This course will provide an introduction to the study of film as a narrative art and cultural text. Students will learn how to view films from closely, how to relate films to their contexts, and how to employ the basic terms and concepts of film analysis. Attention will be paid to student writing, particularly to devising a thesis, crafting an argument, and learning how to use supporting evidence. This section will focus on the portrayal of the monstrous in films of varying genres, geographies, and time periods -- from Polish mermaids in The Lure to futuristic cyborgs in Blade Runner. Keeping human at the center of this humanities course, we'll explore the question of what, exactly, it means to be human and how films uphold, challenge, and mold our understanding of the monstrous and the humane.

 

ENG 280-010: INTRODUCTION TO FILM

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Matthew W Godbey

What does the American classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939) have in common with Winter's Bone, an independent film from 2010 about a young woman's harrowing search for her father in the Ozarks, or the 2015 big budget boxing thriller Creed? ? How can Dorothy's trip down the yellow brick road help us understand the characters and stories found in both these films? How did John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards in the quintessential western The Searchers (1956) pave the way for a host of other famous movie characters who stride across our screens dispensing their own forms of justice? What does the enduring popularity of this type of character tell us about ourselves and about American culture?

This class is designed to help you answer these and many other questions related to the study of American film. Together, we'll watch a variety of movies as we work to understand the archetypal stories, characters, and conflicts from which films draw and use these categories as opportunities for closely analyzing and making arguments about American film by tracking how different directors or screenwriters evoke, manipulate, or transform the archetypes according to historical/cultural context and to the needs of their specific movies. 

 

ENG 280-011: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Of Monsters and Men

TR 3:30:00 PM-4:45:00 PM

Instructor: Deirdre Mikolajcik

This course will provide an introduction to the study of film as a narrative art and cultural text. Students will learn how to view films from closely, how to relate films to their contexts, and how to employ the basic terms and concepts of film analysis. Attention will be paid to student writing, particularly to devising a thesis, crafting an argument, and learning how to use supporting evidence. This section will focus on the portrayal of the monstrous in films of varying genres, geographies, and time periods -- from Polish mermaids in The Lure to futuristic cyborgs in Blade Runner. Keeping human at the center of this humanities course, we'll explore the question of what, exactly, it means to be human and how films uphold, challenge, and mold our understanding of the monstrous and the humane.

 

ENG 280-012: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Environmental Film

M 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Robert Gorum

The environment is an increasingly precarious part of our everyday existence.  In recent years, a great number of environmental documentaries have been released to varying degrees of success, and an increasing number of environmentally post-apocalyptic films and television shows have resonated with audiences around the country.  For better or worse, the environment is at the forefront of society's collective consciousness.  This section of English 280 focuses not on the environmental movement or on global warming, but on its cinematic representations.  We will consider the following questions: who are environmental movies made for?  What cultural work do environmental movies do for their various audiences?  Can an environmental movie be an environmental movie if it wasn't the director's intentions?  What formal elements of film make a film an environmental film? In the process of discussing these questions, this course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of film: you will learn how to critically evaluate the ways filmmakers tell stories.

 

ENG 280-013: INTRODUCTION TO FILM: Environmental Film

T 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Robert Gorum

The environment is an increasingly precarious part of our everyday existence.  In recent years, a great number of environmental documentaries have been released to varying degrees of success, and an increasing number of environmentally post-apocalyptic films and television shows have resonated with audiences around the country.  For better or worse, the environment is at the forefront of society's collective consciousness.  This section of English 280 focuses not on the environmental movement or on global warming, but on its cinematic representations.  We will consider the following questions: who are environmental movies made for?  What cultural work do environmental movies do for their various audiences?  Can an environmental movie be an environmental movie if it wasn't the director's intentions?  What formal elements of film make a film an environmental film? In the process of discussing these questions, this course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of film: you will learn how to critically evaluate the ways filmmakers tell stories.

 

ENG 284-001: HISTORY OF FILM I

MWF 1:00:00 PM-1:50:00 PM

Instructor: Randall Roorda

Film is the one form of expression that grasps time in its passing. This makes old films ever fresh: they're resurrections. In this class we’ll encounter moving pictures of people dead for decades in places gone forever, yet these figures will walk, gesture, emote, dance, eventually talk and sing, on cue for us, as if viewed through a dusty window right now.  While this class won't neglect what it's charged to cover (silent pictures, advent of sound, Hollywood's rise and more, as laid out in the catalog description), its grand subject is the emergence and spread of a miracle. Appreciating their origins, we may cease to take our screens for granted. We'll watch a movie a week (maybe more- some are short), write brief responses to them, and endure some exam-like instruments to pique attention.

