Fall Semester 2006

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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 2006 - Course Descriptions

Abbreviations: MAC = Satisfies MA Core Requirement;
PLC = Satisfies Program in Literature Core Requirement;
PRC = Satisfies Program in Rhetoric and Composition Core Requirement

ENG G101: Critical Issues

Peterfreund
Key #78693
THURSDAY, 3:30-6:00 PM
(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.

ENG G102: Key Concepts in Rhetoric and Composition

Sullivan
Key #71229
MONDAY, 3:30-6:00 PM
(MAC)

This course has two aims: one, to provide an introduction to the fields of rhetoric and composition for all MA students; and two, to help students in the Program in Rhetoric and Composition develop the vocabulary and frameworks needed for subsequent coursework in these fields. We'll begin by considering narratives that scholars from the fields of communication and English studies (including composition, literary, and cultural studies) tell about the formation and development of the field of rhetoric and composition. We will then spend two weeks looking at each of five concepts central to both fields. Our readings on these concepts -- knowledge, context, discourse, authority, and genre -- will serve as an overview of important issues and theories in rhetoric and composition. Assignments include short response papers, a presentation, a review of a recent book in composition and/or rhetoric, and a substantial inquiry-based literature review. The class may collectively decide to address additional concepts and/or develop different assignments or projects during the course of the semester as they suit our needs or interests.

ENG G211: Topics in Am. Lit.: Multiethnic Literature, Theory, Pedagogy

TuSmith
Key #43068
TUESDAY, 6:00-8:30 PM
(MAC, PLC)

This course focuses on the study of contemporary American literature that is ethnically identified (e.g., US Latino/a, American Indian, African American, Asian American, Jewish American). Given the challenging range and diversity of such a rubric, we will approach the topic as a disciplinary study by addressing questions such as: What is multiethnic literature? What are its central tenets as defined by contemporary literary theorists? How does one go about teaching ethnically identified literature? Students will be introduced to major concepts in literary and pedagogical theory, a manageable sampling of literary works, and specific areas of current scholarship. We will aim for in-depth textual analyses while developing our understanding of broader issues related to the study of multiethnic literatures of the US.

ENG G243: Modern American Drama

Bernstein
Key #71213
WEDNESDAY, 3:30-6:00 PM
(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, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, August Wilson, and others. 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 page critical/scholarly paper and present one or more in-class reports.

ENG G284: Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Rise of the Novel

Howlett
Key #43159
THURSDAY, 6:00-8:30 PM
(MAC,PLC)

This course provides an excellent background for those who wish to concentrate their studies on the novel. We will consider the crucial issues of form, characterization, and prose style, and examine the generic antecedents that contributed to what we now consider "the novel": the picaresque, history, romance, criminal autobiography, epistolary fiction, spiritual autobiography, conduct books, trials, and travel literature. As we explore the forms of the novel as it developed in the early modern period through the eighteenth century -- from Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and beyond -- we will address the corresponding cultural, social, and historical developments that allowed this new genre to thrive. Crucial questions in our inquiry will include perceived changes in the reading public, the commodification of art, experimentation in prose style and the new language theories (which bear some resemblance to modern semiotics), and the development of psychological realism. Central to our class discussions will be the current critical debates on the rise of the novel that challenge many of Ian Watt's long-standard assertions regarding "the rise of the novel."

ENG G311: Introduction to Linguistics

Randall
Key #78688
TUESDAY, 3:30-6:00 PM
(MAC, PLC, PRC)

This courses introduces students to a new way of thinking about language. Normally using language is an unconscious activity: when we speak and understand sentences, we are unaware of the complex mental activities going on at each moment. In this course, we will have 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 language standards, sexism in language, and language change. A weekly problem set or essay plus a take-home final exam will be required.

ENG G362: Contemporary Poetry

Rotella
Key #43073
WEDNESDAY, 6:00-8:30 PM
(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.