English 103
Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Deborah Mutnick
This course gives 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 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.
Readings include essays by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin,
Richard Rodriguez, Vivian Gornick, Adrienne Rich, and Annie Dillard. Students
will present their writings in weekly workshops at least three times during
the semester. Writing requirements include a course journal, three short
(4-6) page essays, and one longer (15-20 page) essay or the equivalent.
English 104
Creative Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
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 class period will be
devoted to reading 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 a review of learning and a self-evaluation,
along with revised poems and stories. Books for class will include The
Handbook of Poetic Forms, and a collection of short-short fiction.
English 129
Writing the Empire in 18th-20th Century British Literature
Professor Louis Parascandola
This course will focus on literature exemplifying the development
and expansion of the British Empire. Major texts include Aphra Behan’s Oroonoko,
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. We will also discuss shorter
pieces by such authors as Swift, Blake, Coleridge, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens,
and Kipling. In addition, we will examine “colonization in reverse”: responses
from people of color who have lived and written in England, including Olaudah
Equiano, Louise Bennett, Grace Nichols, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and
V.S. Naipaul.
English 159
American Literature Survey II
Professor Carol Allen
This survey covers American Literature from the second half
of the 19th Century to the present. The course will provide
information about the major writers and texts that have contributed to
the great, diverse tradition of American Letters. We will chart our discoveries
by looking through the lens of representation, asking such questions as: Who
gets to represent the newly unified post-Civil War America? How do
turn-of-the-century and early 20th century creative artists
re-envision America during an age of Western imperialism/expansion/colonialism? How
does literature compete with new technologies that also produce representation
(photography, film, television)? What is meant by and what are the politics
of “American” modernism and post-modernism? And, finally, How does
literature both document and “undocument” American experience? We may read
such writers as Charles Chesnutt, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Nella
Larsen, and Richard Wright among others.
English 170
Modern African Drama
Professor Huma Ibrahim
In this course we will be reading Modern African Drama from
various parts of Africa. We will be reading dramatists like Wole Soyinka,
Ama Ata Aidoo and Fatima Dike among others. There might be a section on
Soweto drama as well, depending on the availability. What we will try to
do in this class is look at this drama 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 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 that we
are reading, such as the idea of nationalism, identity, gender and the
postcolonial condition, which is sometimes manifested in the immigrant
experience as well.
English 180
Reading and Writing Autobiography
Professor Patrick Horrigan
This is a course in a popular form of life writing known
as “autobiography,” the writing of one’s own life. By studying a diverse
selection of autobiographical works ranging from early Christian “confessions”
to slave narratives to contemporary video diaries, we will see how various
writers and visual artists throughout history have tried to create images
of themselves. Works will include Saint Augustine’s Confessions;
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays; Olaudah Equiano’s narrative of his
life as a slave; Wtitle Whitman’s journal, Specimen Days; Edmund Gosse’s Father
and Son; Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”; James Baldwin’ s
“notes of a Native Son”; Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior;
Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory;
Tom Joslin’s film Silverlake
Life; and Faith Ringgold’s series of quilts entitled Dancing
at the Louvre.
In addition to reading
and writing about the works of published autobiographers, students will
have the opportunity to create their own autobiographies.
English 190
Senior Seminar
Professor Michael Bennett
This course will guide students through the process of writing a long research
paper (20-25) pages on a topic of their own choosing. Students will use a range
of research resources and write an informal proposal, a formal proposal, a
first draft, and a final draft of the paper. During the first half of the course,
we will read texts from a variety of genres, including poetry, prose, the novel,
drama, and film. We will also read a variety of critical responses to these
texts, cultural studies of one or two non-literary texts, and essays on the
field of English studies. During the last half of the course, students will
lead discussions of their own works-in-progress, read and critique each other’s
work, and hand in a final seminar paper.
Required texts:
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering
Heights. 2nd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2003.
(0-312-25686-8)
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass. NY: W.W.
Norton. (0-393-96966-5)
Hacker, Diana. A
Writer’s Reference. 4th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
1999. (0-312-17161)
Sophocles. The
Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus
at Colonus. NY: Viking Penguin,
l984.
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