 

ENG 290-001: INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN'S LITERATURE: Women on the Road

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Gokce Tekeli

Since Homer's Odyssey, literature has described travelers, their journeys and transformations. While on the road, travelers face conditions that can be dangerous, difficult, or sometimes convenient. This class will focus on women's versions of such stories. How do journeys change women? What does it mean to be on the move? Physically? Mentally? Or Emotionally? Women on the Road is a course of journeys - both literal and figurative. In this course, we will trace geographies and explorations in a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, and self-life narratives across time and space. Our journey will begin with the fugitive slave Harriett Jacobs in antebellum America. We will trespass boundaries of a Moroccan harem with Fatima Mernissi, inquire into the Islamic Revolution in Iran with the guidance of Marjane Satrapi, follow Alison Bechdel through her archival journey of self-discovery, and more.  In this course, we will read and write a lot. You should expect short writing assignments throughout the semester.

 

ENG 290-002: INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN'S LITERATURE: Women on the Road

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Gokce Tekeli

Since Homer's Odyssey, literature has described travelers, their journeys and transformations. While on the road, travelers face conditions that can be dangerous, difficult, or sometimes convenient. This class will focus on women's versions of such stories. How do journeys change women? What does it mean to be on the move? Physically? Mentally? Or Emotionally? Women on the Road is a course of journeys - both literal and figurative. In this course, we will trace geographies and explorations in a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, and self-life narratives across time and space. Our journey will begin with the fugitive slave Harriett Jacobs in antebellum America. We will trespass boundaries of a Moroccan harem with Fatima Mernissi, inquire into the Islamic Revolution in Iran with the guidance of Marjane Satrapi, follow Alison Bechdel through her archival journey of self-discovery, and more.  In this course, we will read and write a lot. You should expect short writing assignments throughout the semester.

 

ENG 301-001: STYLE FOR WRITERS

MWF 1:00:00 PM-1:50:00 PM

Instructor: Elizabeth Ann Connors Manke

 

ENG 330-001: TEXT AND CONTEXT: Singin' In the Rain

MWF 10:00:00 AM-10:50:00 AM

Instructor: Pearl James

This classic Hollywood musical from 1952 will be our lens into film history.  Singin' in the Rain looks backward to the film industry's transformation by the wide-scale adoption of synchronized sound with The Jazz Singer, but also comments on its own contemporary Hollywood moment and the studio system. This film is also relevant to our own contemporary nostalgia for classic Hollywood, expressed in films such as La La Land and The Artist.  We'll read film criticism, consider the Hollywood  "star system" at different moments, consider the musical as a genre, and learn to interpret the film's design and dance.  Short papers throughout the semester will culminate in a final research project, either written or digital, on your own chosen context through which to analyze this film. 

 

ENG 330-002: TEXT AND CONTEXT: Robinson Crusoe

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Michael E. Genovese

Many ways, it gave birth to prose fiction as we still know it today: as a story that takes place in a familiar, realistic world occupied by people doing things we recognize as everyday.  But what is familiar?  Realistic?  Everyday?  Are people and characters even the same thing?  As we study Defoe's novel, we will stretch into its literary past and future in order to explore these questions and come to terms with what it meant to be the first novel and what it still means to be a novel today.  We will read novels by Defoe as well as works selected from the following novelists: Bunyan, Haywood, Coetzee, and Joyce.  There will also be regular reading of responses to Robinson Crusoe, both from the past and the present.  Expect approximately 80 pages of reading per week, as well as 15-20 pages of writing.  Active participation is required, and there will be a cumulative final exam.

 

ENG 330-004: TEXT AND CONTEXT: Toni Morrison's Sula

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Rynetta S Davis

This section of 330 will focus on Toni Morrison's 1973 novel, Sula.

