Fall 2009 Course Offerings — English
Undergraduate Courses
Combined Undergraduate/Graduate Courses
Graduate Seminars
Undergraduate Courses
English 090 - Basic Writing
Various Instructors
Various Times
$30.00 Fee
English 101 - English Composition
Various Instructors
Various Times
When Combined with ENGL102 Satisfies Goal 1
English 102 - Critical Reading and Writing
Various Instructors
Various Times
When combined with ENGL101 Satisfies Goal 1
English 110 - Intro to Literature
Various Instructors
Various Times
Satisfies Goal 7
English 115-01 - Literature and War
Folke Person
T/H 9:40-10:45
Satisfies Goal 7
The aim of this course is to examine writings dealing with war, and by that means to try to gain some insight into its nature, and into the attitudes reflected in those writings towards war. Such attitudes might range from glorification to abhorrence. Reflections on the subject of human conflict go back to preliterate time--the time of oral tradition/transmission--so we will find no dearth of materials to examine. Either in groups, or individually, or as a class, we will look at poetry, both epic and lyric; prose fiction, both long and short; drama; and nonfiction prose. A supplementary reading list might include such authors as Homer (Iliad), Aeschylus (Suppliants), Sophocles (Antigone), Euripides (Trojan Women), Virgil (Aeneid), Herodotus (Germania), Cervantes (Don Quixote), Milton (Paradise Lost), Pope (Rape of the Lock), Lincoln, Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), R. Brooke (poems), W. Owen (poems), Hemingway (short stories, essays), Brecht (Good Soldier Schweik), Churchill, Remarque, Pasternak, Solzhenitzyn, and others. Students will write three papers and two exams. Texts will tentatively include (but not be limited to) Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Norton Book of Modern War, Men At War (ed. E. Hemingway), Shakespeare’s Henry V, S. Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, and D. Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.
English 115-02 - The Fantastic in Literature: The Hero's Journey
Brian Attebery
T/H 1:00-2:15
Satisfies Goal 7
This course is both an introduction to the study of literature (fulfilling the general education requirement) and a survey of some of the modes and themes of fantastic literature, from ancient myth to modern science fiction and fantasy. This semester the theme is the hero’s journey. This is a theme that shows up in all cultures and traditions. One of the premises of this course is that the natural habitat of a hero is a story: people are not heroes in real life, though they may perform heroic actions and inspire heroic narratives. Heroism in traditional and modern narratives always seems to involve a symbolic journey, such as the fairy tale hero’s walk into the woods or the knight’s quest or the astronaut’s launch into space. We will examine heroism of various sorts, including heroic action and inaction and female as well as male heroes. Readings for the course will include the epic of Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the fairy tale, “Mollie Whuppie,” Shakespeare’s Pericles, Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Molly Gloss’s Wild Life.
English 115-03 – Literature: Special Theme
Lynn Worsham
H 4:00-6:30 pm
English 115-04 – Literature and Film Adaptations
Steve Harrison
MWF 8:00-8:50
English 115-05 – Literature: Alternative Voices
Jessica Edwards
MWF 12:00-12:50
“Alternative Voices” is an exploration of how identity and persona are created through literature. We will investigate how it is both we, as authors of our own lives, and literary authors of repute form identity through outward expression. In order to gain understanding of “alternative voices,” we must define (if possible) and identify “voice” in creative writing: this is how the class will begin. From novels, as well as selections from short stories and poems, students will develop an understanding of traditional literary conventions and components (with, of course, an emphasis on voice and persona). We will then look at how authors subvert the traditions of characterization and why they choose to experiment with the creation of character, identity, and self. As students are (increasingly) aware of the artifice of projected identity, this topic is relevant to our current cultural climate as well as to the timelessness of literary study.
English 206-01 - Creative Writing Workshop
Bethany Schultz Hurst
MWF 12:00-12:50
English 206-03 - Creative Writing Workshop
Bethany Schultz Hurst
T/H 11:00-12:15
English 211-01 - Introduction to Literary Analysis
Lynn Worsham
T/H 1:00-2:15
English 212-01 – Introduction to Folklore/Oral Traditions
Jennifer Attebery
T 7:00-9:30 pm
This course is required for the Folklore minor
This course provides students with an overview of folklore as a field of study. We will cover the many and varied folklore genres and the groups that create them: from proverbs to folktales, children's games to holiday customs, and quilting bees to log buildings. Many of the examples used throughout the course will be drawn from folk cultures of the United States. The course grade will be an average of four components: (1) a short paper in which students describe and analyze an example of folklore from their own experience, (2) reading quizzes and Moodle forum postings due throughout the semester, (3) a midterm examination, and (4) a final examination.
