Engl 2332, Literature of the Western World: From the Classics to the Renaissance

The goals of all sophomore survey courses are:

    1. to examine the connections between literary works and
        their social, historical, and cultural contexts, by reading
        texts by authors from a range of cultures and nationalities;

    2. to explore the distinctive characteristics of relevant literary
        periods, genres, and writers;

    3. to understand and use basic literary terms and concepts;

    4. to develop analytic skills by close reading, class discussion,
        and writing;

    5. to use writing as a tool for learning.

Please visit the bookstore for the anthology used by your instructor

Engl 2333, Literature of the Western World: 1600 to Present

See goals under 2332.

Please visit the bookstore for the anthology used by your instructor

Engl 2334, Themes and Genres in English Literatures

Course Objectives: This course introduces literatures in a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and autobiographies/memoirs, written about or from cultures and peoples ruled by (or formerly ruled by) European powers. Our goals will be
      1.To examine the connections between literary works and their social, historical, and cultural contexts by reading texts by authors from a range of cultures and nationalities.
      2.To explore the distinctive characteristics of relevant literary periods, genres, and writers.
      3.To understand and use basic literary terms and concepts.
      4.To develop analytic skills by close reading, class discussion, and writing.
      5.To use writing as a tool for learning.

Course Description: We will examine a variety of voices that emerge from the encounter of English travelers and empire builders with peoples and ideas abroad: places such as India, South Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean. Students will work with multiple perspectives, voices, and genres to examine how cultural identities (for both the English and the “Other”) are expressed, shaped, and examined through literature.

Engl 2335, Themes and Genres in the Literature of the Americas

Semester Topic: “American Dreams: Lost and Found”
This course introduces students to literature from a variety of time periods by major writers of the Americas. We will read from a range of literary genres, as well as exploring other cultural texts (e.g., music and art). As part of our study, we will consider the shifting ways that individuals and groups in the Americas have conceived of and responded to the American dream. Our goal will be to determine how this peculiarly American idea has helped to shape the cultures and literatures of the Americas. Some of the questions that will guide our study are: What does the term “the American dream” mean? How has this concept been represented in American literatures? Whose dream is it? Is there just one dream for all Americans? How has the dream evolved over time? What forces shape it? To what extent has the dream been differentially experienced as a result of such elements as gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, and race? What are the cultural effects of the dream? Is there such a thing as a pan-American dream?

Edward Albee. The American Dream
Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale
Carlos Fuentes. The Old Gringo
Christina Garcia. Dreaming in Cuban
Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Luis Valdez. Zoot Suit.
Other Readings: online and handouts

Engl 2370, Writing About Literature

An introduction to literary analysis and scholarship, required of all English majors but open to all interested students who have successfully completed ENGL 1301 and 1302. This course emphasizes the major genres of literature, literary research, and expository and analytical writing about literary texts. English Majors should take this in their sophomore year or as soon as possible.

In Spring 2005, the required texts will be:
- An Introduction to Literature (Barnet, Burto, Cain);
- The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (Murfin, Ray);
- The MLA Handbook for Writers (Gibaldi).

Engl 3301, Principles of Professional and Report Writing

A course designed to help students gain practical experience in finding and interpreting information and writing reports and documents for specialized audiences in the professional world. The course is held in a computer-assisted classroom and satisfies university computer literacy requirement. Students prepare their own documents, resumes, application letters, and personal statements, for internships, employment, and graduate school. Students have the opportunity to address needs in the community as part of the course's emphasis on service learning.

Engl 3320, The Bible as Literature

This course will explore the Bible from a literary perspective—in terms of its authors, subjects, literary forms, source language texts and their translations, and its development over time as an anthology of texts, including its influence on the literature of the Anglo-American tradition. You will be given ample freedom to explore the literature of the Bible individually, in small groups, and in whole-class discussions. A wide variety of learning tools will be used throughout the semester, including journals and notebooks, portfolios, “puzzlers,” and portfolios. Everyone will be encouraged to find an area of interest to develop into a project.

The course has four major objectives:
• to understand the cultural and historical contexts of Biblical literature
• to survey the variety of literary forms & techniques found in the Bible
• to understand the transmission & translation history of the Bible, focusing especially on the English Bible
• to examine the uses of Biblical literature, especially its influences on the literature of the Anglo-American Tradition.