 

ENG 330-005: TEXT AND CONTEXT: Silko's Ceremony

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Andrew V Doolen

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest Native American novels ever written. This course examines Ceremony, its historical context, and its impact on Native American cultural practices. Placed at the center of our course, Silko's novel will offer us access to a range of works by Native American authors, including Sherman Alexie, Louis Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch. We will also trace the ways in which Silko's storytelling influenced Native American poetry, photography, and film. The final grade in the course will be based on student writing, active participation, presentations, and a final project.

 

ENG 339-001: AUTHOR STUDIES: The Dark Mark Twain

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Michael W Carter

We know the kindly, mustachioed, white-haired-gentleman author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of Jumping Frog fame, and the humorist who traveled the globe cheering thousands with his irreverent views on governments and the late 19th century world. What we may be less familiar with is the cynical, blasphemous writer that even his family hid from the public after his death. This dark Twain tackled religion's hypocrisy and mankind's ignorance as well as other issues of his day. We'll begin with Adam and take our tour of Mark Twain's Bible through to the early 20th century and The Mysterious Stranger that Samuel Clemens was.  Work load will be daily readings, two short essays, one larger essay, tests and quizzes, and other contextual assignments.

 

ENG 341-001: CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: Matthew C. Giancarlo

 

ENG 347-001: THE RISE OF THE BRITISH NOVEL

MWF 1:00:00 PM-1:50:00 PM

Instructor: Michael E. Genovese

What is the novel and how did it begin? Why did it development at a specific moment in history and what counted as fiction before that time? What makes one novel literature and another trash? In this course we explore the early decades of the novel to better understand prose fiction and how it came to be a dominant genre in English literature. Readings can include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen (including selected cinematic adaptations), and more. Topics can include the novel in history and the history of the novel; the evolving cultural practices of novel-reading; eighteenth-century fiction and contemporary popular culture.

 

ENG 352-001: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURES TO 1900: American Renaissance: Above, Beneath, Beyond

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: Michelle R. Sizemore

The American Renaissance refers to a moment of extraordinary literary expression in the mid-nineteenth century. Our course will begin with the authors originally associated with America's artistic awakening: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. From there, we will delve beneath the masterworks in the AR tradition to the seedy, seamy, and unseemly works of sensation and gothic literature, from Poe to Alcott. In the second half of the semester we'll travel above and beyond these writings to sentimental fiction and the literatures of slavery and reform; our aims are to examine the aesthetic and social factors that initially excluded women and African Americans from the literary renaissance and to recast writers like Martin Delany, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Frederick Douglass within the American Renaissance framework. Throughout the course we will pay close attention to the process of canon-building according to an ideology of individual excellence, a work's aesthetic merit, and its originality and authenticity. Two essays, take-home midterm, research presentation, class participation.

 

ENG 357-001: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

TR 12:30:00 PM-1:45:00 PM

Instructor: William Ewell

This course seeks to identify some of the chief characteristics (and complications) of American fiction published since about 1965, and to explore the various ways in which the novels and stories from the contemporary period represent, critique, and inform American ways of life, both lived and imagined. 

We'll begin by contrasting the postmodernist aesthetic that emerged in the late 1960's with the subsequent period's countervailing impulse towards realism. From there, we'll track the legacy of these seemingly irreconcilable styles through the wastelands and megamalls of contemporary literature, identifying affinities and antinomies between the era's major authors, including Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

We'll conclude by bringing our findings to bear on two very recent novels, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012), in order to develop some hypotheses about what exactly is contemporary, American, or even literary about contemporary American literature. 

Provides ENG Major Elective credit and ENG minor credit. Prereq: Completion of UK Core Composition and Communication I-II requirement or equivalent.

 

ENG 359-001: THE KENTUCKY LITERARY HERITAGE

TR 11:00:00 AM-12:15:00 PM

Instructor: Erik A Reece

In the popular imagination, Kentucky is a backward place known for its feuding families, moonshiners and shoeless bumpkins. Rarely in the national media is Kentucky represented as anything that might approximate the term literary. But the fact is: Kentucky has an extremely rich literary tradition- one that rivals any state in the country. This course is not a survey of that entire history. Rather, it will focus on what I consider the Kentucky Renaissanceof the 1960s, 70s and 80s. During those three decades, a group of writers, many of whom were friends and many of whom where educated at UK, produced an amazing body of work. We will examine some of that fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography in this class and see what conclusions we can draw about the nature of that literature.  This semester marks the first time ENG 359: Kentucky's Literary Heritage is being offered at UK. That being the case, I come to the course with very few preconceived ideas about what we will discover as a class over the next few months. That we will leave to our class discussions. However I will introduce here one theme that is perhaps more prevalent than any other in Kentucky literature: the theme of place. We will begin there and see where the semester takes us.