Required textbooks:
Bronner, Simon. Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America (U Pr of Kentucky, 2004).
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore. 4th edition (Norton, 1998).
Santino, Jack. All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life. (U of IL Pr, 1995).
English 257-01 - Survey of World Literature I
Roger Schmidt
MWF 11:00-11:50
English 267-01 - Survey of English Literature I
Jessica Winston
MWF 9:00-9:50
English 277-01 - Survey of American Literature I
Hal Hellwig
T/H 11:00-12:15
English 281-01 – Introduction to Language Studies
Brent Wolter
T/H 9:30-10:45
English 301-01 - Writing About Literature
Alan Johnson
T/H 1:00-1:15
English 306-01 - Creative Writing Workshop
Susan Goslee
T/H 1:00-2:15
English 307-01 - Technical Writing
Susan Swetnam
T/H 11:00-12:15
English 307-02 - Technical Writing
Brandon Hall
M/W 1:00-2:15
English 308 - Business Writing
Various Instructors
Various Times
English 323-01 – Genre Studies: Short Story Sequence
Tom Klein
MWF 10:00-10:50
The perspective of genre is one of the most important ways we approach, read, and study literature. It shapes our expectations as readers, and it gives writers a form to work with and against. In this course, we focus on the short story, and more particularly on the unique sub-genre, the short story sequence (also known as the short story cycle or composite novel). This term describes a book containing a group of stories which can be read alone, but which together achieve some larger effect. In reading, the audience discovers that separate, juxtaposed stories are linked, sometimes subtly, through common ideas, patterns, or themes. We will explore the possibilities and complications of this form—and will consider why the twentieth century has been a such rich ground for its development.
Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs will offer an early example of the sequence’s development. The genre’s central concerns with place, community, and isolation will emerge especially in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and James Joyce’s Dubliners, while Hemingway’s In Our Time will show the genre responding to the fracturing of a generation through war and violence. Similar themes are found in Tim O’Brien’s treatment of Vietnam War experience in The Things They Carried and Courtney Brkic’s view of the Bosnian-Serb conflict, Stillness.
English 433 – Methods for Secondary Teachers
Curt Whitaker
M 4:00-6:30 pm
This methods course will provide students with hands-on techniques for planning a secondary English class with short and long-term goals. The two main tasks of most English instructors are to teach literature and to teach writing. Accordingly, students in 433 will design daily lesson plans as well as larger units of study to practice achieving these goals. By the end of the course, students will have engaged with English pedagogy to the point that they can design curriculum and justify the choices they have made.
English 433 is intended for students near the end of their undergraduate degree. The course assumes that students have a strong background in literary history and the mechanics of writing and are now looking for methods to teach this material.
English 455-01 – Garcia Marquez
Dan Hunt
H 4:00-6:40
English 491-01 - Senior Seminar
Jennifer Adkison
T/H 1:00-2:15
Undergraduate/Graduate Courses
English 406/506 – Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
Susan Swetnam
M 4:00-6:30 pm
English 461/561 – Classical Literature: Greek and Roman Myths
Curt Whitaker
T/H 9:30-10:45
The Greco-Roman pagan myths have entranced the West since they were first formulated three millennia ago. Part religion, part literature, they explore human problems in a manner that subsequent cultures have found deeply satisfying. This course will focus on what it is about these myths that makes their themes, images, and narrative structures resonate so deeply with readers. Recent developments in cognitive science suggest this lasting popularity is no accident; the myths’ treatment of violence, sexuality, and the natural world correspond to deep structures in the human brain.
The class will begin with an examination of the core myths as told in the epics of Homer and Ovid (The Iliad and The Metamorphoses); the second half of the class will then focus on how these myths are explored further in the lyric poetry of Sappho, Virgil, and Horace.
