Current Course Offerings
**REGISTRATION FOR FALL 2008 BEGINS JULY 14, 2008.**
For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, visit the Registrar's Schedules website (PDF format).
Fall 2008 - Course Descriptions
Abbreviations:
- MAC = Satisfies MA Core Requirement
- PLC = Satisfies Program in Literature Core Requirement
- PRC = Satisfies Program in Rhetoric and Composition Core Requirement
ENGG101: Critical Issues
Mullen
Key #39635
Wednesday, 3:30 – 5:45 p.m.
(MAC)
This course provides an introduction to the range of critical approaches that currently shape the study of English and American literature. After completing an historical review and overview, ranging from Greek aesthetics to mid-twentieth-century formalisms, we will survey Anglo-American criticism and theory as practiced during the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The approaches surveyed will include New Historicism and materialism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and queer theory, ethnic studies and post-colonial studies. We will look not only for the grand intellectual genealogy of present-day literary theory but also at the structure and style of significant essays, asking how different theoretical approaches influence the framing and focus of critical writing. Students will write three short essays in which they apply specific critical methods to literary texts (or in some cases other kinds of texts) and write a take-home essay examination at the end of the semester.
ENGG121: Composition Studies
Kellogg
Key #04036
Monday, 3:30 – 5:45 p.m.
(PRC)
This seminar explores the scholarship of composition and how knowledge about writing is produced. We begin by examining texts that address such issues as the proper range of scholarship in composition studies, qualitative versus quantitative research, the relation between research and teaching, the ethics of research and scholarship, and the interactions between composition researchers and institional review boards (IRBs). We will then look closely at research addressing specific domains of inquiry. Areas to be addressed may include the writing process; the history of writing instruction; English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL); race, class, and gender in the writing classroom; the role of textual analysis; community literacy; writing for specific purposes; the reliability of student and/or program assessment; plagiarism and source use; the role of grammar in learning; and the relations among reading, writing, and learning. Requirements: weekly journal responses; a presentation in the form of a proposal for a hypothetical research project, including IRB information if applicable; a seminar paper.
ENGG243: Modern American Drama
Bernstein
Key #07706
Tuesday, 6:15 – 8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
In this course, students will explore writings by a number of important American dramatists. Included will be work by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry. We will also examine works by Edward Albee, August Wilson, and other dramatists who have written noteworthy plays in recent years. The course will feature the consideration of individual plays, major trends, and critical issues. Through such study, students will confront some of the principal aesthetic elements that underlie and inform the modern American drama broadly considered. Students will write a 15-20 page critical/scholarly paper and present one or more in-class reports.
ENGG261: Medieval Literature: “Reading/Watching the Middle Ages—Text and Film”
Kelly
Key #07711
Thursday, 3:30 – 5:45 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
Our primary focus is the medieval romance and how various tales are retold and refashioned within the genre in the Middle Ages. Arthurian legend is central to such an inquiry, but we will also read romances set in the Middle East (or the "Middle East") that exist in different versions, as well as romances dependent upon classical sources. As we read clusters of medieval romances with analogues and antecedents, we will also inquire into how such romances continue to live beyond the Middle Ages, and therefore we will consider a handful of modern cinematic adaptations of medieval texts. Among the assigned texts and films: selected legends of Tristan and Isolde (and Cocteau’s L’Eternel Retour); selected episodes from Malory's Morte Darthur (and Boorman’s Excalibur); selected episodes from the French Vulgate Lancelot and from Chrétien de Troyes’s works (and Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac); the "oriental" Floris and Blanchefleur and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale (and Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and the BBC’s Man of Law’s Tale); Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (and the BBC Knight’s Tale), and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. We’ll read the transcripts of the trials of Jeanne D’Arc in order to understand how her history becomes romanticized in post-medieval retellings, and pair these readings with Besson’s The Messenger. Our theoretical interests: representations of race and gender, narratology and narrative, intertextuality, and film theory. We’ll watch one or two films in class, but most are to be screened outside of class (which we might do as a group, if convenient). Requirements: short in-class responses to texts, short presentations of film clips, a formal scene analysis of a film, and a final paper. (Reading in Middle English or Old French welcome, but not required: all texts in translation or modernization.) Prerequisite: familiarity with Monty Python and the Holy Grail!
ENGG275: Milton
Blessington
Key #25045
Thursday, 6:15 – 8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
A seminar in Paradise Lost with supplemental readings in Milton's prose and minor poems. Emphasis upon the writing of literary criticism in the context of the history of criticism. In-class short, oral reports, short paper, and one final paper (20 pp.), possibly an extended version of the short paper. A review of a recent Milton book.
ENGG311: Introduction to Linguistics
Randall
Key #39620
Tuesday, 3:30 – 5:45 p.m.
(MAC, PRC, PLC)
This courses introduces students to a new way of thinking about language. Normally, we use language unconsciously: when we speak and understand sentences, we are unaware of the complex mental activities going on at each moment. This course provides an opportunity to look carefully at our unconscious knowledge of sentence structure (syntax), meaning (semantics), word forms (morphology), and sound patterns (phonology). These lead to related issues: "talking" computers, the nature/nurture controversy, and sociolinguistic debates about standard and non-standard English, gender issues in language, and language change. A weekly problem set or essay plus a take-home final exam will be required.
ENGG361: Contemporary Poetry
Rotella
Key #11150
Wednesday, 6:15 – 8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
In the second half of the twentieth century, many poets actively sought to subvert, multiply, or escape from traditional centers of authority and power. They experimented with everything from altered states of consciousness to randomness and chance; made intensely personal revelations or announced the death of the author and the dispersal of the self; defined themselves and their work by gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation; intersected with postmodernism and made the linguistic turn; reflected life’s saturation with media-driven images; dissolved conventional distinctions between "high" and "popular" culture; and wrote poems that are beautiful and strange, disturbing and consoling. We’ll read those poems, for pleasure, and to trace major thematic and technical developments in "British" and (especially) "American" poetry from 1950 to the present.
ENGG405: Independent Study – Women’s Activism: Gender, Literacy, and Human Rights
GCWS course, for NEU credit - LIMITED ENROLLMENT. Please apply first, through GCWS. If accepted, contact the Graduate Office for the appropriate paperwork.
Proposed Spring 2009 Graduate Course Offerings
Provisional, Subject to change
- ENGG102: Key Concepts: Rhetoric and Composition, Sullivan
- ENGG213: Topics in Early American Literature: Three Revolutions in the Atlantic World, Dillon
- ENGG215: Topics in 20th Century American Literature: Identity, Theory, and the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan
- ENGG266: Victorian Literature, Green
- ENGG351: Topics in Literary Study: Archival Research and Theory, Leslie
- ENGG360: Topics in Rhetoric: Gender and the Rhetoric of Law, Britt
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