 

ENG 399: INTERNSHIP

The Department of English internship is available for qualified students to receive academic credit through applied and practical experience with a variety of private and public entities, including but not limited to the University Press of Kentucky, law firms, media outlets, the Lexington Public Library, the Carnegie Center, and others. The student will identify a field-, community-based, practical or applied educational experience and locate a sponsor to host their internship, which will be supervised by both a responsible person on site and by an English Dept. faculty member (usually the Director of Undergraduate Studies). A learning contract must be completed by the student, the faculty supervisor, and the on-site internship supervisor, then filed with the English Dept.’s Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in order to receive credit for this course. Credits: 1-3 credit hours, depending on the time required and nature of the internship. Approximately 10 hours a week of internship work equals three credit hours. At midterm, the faculty and on-site supervisors will communicate about the student’s progress so that the faculty member can submit a midterm grade. English 399 will be graded only on a pass-fail basis. Repeatable for a total of up to 6 credit hours. Prereq: To be eligible for the internship, students must (1) be sophomores, juniors or seniors, and (2) have completed both parts of the CCR/composition and communication requirement. APPLICATIONS due to pearl.james@uky.edu by March 24.

 

ENG 407-001: INTERM WKSP IMAG WRIT: Creative Nonfiction

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Erik A Reece

The term "creative nonfiction" asks us to begin thinking of the essay as a story that uses many narrative devices of fiction-writing to not only tell the truth, but to shape the truth. A successful piece of creative nonfiction should make the world appear a more intense and interesting place than its reader previously imagined. It shows the writer intimately engaging the world, and it shows us a compelling view of the world through that writer's lens. Simply put, the goal of this course is to that make art out of experience.

ENG 407 and 507 build on many of the elements of nonfiction writing that students encountered in ENG 207: establishing voice, creating a sense of scene, rendering complex portraits of people, recreating anecdotes and dialogue. Because ENG 207 is not a prerequisite for this course, we will begin ENG 407 with these basic building blocks of creative nonfiction. Then we will push beyond the memoir and personal essay to explore other forms of creative nonfiction.  

 

ENG 407-002: INTERM WKSP IMAG WRIT: Autobiography

T 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Gurney M Norman

The premise of this course in autobiographical writing is that every person has stories to tell about her or his experiences of life. It is assumed that each member of the class is self-motivated to write his or her individual life-stories. Many will want to write their stories from personal need as part of their journey of self-discovery. Others will be more interested in making a record of their lives and thoughts for future use in a book-length autobiography, and for use by family members as part of the family's collective memory. Perhaps the writer will simply want to record long-held feelings, emotions, facts, secrets and other forms of self-expression. Regardless of motive, the basic task for each student writer is to produce seven to ten standard manuscript pages per week for a total of at least eighty pages. Students should feel free to write more than these minimum pages during the semester.  Beyond the required eighty pages there are no restrictions on length or subject matter. The instructor will respond to the work of each individual through written comments, individual conferences and spoken comments during the class meetings. Fellow students are invited to offer suggestions and themselves take turns reading aloud passages of their writing to the assembled class members. Students are encouraged to maintain a journal or notebook to record thoughts, ideas, memories for later use. The instructor will offer prompts for short in-class and out of class writing exercises. As the final project of the semester, students will assemble the written pages in manuscript form according to professional standards.

 

