A workshop-based course that helps students become confident and effective readers and writers. This course engages students in writing as a process involving critical reading, thinking, writing, and revising. Students will learn to construct cogent and well-supported arguments and analyses. FYW

A study of women characters and women writers in English, American, and foreign literature. May be counted as a core course toward the minor in gender studies. FYW, III.W, V.2, V.5

Prerequisite: Not open to students with credit for HNRS 247. This course focuses on selected works by acclaimed international writers, emphasizing historical and cultural contexts and exploring cross-cultural connections. III.O, V.2

This course examines distinctive contributions made to the art of fiction by selected 20th-century writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Welty, Morrison, Hong Kingston, Erdrich, DeLillo, and Diaz. We will also consider how the geographical, historical, social, and psychological landscapes depicted in these works shape our understanding of America today. FYW, III.W, V.2

From Renaissance poems bemoaning chastity to modern novels confessing illicit rendezvous, literature has both shaped and reflected our understanding of love and sexuality. Most notably, forms of desire disdained by society have found expression in the imaginative space of literature. This course will investigate literary and filmic representations of these forbidden loves, with particular attention to the works’ literary and social ramifications. May be counted as a core course toward the minor in gender studies. Offered alternate years. III.W, V.2, V.5

From “Beowulf’s” murderous Grendel to modern horror films, people have always been fascinated by the monstrous. This course will cover a variety of texts that incorporate both “real” monsters and characters demonstrating monstrous behavior, examining how the definition of what is monstrous has changed over the years and the social commentary implicit in the distinction between what is human and what is not. Offered alternate years. V.2

This course examines the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontes in their historical and cultural context. It explores Austen’s reimagining of plots for the novel from “Pride and Prejudice” to “Persuasion.” It studies the Brontes’ incorporation of both gothic and realist plots in their novels and considers how the confluence of gender and genre reinvented the form and plots of the nineteenth-century novel. This course is not open to student who have credit for ENGL 134, ENGL 204 (spring semester 2005), or ENGL 218 (spring semester 2007). FYW, III.W, V.2, V.5

We normally associate the Victorian period with domesticity, family values, and propriety. In this course we will explore the dark side of Victorian literature focusing on secrets, detection, urban violence and prostitution, sexuality, and vampires. Works to be studied may include the Sherlock Holmes stories, accounts of Jack the Ripper, “Tess,” “Dracula,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “The Woman in White,” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” V.2

This course will introduce students to the history and analysis of film. Students will learn the technical and critical vocabularies of film studies and analyze films representing a variety of styles and genres. The global and historical scope of this course will lead us to consider films from America, Italy, France, Germany, and Japan and from the silent period to the present. Offered alternate years. V.6a

Prerequisites: ENGL 104 or its equivalent, and sophomore standing. In this course, students will study and practice various forms of business writing, including reports, letters, memoranda, proposals, and other documents. Assignments will replicate typical business cases, scenarios, and cultures. Selected readings introduce students to business discourse. This course cannot be taken on a P/CR/NC grading option. III.W

Prerequisite: ENGL 104. This course provides an introduction to “hard news” reporting and editing in the age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. Emphasis will be placed on developing story ideas, research and interviewing skills, and the ethical use of social media as news-gathering tools. Students will be required to maintain a blog and submit course assignments to the student newspaper. Offered alternate years. III.O, III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: First-year students with permission. Topic will vary by semester. Close reading, various interpretive strategies, and research skills will be stressed. This course may be counted toward the transnational requirement for the majors of English and English and creative writing when content is appropriate. V.2

Prerequisite: Sophomore standing, 3.0 GPA, and permission of the instructor. The course is a practicum designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of peer tutoring in writing across the disciplines. Students will study composition theory and pedagogy and develop skills in responding to student writing through course readings, writing assignments, and peer tutoring. Theories will be tested through observation and practice.

Prerequisite: First-year students with permission. A study of the sonnet, arguably the most versatile and enduring poetic form in English. We will read major sonnets and sonnet cycles of the Renaissance, including works by Petrarch (in translation), Wyatt, Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. We will investigate historical and social trends in the poetry, and we will consider how individual writers adapt the form for their own ends. Finally, we will examine the sonnet's development since its resurgence in the Romantic period. III.O, V.2

Why are film stars so fascinating to us and what are the pleasures we get from them? In this course we will study the Hollywood star system and the relationship between performance and stardom. We will examine issues such as the star as commodity, the star as text, and the star as an object of desire. Films to be considered are: “The Godfather,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Some Like it Hot.” V.6a

