Summer 2012

ENG 590: Seminar: English Renaissance Literature in Context. (3) Morrow MW 4:20PM - 7:10PM


Our three-part study of drama and poetry will be informed by overlapping cultural, historical perspectives: 1) gender norms and relations; 2) court politics; and 3) economics and social class. We will read work by historians, literary critics and theorists, while focusing on sixteenth and seventeenth century authors, including Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser. In place of one long research project, students will complete two shorter ones.

Fall 2012

2227 ENG 516 E1 Survey of Medieval Literature (3) Laity M 6:15-8:55
This course will introduce you to some of the key texts of the Middle Ages. We will explore the texts as literature, but also in terms of their language and cultural context. While we will have facing page translations for Anglo-Saxon poetry, students will be expected to read and recite a certain amount of Middle English.

2226 ENG 537 E1 Modern Drama (3) Krauss M 6:15-8:55
Readings in modernist and post-theatre literature, from Ibsen to the present. Attention to production and reception history, criticism, and major trends away from realism.

2229 ENG 584 E1 19th Century American Literature (3) Sweeney R 6:15-8:45
One of the first mass media forms made possible by the industrial and market revolutions, the magazine (literally, “warehouse”) offered nineteenth-century readers a promiscuous assemblage of information, advertising, and entertainment prefiguring our digital age. In the pages of magazines, “timeless” literary masterpieces rubbed elbows with the trivial and ephemeral: book reviews, fashion plates, cartoons, advertisements, sheet music, and more. In recent years, digital archives have given us unprecedented access to American literary texts in periodical form. In this course we will explore these digital archives to address a variety of questions: How did magazine contexts shape literary texts? How do such texts depict the social and psychological effects of mass media? How did changing conceptions of authorship, copyright, and literary value influence nineteenth-century American literary production? Course requirements include intensive, self-directed research in digital archives; critical analysis of magazine writings by Poe, Melville, Wharton, James, Chesnutt, Hopkins, and Chopin; readings in literary criticism, cultural history, and theory; research papers; blog postings; presentations; and class discussion.

2463 ENG 585 01 Digital Composition (3) Fulwiler W 6:15–8:45
What does it mean to write in the digital age? Traditional notions of both literacy and composition are print-based and book-bound, but scholars argue that we are currently in the midst of a literacy revolution not seen since the 15th century invention of the printing press. In this move from “page to screen” (as Gunther Kress has famously called it), what happens to our foundational assumptions about reading, writing, and textual production? This course will examine emergent digital tools, digital composition, and digital or “new” literacies within the larger context of the history of writing and theories of literacy. Students will analyze, critique, evaluate, and create multi-media texts. Central to the course will be reflection on the process(es) of composing including: invention, drafting, and revision across multiple modes, media, and genres. As we study the theory and practice of the new literacies required of 21st century composing, we will also attend to the social, critical, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of these evolving communicative sites and practices.

2228 ENG 589 E1 Topics in Literary Theory (3) Palecanda T 6:15-8:45
As an introduction to twentieth and twenty first century literary theory, the course addresses preoccupations of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and gender/queer studies. The course may focus on a topic or critical approach and include literary and visual texts. Depending on the topic/approach, readings may include Saussure, Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Jameson, Lyotard, Fanon, Bhaba, Butler, Harberstam, and Zizek. Course may be taken more than once as long as a different topic is addressed. Fulfills theory requirement.

906 WRT 564 E1 Fiction Writing: Theory and Practice (3) Shavers W 6:15-8:45
The primary focus of this course will be short fiction and novel excerpts written by students in the class. Besides production of their own material, students will analyze literary and theoretical texts in order to gain a better understanding of different storytelling forms, aspects of style, and other elements of a fiction writer’s craft. Some attention to publication processes and possibilities for fiction writers. Fulfills 500-level writing requirement. In the fall of 2012, this course is the equivalent of ENG 564.