ENG 407-003: INTERM WKSP IMAG WRIT: Fiction

M 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Gurney M Norman

English 407 is an intermediate-level course designed to give students practice in writing fiction including short stories, novels and first-person personal narratives. The class meets once each week for two and one-half hours. The format allows the class to proceed in a relaxed atmosphere featuring in-class writing exercises, discussion of students' original writing, discussion of traditional and contemporary fiction by established writers and a series of brief lectures by Professor Norman. Students will be asked to produce three or four pages of first-draft (newly written) work each week and three completed, polished "best effort" stories or chapters during the semester. Students are encouraged to experiment with different styles and methods of fiction writing including explorations of digital fiction. One premise of the course is that in some ways it approximates a literary salon where writers gather, perhaps with a mentor, to enjoy each other's company and to support each other in his or her creative work. The class meetings are designed so that in every session each student will read something, write something, say something and listen to what others have to say, all in the spirit of experiencing the basic activities of the professional writer's life. It is hoped that in a semester of such activity students can come to understand that creative writing is not an intellectual or academic enterprise. It is a creative enterprise that uses the imagination and draws on the personal experiences of the student authors. Storytelling and story-making are ancient arts, practiced by people who lived long before the invention of writing. In some oral narrative traditions, spoken stories have a sacred quality.  English 407 is not a course in the oral storytelling traditions but the course does recognize that modern story writing is descended from ancient storytelling.

 

ENG 407-004 / ENG 507-004 INTERM/ADV WKSP: Poetry

W: 5:00pm-7:30pm

Instructor: Jane Ansel Elkins

This writing workshop will be a series of adventures and experiments in imagination and poetry. You will be encouraged to play with different voices and personae, to take risks in your writing by reimagining the world from different perspectives. We will experiment with various ways of telling familiar stories—using sources like fairy tales and pop culture, as well as our own personal stories—by remixing traditional forms such as the ghazal, the epistle, odes and anti-odes, and contemporary hybrid forms like erasure, the lyric essay, and the haibun. Class time will be split between discussing assigned readings and student work, as well as in-class writing experiments. Students are expected to write a new poem each week, to read with passion, and embrace poetry with a sense of curiosity and open-mindedness. By the end of the semester, each student will have created a final chapbook of 8-10 poems. Through revision and workshop, we will explore new possibilities for what our poems can become, and encourage each other to take risks in our writing. 

ENG 425-001: ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING

MW 3:00:00 PM-4:15:00 PM

Instructor: Randall Roorda

This class will sample a range of genres or modes of writing lumped under its title- landscape evocation, natural history description, field guides, scientific ecology, travel pieces, crisis reportage, polemic, reflection, lamentation, celebration and so forth. We'll get briefed on EW's influential precursors and acquainted with its present state. We'll dwell on writing as a practice of engaging with place, of becoming (so to speak) environed. Having surveyed the area, participants will be invited to go and do likewise, in writing projects of their own submitted in stages and reviewed in workshop groups. At least one field trip will be mandatory for the class, with dates and details announced at the outset.

 

ENG 440G-001: STUDIES IN BRITISH LIT: Modern Irish Literature

TR 9:30:00 AM-10:45:00 AM

Instructor: Jonathan M Allison

A course on Modern Irish Literature and Culture, 1900-2017, including the fiction of James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and Edna O'Brien, and the poetry and drama of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. We will study several classic films, including one celebrated documentary film, Man of Aran, as well as the work of several Irish painters (such as Jack Yeats and Sean Keating). Our aim will be to explore the concepts of nation, gender, and imagined community in relation to the cultural life of the nation, broadly defined. Themes to be explored will include gender, sexuality, and nationalism; unionism and postcolonialism; the place of the rural and the idealization of the west; Celticism and Gaelic culture.

 

ENG 450G-001: STUDIES IN AMERICAN LIT

TR 3:30:00 PM-4:45:00 PM

Instructor: Armando J Prats

From the late 1960s to the mid 1970s—the heady and hairy times that so many of our current students scorn as antediluvian—an everyday domestic anxiety enveloped all news of the intractable and all-too-tragic war in Vietnam. Every discouraging account of the war bore an implicit reminder: “America has never lost a war”; and every day the news from Vietnam seemed only to imperil America’s untarnished war record. The national disquiet had its source not only in battlefield reports that failed to reassure the American public but in a nation so badly fractured that it was common to hear the contemporaneous punditry invoke the Civil War as the only time exhibiting a deeper national division. There were deadly race riots, there were deadly protests on university campuses, there were assassinations. And there were lies about our motive for fighting the war, and lies about the conduct (or “progress”) of the war, and lies about headway in the peace negotiations. And that idea of such dubious historical utility—namely, that America has never lost a war, in time produced, for one thing, a spurious backward look—from World War II back to the very first (white) proto-Americans that waged war against the Indians with genocidal zeal. In so tendentious a retrospect, Vietnam became the solitary blemish, the detested, best-forgotten, event in our history of wars.  American history (really, something more like America’s “Manifest Destiny”) had been a series of triumphs. Each generation had mastered the nation’s foes and had earned its right to bequeath the heroic legacy to the next generation. In its turn, the younger generation would eagerly embrace the heroic legacy and march proudly to a war of its own. Or so, at least, the myth, until the rupture of that long heroic line in the form of the Vietnam War.  

