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English 101: Introduction
to English Studies
Professor
David Toise
In this course,
(designed for English majors and minors), students will further
develop their abilities to read and analyze literature, examine
recent developments in the field of literary analysis, and learn
the importance of these skills as the basis for future careers.
We will work on becoming literate in the basics of English studies:
reading and analyzing the structures of poetry, drama, and fiction,
as well as developing our own writing and editing techniques. Our
course will, in some sense, come together in our reading of Charles
Dickens’s l861 novel Great Expectations.
Dickens’s novel raises questions about what it means
to read correctly, how language works, and how reading and interpretation
play a role in our own sense of self. The questions Dickens raises
about the connection between interpretation, reading, and identity
will help us examine both traditional and more recent critical approaches
in literary studies. Our readings of the novel, then, will be supplemented
by essays covering a variety of approaches within contemporary literary
criticism. Whether or not we desire, like the hero of Dickens’s
novel, to become “a gentleman,” we will also discuss
our own career goals and, thus, through guest speakers and our own
readings, examine the significance these interpretive skills hold
for careers in such diverse fields as publishing, law, advertising,
education, politics, social services, and entertainment.
English
103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
In
this advanced course in nonfiction writing, students will expand
their facility with rhetoric by analyzing professional writing,
including critical essays in diverse fields, magazine articles,
book reviews, and sermons. Utilizing the rhetorical strategies and
forms revealed through analysis of professional writings, students
will write several formal essays.
Writers to be studied may include Jane Tompkins, Ishmael
Reed, Stanley Fish, Stanley Crouch, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martin
Duberman, and Patricia Williams.
English
104: Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
This
course will be a writing workshop. Students will read, study, and
write poetry and short fiction using a variety of forms and approaches.
Students will discuss the works of published writers as well as
provide feedback to the works of their classmates. Students will
learn how to critique and revise their own work. A final portfolio
of work will be required.
English
128: British Literature
I
Professor Sealy Gilles
In
this course, we will explore the first seven hundred years of literature
written in the British Isles–from the monster tale of Beowulf
to the tragedy of the African prince, Oroonoko. Major texts also
include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, and a Shakespeare play.
These selections range in genre from epic to romance, from
comedy to tragedy . In these texts, and in shorter lyric poetry
of the period, we will focus on the role of the stranger–the
exile, the outsider, and the alien–in early British culture.
How is strangeness defined? What kinds of demands does the stranger
make upon the culture? What is the culture’s response to an
alien presence? Students are expected to complete a research essay
on a topic related to one of the assigned texts. In addition, there
will be one short essay and a final examination.
English
158: Literature of the United States I
Professor Amy Pratt
Even
before land was sighted, the New World had captured the imagination
of European men and women. This course will examine America as a
literary phenomenon; that is, something that was created, in part,
through the words written about it. We will explore the different
and sometimes conflicting dreams and fantasies that men and women
brought to America and trace what happened to them over two centuries.
Through our examination of the metaphors associated with America
and the kinds of literary forms used to tell stories about the New
World, we will question how certain ways of making meaning influenced
relationships between Europeans, African Americans and Native Americans,
and whether they still shape our thinking about what America is,
or should be, today.
English
170: Post-Colonial
Literature
Professor
Huma Ibrahim
In this course
we will be reading what has been termed “postcolonial literature.”
This includes literature from Africa, Asia and diaspora.
We will be reading authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa
Thiongo, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bessie Head and many others.
What we will try to do in this class is look at this literature
in the context of the socio-political milieu out of which it emerges.
We will examine the texts and do some close readings. Since this
is not a sociology but rather a literature class, we will do some
of the things one does in literature classes such as discuss the
plot, characters, images and the kind of writing we see in each
work. We will also examine the western languages in which these
works were written–and the complicated relationships of the
writers to this language. For instance, do they do violence to the
English language as it is used in England, or do they simply imitate
it? Lastly, we will write essays on themes that engage the writers
whom we are reading, such as the idea of nationalism, identity,
gender and the postcolonial condition which is sometimes manifested
in the immigrant experience.
English
187: The Bible as Literature
Professor William Burgos
The
Bible is an anthology of sacred literature–texts which attempt
to define the relationship between the divine and the human. In
this course we will study the various ways in which biblical authors
use language and story-telling to evoke for their readers the experience
of the sacred and to explore its role in human existence. Selections
from Jewish and Christian Scripture will include: Genesis, Exodus,
Samuel, Psalms, the Gospels and Revelation.
English
224: Caribbean Women
Writers
Professor Carol Allen
An
introduction to contemporary Caribbean Women writers, this course
features texts that are written in or have been translated into
English. Nationalism, regionalism and the role that women play in
rapidly decolonizing countries are the major themes that we will
explore over the semester. In particular, we will pay close attention
to the fact that some of the texts are clear allegories for national
independence, but others are more, combining both a figurative reading
of the nation–as it comes into being–with the moment
when the female subject also emerges. The semester will be divided
into three units: reading the slave/colonial past, Caribbean bildungsroman
and intersecting history, myth and space.
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