Engl 3321, Film and Literature

The course works from the premise that films are narratives with all the basic elements of literature, that they have meanings that can be examined and discussed using the same methods we use to talk about literature. Students will examine and evaluate films from various genres while considering the relationship between films and the literary works they are based on or influenced by. Prerequisite: ENGL 1302.

Course Objectives: Students will be able to:
• understand that film and texts are both forms of storytelling, reflecting and illuminating human experiences, motives, conflicts, and values, and employing symbolism, allegory and myth.
• comprehend verbal and visual representations on literal, implied, and symbolic levels.
• identify the point of view and tone of a text and of a film.
• make critical judgments about textual and visual stories, including separating fact from opinion, recognizing propaganda, stereotypes and statements of bias, recognizing inconsistencies, and judging the validity of evidence and the sufficiency of support.
• develop an appreciation for cultural diversity and cultural literacy through their viewing of selected films and literary works.

Required Texts to Buy:
John Berger. Ways of Seeing
Timothy Corrigan. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader
Tracy Chevalier. Girl with a Pearl Earring
Norman MacLean. A River Runs Through It

Online Texts:
David Chandler. Notes on "The Gaze"
Sharon Cobb. "Writing the New Noir Film"
Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont. "Beauty and the Beast"
Ambrose Bierce. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Jonathan Nolan. "Memento Mori"

Films:
La Belle et la Bete/Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau 1946; Disney 1991)
Girl with a Pearl Earring (Webber 2003)
Jacob's Ladder (Lyne 1990)
Memento (2001)
La Riviere du hinou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Enrico 1962)
A River Runs Through It (Redford 1992)

Engl 3323, Young Adult Literature

This course will study literature read and appreciated by people roughly between 13 and 17 years old. Whether such literature is written solely for that age group is only one question that this course will investigate. It will study a selection of young-adult novels and poems, including classics such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Arrow, and contemporary works such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Will Hobbs’s Far North, Louis Sachar’s Holes, and Pat Mora’s My Own True Name. We will study them as pieces of literature, especially their connection with prestige, genre, canon, readership, resistance, media presence, social class, and other cultural and social functions.

Engl 3339, English Language and Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of human language, which is interesting intellectually as well as useful for any educated person as language impinges on so many areas of human life. In this introductory course, students will become familiar with linguistic terminology and the diversity of language systems, and understand the relation of language to thought, society, and culture. The course covers the following topics: neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax, morphology, semantics, phonetics, and language acquisition.

Required course material: Yule, G. (1996). The Study of Language. (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Engl 3340, English Language: Grammar

This course provides the teacher trainee and English language student with the fundamental concepts of English syntax. It follows a framework of linguistic concepts intended to provide a structure which the future teacher can use to teach its application in the elementary or secondary classroom. This class also provides students with new ways to analyze the structure of the English language as well as a new sensitivity/awareness of language issues.

Required course material: Lester, M. (2001). Grammar in the classroom. (2nd ed.). Dallas: MacMillan.

Engl 3341, Literature of the English Renaissance

In this class we will be studying a variety of literary works from the English Renaissance, 1500-1660. We will begin with the prose satire of Sir Thomas More, Utopia, then turn to the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poetry of John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Edmund Spenser. We will study Milton’s great epic Paradise Lost, and finally turn to several plays by dramatists other than Shakespeare. Since many of these writers place their stories in imaginary or highly dramatic settings, we will study the implications of these settings and situations. How do the settings, for example, enable the writers to engage in political and religious discussions of their time? Do the particular settings and situations distance the issues from the writers or do they heighten the sense of personal investment? We will also look at how the specific audiences for which the works were written influence the treatment of themes and the writer’s style. Finally, how do Renaissance writers use literature to express their personal views, to win patronage, and to re-imagine or re-create themselves? Is early modern literature a tool for what Stephen Greenblatt calls “self-fashioning”?

Assignments: In addition to reading the assigned works and participating in class discussions, you will be asked to take two examinations (a take-home mid-term and an in-class final), write one formal research paper (approximately 10 pages), and keep a journal or notebook for weekly responses and other informal writing assignments.