This course proposes to consider the Vietnam War as the fulcrum event from which to look back at America’s previous wars and forward to the pall that Vietnam cast on subsequent wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan and Iraq. We will read American literary texts of the major American wars and will also consider “minor” wars—the Pequot War of 1637, for example; and the wars against the native populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the Spanish-American War in Cuba (which must be looked nowhere else but in the hyphen) and in the Philippines (where the US fought Muslims for the first time—and all but lost). We will also view American movies of the several wars, with special attention to movies of the Second War and the Vietnam War. 

Individual projects, short-ish papers, discussion, engagement, curiosity. NO LAPTOPS, NO CELLPHONES. 

 

ENG 495-001: HONORS SEMINAR: British Literature and the Left

MWF 11:00:00 AM-11:50:00 AM

Instructor: Peter J. Kalliney

British literature has a long and fractious history with the politics of the left.  Some of the twentieth century's leading writers have described themselves as socialists, communists, and fellow travelers--including George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Doris Lessing, and Salman Rushdie--and yet these figures have also been the quickest to rebuke, criticize, and disown the parties and causes cherished by the left.  In this seminar for departmental honors, we will study the writing connected to three major political phases of the twentieth century: the Popular Front era of the 1930s, the British New Left of the 1950s and 60s, and the era of multiculturalism and anti-Thatcherism of the 1980s and 90s.  Assignments include a class presentation and a substantial research paper.

 

ENG 507-001: ADV WKSHP IMAG WRTNG: Creative Nonfiction

TR 2:00:00 PM-3:15:00 PM

Instructor: Erik A Reece

The term "creative nonfiction" asks us to begin thinking of the essay as a story that uses many narrative devices of fiction-writing to not only tell the truth, but to shape the truth. A successful piece of creative nonfiction should make the world appear a more intense and interesting place than its reader previously imagined. It shows the writer intimately engaging the world, and it shows us a compelling view of the world through that writer's lens. Simply put, the goal of this course is to that make art out of experience.

ENG 407 and 507 build on many of the elements of nonfiction writing that students encountered in ENG 207: establishing voice, creating a sense of scene, rendering complex portraits of people, recreating anecdotes and dialogue. Then we will push beyond the memoir and personal essay to explore other forms of creative nonfiction.  

 

ENG 507-002: ADV WKSHP IMAG WRTNG: Autobiography

T 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Gurney M Norman

The premise of this course in autobiographical writing is that every person has stories to tell about her or his experiences of life. It is assumed that each member of the class is self-motivated to write his or her individual life-stories. Many will want to write their stories from personal need as part of their journey of self-discovery. Others will be more interested in making a record of their lives and thoughts for future use in a book-length autobiography, and for use by family members as part of the family's collective memory. Perhaps the writer will simply want to record long-held feelings, emotions, facts, secrets and other forms of self-expression. Regardless of motive, the basic task for each student writer is to produce seven to ten standard manuscript pages per week for a total of at least eighty pages. Students should feel free to write more than these minimum pages during the semester.  Beyond the required eighty pages there are no restrictions on length or subject matter. The instructor will respond to the work of each individual through written comments, individual conferences and spoken comments during the class meetings. Fellow students are invited to offer suggestions and themselves take turns reading aloud passages of their writing to the assembled class members. Students are encouraged to maintain a journal or notebook to record thoughts, ideas, memories for later use. The instructor will offer prompts for short in-class and out of class writing exercises. As the final project of the semester, students will assemble the written pages in manuscript form according to professional standards.

 

ENG 507-003: ADV WKSHP IMAG WRTNG: Short Fiction

M 5:00:00 PM-7:30:00 PM

Instructor: Hannah Pittard

This course will focus heavily on student writing. As such, students will be expected to write and workshop up to three short stories over the course of the semester. Note: This is not a workshop in novel or novella writing. This is a workshop whose focus is on Short Fiction. No previously workshopped or previously written material will be accepted. Participation and attendance are required.