English 464/564 – 17th Century Literature
Terry Engebretsen
T/H 11:00-12:15
This semester, English g 464 will focus on the “long 17th century” in America, 1600-1750. Historian Jack P. Greene has pointed out that underneath the surface variations from region to region and over time, all regions in Colonial British America followed a similar pattern of development. Initially, it was impossible to duplicate social structures from home (the metropolis), so colonies (the peripheries) entered a period of experimentation, change and simplification. With a short time–by the end of the 17th century in New England and Virginia–colonies began to become more alike and more like society in the metropolis.
As a result of this development, some groups’–women, Africans, Indians–freedoms and options that had been available to them were closed off. In this course we will begin by examining literature from discovery early settlement to explore the tensions between trying to reproduce the metropolis in the frontier conditions of the New World. Then, in the second part of the course, we will look more closely at writings by and about women, Africans, and Indians to see how their lives were affected by the initial expansion followed by the closing off of possibilities.
Students will write several short papers and participate in a “learning community” to expand our exploration of the Early American experience. There will be an additional project for graduate students.
English 472/572 – Proseminar: Major Literary Figure
Roger Schmidt
MWF 1:00-1:50
English 480/580 – Varieties of American English
Sonja Launspach
M/W 4:00-5:15 pm
English 487/587 – History of the English Language
Tom Klein
MWF 2:00-2:50
This course aims to give you a historical perspective on the (ongoing) development of English, and to provide you with analytical tools to perceive the ways in which the language operates and changes. We will trace the story of how English, once the dialect of an obscure Germanic tribe, came to be one of the world’s most widespread languages; we will see how it changed and why. This course aims especially to heighten your awareness of the linguistic systems underlying the language you use intuitively. You’ll get practice writing about language and using the tools for historical research; you’ll also learn to identify linguistic features particular to an era. I’ll encourage you to think about how historical linguistic awareness might help your work outside of the class.
Finally, a chief aim is to promote a philological frame of mind (philologist—literally, “a lover of words”). The philologist is attracted by origins and wonders about the connections between modern and ancient forms. When you find yourself wondering, for instance, when orange first came into the language or what promiscuous originally meant, you’re becoming a philologist.
English 492/592 – Folk and Literary Tales
Brian Attebery
T/H 11:00-12:15
Fairy tales are found in the oral traditions of most cultures. Unlike myths, they don’t claim to be sacred or timeless, and yet, like myth, they take hold of the imagination and shape our sense of self and universe. Writers have been quick to pick up on the power of the fairy tale. From Apuleius to Angela Carter, authors have written versions of well-known tales or imitated the form in literary fairy tales. In this course we will examine traditional models and some of the scholarly literature on the magical folktale alongside some of the more challenging and imaginative literary reworkings of the form. The goal of the course will be to develop and employ an aesthetic of the fairy tale and to analyze some of the social and psychological uses of the tale both in traditional settings and in contemporary literature.
Graduate Seminars
English 610-01 – Careers in English
Jessica Winston
H 3:00-3:50
English 612-01 – Introduction to Graduate Studies in English
Alan Johnson
W 4:00-6:30 pm
English 627-01 – Seneca, Shakespeare, and the Politics of Renaissance Tragedy
Jessica Winston
H 7:00-9:30 pm
Seneca (c. 1 BC–65 AD) was an advisor to the Roman emperor Nero, and as well as the author of several tragedies and several philosophical treatises. The tragedies comment on Nero’s tyranny and were very influential for Renaissance playwrights, including Shakespeare, who also wrote tragedies commenting on monarchic power. This class explores this influence, as well as issues of adaptation and imitation, and will be helpful for anyone who might ever teach a Shakespeare play, as well as those interested in tragedy, Renaissance literature, literature as political commentary, or literary adaptations. Readings will include Seneca’s Trojan Women, Thyestes, and Agamemnon as well as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Hamlet.
English 631-01 – Seminar in Teaching Writing
Angela Petit
M 7:00-9:30 pm
English 680-01 - Introduction to Linguistics
Sonja Launspach
W 7:00-9:30 pm
This course is the first course in the TESOL certificate program sequence. It will provide an introduction to the fundamental concepts and methodologies of modern linguistics necessary for work in ESL. Areas of study include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics, as well as language acquisition issues. The course will provide opportunities to explore the practical application of the topics covered in the course.