Engl 3345, British Literature of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Course Theme: Welcoming Strangers and Friends: The Ethics of Hospitality

Description of the Course: This course takes a thematic approach in surveying 19th and 20th century literature. We will include a full sampling of genres (poetry, film, short stories, plays, and novels) to explore the theme of hospitality, working toward a synthetic analysis of both its roots, its development, and its current expression in British literature. Students will be asked to actively participate in class discussions and group work, to generate two short studies of our
assigned texts, and ultimately connect our theme to a research project of their choice that illumines both the literary treatment of hospitality and the exercise of hospitality in our contemporary times.

Importance of the Topic: The theme of hospitality is as old as Western literature itself. The Iliad provides numerous scenes of feasting, wherein warriors are rewarded and booty divided. The Odyssey depicts travelers who continually overcome obstacles to reaching “home.” Beowulf emphasizes “open-handedness” as a means of establishing bonds of loyalty. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight illustrates the relation between host and guest. And certainly the Old and New Testaments provide numerous examples of welcoming, feasting, and serving the prophet, pilgrim, or stranger who may be a messenger of God. Examining the theme of hospitality within this tradition provides an important insight into how 19th and 20th century British culture has both affirmed and rejected the ethics of hospitality, thereby validating, or alternately, re-defining, the social and spiritual responsibilities of the self “at home” to the self who is “homeless.”

Engl 3351, American Poetry

A survey of American Poetry from the Colonial period to about 1940. We examine representative poems, poetic forms, and important themes in works by American poets, including Bradstreet, Taylor, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost and Stevens.

Engl 3353, The Short Story

This course will allow you to see how the genre of the literary short story evolved in the nineteenth-century and continued to develop over the 20th- and into the 21st-centuries. We’ll start with Hawthorne and come all the way through the last century and into our contemporary world— there, we’ll examine what wild and wonderful pieces are now nestling under the big umbrella that we call the short story. The course is a fascinating one for anybody who loves literature (especially in short forms), and it’s a particularly good course for those of you who are interested in writing your own fiction. You will write three short papers during the semester, and then either one longer one at the end or your own short story.

Text
Ann Charters. The Short Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Compact 6th ed.

Engl 3355, American Literature of the Late 19th and Early
20th Centuries

A survey of American literature from just after the Civil War until about 1940, from post-Civil War writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Sara Orne Jewett to Faulker, Stein and Tennessee Williams. The purpose of this course is to help you develop a sound understanding of important works of fiction, poetry and drama, as well as an acquaintance with the themes and concerns of significant American writers of this period. We won't read all of the best, but we will read much interesting writing by a variety of important authors.

Engl 3356, American Literature since 1945

This course focuses on how American authors explore, through their prose, poetry, and plays, American geographical spaces and map individual and social identities. The concepts of frontier and melting pot have long been important both in American history and in the literary imagination. We will ask questions such as, how do contemporary authors revise images of the frontier? how have literary artists in the late 20th century represented the land, the nation, the border, or ideas of the melting pot? how do these representations relate to current political and social debates? how do they relate to movie representations of these issues? what are the roles of gender and ethnicity in constructing American identities?

We will read works by Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, Toni Morrison, Joy Harjo, and Ana Castillo, and will watch such movies as Easy Rider, Independence Day, Thunderheart, and Daughters of the Dust.

Engl 3357, Reading and Writing Autobiography

The topic of inquiry in this course is U.S. autobiography. We will examine this genre from the perspective of both reading and later writing autobiography (to include the personal essay). In the early part of the course, we will focus on analyzing the historical aspects of U.S. autobiography to further understand this quest of identity that represents the predominant theme of personal writing in our country. Specifically, we will emphasize contemporary ethnic authors and their search for identity as Americans. As the course progresses, we will begin examining various theories of autobiography as well as different strategies for writing autobiography. These preliminary studies will help us understand the larger project of this course where students will create a virtual autobiography centered on identity issues.

Engl 3360, Current Approaches to Composition and Literature,
    Wolff-Murphy

English 3360 is designed to contribute to a student's preparation to be an accredited teacher in elementary, middle, or secondary public schools, a teacher who will be able to engage learners in the ongoing process of literacy acquisition and development. English 3360 introduces you to current research in literacy, writing, and teaching of writing, and invites you to begin the ongoing process of developing your own pedagogy of writing and literature. Recognizing the complexity and diversity of local and global factors that affect the teaching context, the course will focus on how teachers can help all of their students learn to use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish a wide range of meaningful purposes. This course is an amalgam of writing workshop, teaching practicum, and composition theory course.

