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English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Deborah Mutnick
This course gives the students the opportunity
to develop, share, and get feedback on their writing in a workshop
format. The focus will be on the essay, a genre we will explore
from a variety of angles: formal, informal, personal, academic,
traditional, and experimental. Through juxtaposing one type of essay
with another, students will expand their repertoire of strategies
and practice the art of shaping the writing for particular occasions,
audiences, and purposes. We will study different approaches to nonfiction
writing, such as the use of autobiography in critical writing and
of literary techniques like dialogue and point of view to write
about real places, people, and events. Students will benefit from
a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of
their work, and constructive criticism.
A tentative reading list includes
essays by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Richard
Rodriquez, Vivian Gornick, Tony Hiss, Barbara Kingsolver, and Dorothy
Allison. Students will present their writing in weekly workshops
at least three times during the semester. Writing requirements include
a course journal, three short (4–6 pages) essays and one longer
(15-20 pages) essay or equivalent.
English 104: Workshop in Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
In this writing workshop, students will read,
study, and write poetry and short-short fiction using various forms
and approaches. A writer’s notebook will be an ongoing project
from which students will gather material for their assignments.
Part of each period will be devoted to reading and discussing poems
and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will
be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A
final portfolio will include an evaluation of the student’s
learning along with revised poems and stories. The text/s used will
be announced.
English 129: British Literature II
Professor Howard Silverstein
This course focuses on the theme of the individual
and society as illustrated in selected works from the nineteenth
and early twentieth century. This semester will be divided into
the following topics: (1) The Revolt against Victorianism: Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure, and Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian
Gray, (2) The Irish Rebellion: plays by Synge, Shaw, and O’Casey;
Joyce’s novel Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
and (3) The Poet’s Reaction to the Modern World: poetry of
Yeats, Housman, Hardy, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, and Auden.
English 150: Asian American Writers
Professor Xiao-Ming Li
Asian Americans, a diverse group in and of themselves,
have been in the United States for over 150 years and today belong
to one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in America, yet they
are still the least understood.
The course intends to provide a window on their unique cultural
heritages, their continued struggle to preserve their ethnic identity
in an alien and often hostile environment, and their search for
reconciliation between generational and cultural differences among
themselves and with the larger society.
We will read about Taoism, Confucianism, and
Buddhism—the three major religions in Asia from translated
texts. We will also review the historical backgrounds against which
these “strangers from a different shore” (Takaki) came
to this country. Finally, with this contextual knowledge in mind,
the course will proceed to reading some Asian American writers,
all award-winning writers but each with her/his distinct style and
perspective: Maxine Hong Kinston, Joy Kogawa, Bahrati Mukherjee,
Chang Rae Lee, Fae Myenne Ng, and others.
Participants in the class are expected to keep
a reading journal, take a midterm in-class exam, and write two papers
of moderate length.
English 159: Literature of the United States
II
Professor Michael Bennett
This course will focus on works of literature
written in the United States after 1865. We will be going in search
of the Great American Novels published from just after the Civil
War to the present. Ours will be a multicultural exploration as
we range between Native, European, African, Hispanic, and Asian
literary traditions within the United States. As we undertake the
search for the Great American Novel, we will also interrogate each
of the terms of our quest. What is a novel? How do we determine
whether or not a work of literature is great? What do we mean when
we say “American?” Rather than providing any final answers,
we will see if the questions themselves provide us with some understanding
of the complex and convoluted terrain of American literary history.
We will also examine poems, short stories, and “myths”
written by a variety of American authors (photocopies will be handed
out in addition to the works listed below).
Requirements: class participation and presentations,
daily reading quizzes, two essays, and a final exam. Texts: Mark
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Kate Chopin, The
Awakening; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man; Rudolfo
Anaya, Bless Me Ultima; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman
Warrior; N. Scott Momaday. The Way to Rainy Mountain;
and Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference.
Eng. 170: American Literary Regionalism
Professor Leah Dilworth
This undergraduate course will examine fiction produced
from the 1880s to the 1920s, from the flowering of “local
color” writing to the novels of Faulkner and Hurston. We will
consider the notion of “region” and the construction
of cultural regions in the United States: the Northeast, the South,
the Midwest, the West. In addition to the written texts, we will
look at some painting and photography from the period. Authors we
will examine include: Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Willa
Cather, Edith Wharton, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and William
Faulkner.
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