Textbooks include:
Calkins, Lucy McCormick. The Art of Teaching Writing. New Edition. Heinemann, 1994. Zemelman, Steven, and Harvey Daniels. A Community of Writers: Teaching Writing in the Junior and Senior High School. Heinemann, 1988.
NCTE/IRA. Standards for the English Language Arts. NCTE, 1996.

Engl 3361, Strategies & Genres of Advanced Writing

This is a course for anyone who wants to improve his/her writing skills. It’s a practical, hands-on course, designed to give you an understanding of your own writing process and of the range of techniques available to you in the great, communal writers’ toolbox. We’ll talk about how “real” writers set about their tasks, and we’ll talk about the different forms/genres in which these authors write. You’ll try out various strategies for successful writing, and you’ll write in different genres yourself, eventually producing a portfolio of work that will, I hope, surprise you—a portfolio of which you can be proud. The course, scheduled in a computer classroom, will be taught in an informal, workshop style, so you will have good opportunities to get help from your peers as well as from me.

Engl 3362, Techniques of Creative Writing

This course will introduce you to the discipline and art of creative writing, and will focus on the techniques involved in actually writing short fiction and poetry. During the semester, the class will explore a wide range of techniques and tools used by writers of literature; you will try these techniques yourself and you will study poems and stories to see how they have been used by published authors. The class will be taught using a “studio approach,” where students will work individually and in small groups actually trying the techniques being studied. You will have the opportunity to create a portfolio of poem and story drafts to advance your craft and also to take with you into our creative writing workshops.

Course Objectives
The objectives of the course are
* to introduce you to the terminology and to give you practical experience in using as wide a range as possible of the creative writer’s “tools”
* to expose you to a broad and eclectic selection of modern and contemporary poetry and fiction, i.e., to what is being written in your own time
* to allow you to experiment, stretch, and take risks with your writing through a series of exercises not all of which will “work or result in brilliant, finished pieces
* to encourage and enable you to produce at least one or two brilliant, finished pieces during the semester that will surprise you
* to prepare you for entry into ENGL 4330 Creative Writing Workshop, or any other creative writing workshop

Engl 3366, Language in Culture and Society

This course will study the way text-based language actually functions in day-to-day living. The focus will be on politics, commerce, class, ideology, ethnicity, region, gender, age, and readership. Topics are practically limitless: labeling, Spanglish, brand-names, slogans, internet flaming, censorship, gobbledygook, euphemisms, taboo words, dialects, loanwords, symbols, and on and on. There will be no comprehensive testing, but rather hands-on applications. The reader will be Clark, Eschholz, & Rosa, Language: Readings in Language in Culture, but the real reading will be texts for analysis discovered by the class.

Engl 3368, Community Literacy and Service Training

Community Literacy and Service Learning is a course centered around both the history and pedagogies of multiple literacies and the practice of civic engagement. Civic engagement, as defined for this course, is a process in which students, teachers, and community members work together to solve problems. The first half of this course will be focused on theories of multiple literacies. The second half of the course will take the students into the community, as we as a course work in collaboration with a community client to solve a literacy-related problem. Past courses have worked with Corpus Christi Public Libraries to help develop literacy programs for K-6 children.

Engl 3378, Desktop Publishing

The Desktop Publishing course’s hands-on design projects focus on the interface and synthesis of the textual and visual rhetoric across a wide spectrum of professional publications including technical documents, periodicals, public relations pieces, consumer product package designs and advertisements.

The course has eight design objectives:
Use basic layout techniques to enhance the readability of documents.
Enhance the visual appeal of documents.
Manage desktop publishing files and templates.
Identify and design for audience expectations/needs.
Understand the desktop publishing process, from start to finish.
Understand the use of typography and color.
Understand the roles and uses of hypertext.
Determine which tools to use for each document.

Text: Hilligoss, Susan & Tharon Howard. Visual Communication: A Writer's Guide. 2nd edition. New York: Pearson Education, 2002

Engl 3380, Advanced Writing in a Computer Networked Environment

This course is meant to be the second of a two-course sequence, which explains the "Advanced."

We will continue to explore what it means to "write" in computer networked environments. As part of that exploration, we will focus on the different understandings of "writing" and of "networks"; and we will consider the ways that different tools affect writing.

We will share the understanding of writing as a purposeful activity, with specific objectives, specific outcomes, and as done in specific contexts, in communities of language users. As a result, we will explore and use concepts of audience, purpose, forums, forms, and "community."

We will read about and discuss "writing in networked environments." And we will apply our readings and discussions by analyzing and evaluating a wide range of writing in networked environments.

We will explore different network environments (and communication tools), including email, discussion lists, bulletin boards, news groups, threaded discussion forums, instant messaging, intranets, blogs, wiki, and various kinds of web sites.

We will learn about and use different tools for producing effective writing in network environments. Included among these tools will be the various programs you choose to use to produce documents and graphics; tools for sharing and revising work in progress;
tools for finding and organizing information.

Because "writing" in networked environments enables / requires us to use more than alphabetic text, and because networked environments are very much different from print-based texts, we will spend considerable time exploring / discussing / analyzing the multiple issues related to design and composition, which will engage us in learning about uses of graphics and multimedia options.

Engl 4304, Shakespeare

When I teach a course in Shakespeare, I like to give my students the experience of reading plays from a variety of genres (history plays, comedies, tragi-comedies, tragedies, late comedies) and from the early, middle, and late periods of Shakespeare’s career.

For the coming semester, I have selected plays that support three themes. These are as follows:

1) Fortunate Lovers –The plays for this theme are Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The University Theatre has planned a production of Midsummer for spring, and I hope that my class can benefit from some cross participation with the Theatre department.

2) Shaping Identity and Conceptions of the “Other.” We will be reading for this theme The Merchant of Venice and Othello, both fascinating and highly controversial plays that deal with racial, ethnic, and sexual issues.

3) Real and Mythical Kings. For this theme we will be working with Henry V, an early history play; King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most profound tragedies; and a late comedy, called A Winter’s Tale. In this section we will be viewing Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in their film of Henry V and Sir Lawrence Olivier in the film King Lear.

The class will discuss Shakespeare’s works in the context of Renaissance culture, dramatic tradition, and stage history. In addition to reading and discussing the plays (and viewing many scenes from video productions), students should plan on taking several examinations, keeping a journal, writing a research paper, and participating in an end of semester group performance. There is quite a bit of work involved in this course, to be sure, but the experience, most students have found, is well worth the knowledge, insight, and experience. I hope that you will join us!

Engl 4311, British Romantic Literature

The main purpose of this course is to broaden your acquaintance with the historical movement known as Romanticism, and more specifically with the British poetry and prose that surfaced during the Romantic era. We will primarily study the “big five” poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats), but we will also look at some lesser stars and at some Romantic prose in order to view the movement from a broad perspective. The aim of this is to give you a firm context in which to evaluate the quality and contributions of the major poets, and also to show you a wider picture of the movement itself.

Text:
Abrams, M.H. and Jack Stillinger, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2A: The Romantic Period

Engl 4312, British Romantic Literature of the 20th Century

“The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.” (Oscar Wilde)

In this class we will read novels, poetry, and plays written before, but primarily during, the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837 – 1901). We will look at texts that reinforce our own stereotypes of the Victorians--tight-mouthed, buttoned-down, moral—before quickly moving to the “other” side of Victorian life, the dark, mysterious side that fueled much of the imaginative energy of the nineteenth century and continues to preoccupy us today. Using the theme of secrets and scandals as our guide, we will study the dualities of Victorian life and the power of not knowing in a culture obsessed with knowledge.

Required Literary Texts
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice
Bronte Charlotte, Jane Eyre
Martin, Valerie. Mary Reilly
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Poems and fairy tales by Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles
Swinburne, Charles Dickens, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

English 4320, Professional Writing Workshop, Etheridge
This course is intended to provide students with in-depth work with a particular kind of writing. During Spring of 2005, the course will be subtitled 'Grant WritingWorkshop.' The ability to write grants is a highly marketable skill, especially in today's political climate, which finds governments withdrawing support from education and health care, resulting in an increased need for non-profit groups to find additional financial support. In the seminar, students will learn the basics of grant writing, including needs assessment, identifying potential funding sources, creating goals, and identifying assessment plans. A large group project will involve the entire class in the creation of a significant grant proposal on behalf of a local community service or government agency, and, later in the semester, each student will write a smaller grant for a local agency. A student who completes this course will know how to write a grant and will be able to list actual grant writing experience on her or his resume.

Engl 4313, British Romantic Literature of the 20th Century

Our focus will be on the art of story telling and the craft of narrative form. We will be reading Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, James Joyce's The Dubliners, Virginia Woolf' To the Lighthouse, as well as short stories by D. H. Lawrence and poems by W. B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. As companion pieces to the literature, we will be reflecting on aspects of narrative including point of view, spatial fiction, stream of consciousness, and cross-gendered voice.

Engl 4330, Creative Writing Workshop

This course is a Creative Writing workshop, in which students read and critique each other's creative work--most often short stories and poems. The objective of the course is to provide thoughtful and helpful feed back to the writers in the group. Each student will have approximately four opportunities to present their work to the group during the semester. When a student's work is scheduled for presentation, the student distributes xeroxed copies to everyone the class period before, so that we have time to read and make comments on the work before the discussion. During each class session, we will discuss four students' work. The students concerned will then get back all the copies of their work with the written comments, which will hopefully aid them in revision. This course really helps to move students' writing forward!

Engl 4335, Creative Writing Workshop

This course is a Creative Writing workshop, in which students read and critique each other's creative work--most often short stories and poems. The objective of the course is to provide thoughtful and helpful feed back to the writers in the group. Each student will have approximately four opportunities to present their work to the group during the semester. When a student's work is scheduled for presentation, the student distributes xeroxed copies to everyone the class period before, so that we have time to read and make comments on the work before the discussion. During each class session, we will discuss four students' work. The students concerned will then get back all the copies of their work with the written comments, which will hopefully aid them in revision. This course really helps to move students' writing forward!

Engl 4350, Studies in Poetics and Poetry

Purpose
Students will study topics in the poetics of the Anglo-American tradition by focusing on works written by published poets about poetry and poetics from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries.

Prerequisites
This writing-intensive course is designed as an elective course for the upper-division student, including ENGL and non-ENGL majors and creative writing minors, who has successfully completed ENGL 1302, Composition II (or its equivalent), sophomore literature, ENGL 2332, 2333, 2334, or 2335.

Course Objectives
By the end of the semester, students will have
• been introduced to various schools of poetics in the Anglo-American tradition from the 19th-21st Centuries.
• become familiar with the appropriate critical terminology needed to understand and to write about poetics.
• formed their own critical perspective of contemporary poetics.

Engl 4351, Senior Capstone: 20th Century Literature and Writing

In the 20th century the U.S. has witnessed the most widespread and sustained movement of peoples. In this course we will examine U.S. migration and immigration experiences in a variety of cultural and literary texts and contexts. Our analysis will focus on the following questions: how have these experiences been reflected in the writings by men and women whose cultural and ethnic origins are in Europe, Asia, and the Americas? How do they reflect these experiences differently or similarly? Is there a prevailing paradigm of immigration? What issues of language, assimilation, acculturation, Americanization, dislocation do migrants/immigrants have to deal with? How do authors of prose fiction, poetry, and autobiographies present the figures of the refugee, the exile, or the nomad? The goals of this course are to encourage you to see U.S. American literature in context, to foster critical cultural literacy, and to enjoy reading literature.

Required Texts
Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky
Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo
Alice Hoffman, Lost in Translation
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
John Okada, No-no Boy
Helena María Viramontes, The Moths and Other Stories

Selected handouts and library reserve materials are also required.

Engl 4354, Science Fiction

In Science Fiction we work to develop a clear understanding of the nature and purposes of Science-Fiction. We explore major themes of (mainly American) science fiction novels, short stories and films, and study the literary quality of these texts. Our texts include: Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, and Neuromancer.

Engl 4361, Topics in Ethnic American Literature:  Chicana and Latina Literature

This course is an introduction to Chicana/Latina poets, novelists, and autobiographers. Through close readings of the literature, various genres of writing, interactions with Chicana/Latina writers and scholars, and participation in class discussions, we will work to understand the historical and cultural experiences of these women writers. Participants will be actively involved in preparing for Pat Mora’s visit in March through various research, writing, and presentation activities. Students will be required to write letters to the authors or filmmakers, conduct research and interviews for papers, and engage in preparing for a Chicana poet’s visit to campus.