Prerequisite: First-year students with permission. We will read banned books from a range of historical periods and will work to understand society’s ethical ambivalence towards these texts. We will investigate whether literature’s treatment of topics like religion, violence, race, and sexuality is dangerous or even harmful, ask how society should react to potentially disruptive literature, and work to determine the social value of these works. III.O, V.2, V.7

Prerequisite: First-year students with permission. This course introduces students to the extraordinary vitality of the contemporary Irish and Scottish literary scenes. We will focus on competing visions of Ireland and Scotland and what it means to be “Irish” or “Scottish” today, the growing dialogue between the two cultures, and the role of literature in responding to, and at times promoting, social and political change. All works will be read in English. Close reading, various interpretive strategies, and research skills will be stressed. III.O, V.2

Prerequisites: One ENGL course and permission of the instructor. Study at an introductory level of selected topics in literature or writing to be pursued by individual students under the immediate supervision of a department member.

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. The setting or place of a story - the fictional universe, real or imagined - can be as important as a story’s characters and events, shaping narrative in powerful ways. How do writers use setting to enrich or enlarge or complicate a story, and how does the world of a story play a role in a story’s unfolding drama? Students will read short stories distinguished by vivid or unusual landscapes and write original works of their own in which setting plays an important part. Offered alternate years. III.O,III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. In this course students will write the first three chapters of their own memoir. In preparation for this semester-long writing project, students will closely read a variety of contemporary memoirs to become familiar with both the array of narrative conventions and strategies memoirists employ as well as the stylistic and structural concerns one confronts when writing autobiographically. Emphasis will be placed on recent memoir scandals and memoirs that question the line between fact and fiction. Offered alternate years. III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Topic will vary by semester. This course may be repeated once for credit when the topic is different. Topic for Fall 2011: "Framing Shakespeare." An intensive examination of two or three Shakespearean plays as vehicles for exploring contemporary literary theory. We will explore the nature of reading as the "framing" of a text: both selecting a context for interpretation and charging the text with meaning. To this end, we will evaluate and practice "reading in slow motion" (a contemporary adaptation of close reading), and we will consider other interpretive methodologies, such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and new historicism. V.2

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. Since modernism, poets have focused their attention on the rendition of visual images in language. Poems that respond to the visual arts, either in their subject or in their mode of composition, bring the reader a uniquely layered and synesthetic experience. This course will offer collaborative opportunities, and will encourage students to respond to paintings, photography, sculpture, dance, film, and conceptual art. Students will read, write, and peer-critique poems in a variety of traditions. Offered alternate years. III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Though medieval heroic epics focus on (and are often named for) their male heroes, they also include female characters of subtle but essential significance. This course will examine representations of gender and gender roles in medieval heroic literature and how those representations change over time and across cultures, assessing the extent to which the heroes of this genre owe their fame and fates to the unacknowledged heroines with whom they interact. V.2, V.5

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. If the ability of a poet is a balance of her powers of perception and powers of expression, how can consideration of subject matter amplify the former? How can broadening one’s emotional and intellectual range refine the latter? This course will encourage students to approach the broadest possible range of subject matter, and to engage it in a way that’s ethical, elegant, and effective. Students will read, write, and peer-critique poems in a variety of traditions. Offered alternate years. III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. An examination of English Renaissance drama before 1603, including early works by Shakespeare and plays by his Elizabethan contemporaries such as Lyly, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd, and Dekker. We will study the increasing secularization and professionalization of theater, the development of comedy and pastoral, and the emergence of revenge tragedy. Both textual analysis and dramaturgy will be emphasized. Offered alternate years. V.2, V.6a

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Study of works of 19th-century American Romantic writers or those who are strongly influenced by them. Emphasis on writers such as Alcott, Douglass, Emerson, Fern, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Phelps, Thoreau, and Chopin. Offered alternate years in the fall semester. May be counted as an auxiliary course toward the minor in gender studies. III.O, V.2

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Topics can include the movements towards modernism and realism as well as the re-evaluation of women and minorities in American life. Offered alternate years in the fall semester. May be counted as an auxiliary course toward the minor in gender studies. III.W, V.2

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. This course focuses on how fiction writers use the material of the real world - real places, real people, real events - in the fictional universe, considering such questions as how a fiction writer’s research methods and purpose might differ from an historian’s. Students will read and write short stories that arise out of historical or contemporary fact or account and examine how the imagination transforms fact into fiction. Offered alternate years. III.O, III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. We will study gothic literature in England during the nineteenth century in texts by Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde and then examine gothic returns in three films: “Let the Right One In,” “Sin City,” and “The Dark Knight.” We will explore historical, social, and psychological reasons for the appearance of gothic literature as we read critical works on gothic theory. Offered alternate years. V.2

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. The long story or novella seems to fall into a middle distance between the novel and the short story. In their unique suspension of a narrative over time, novellas and long stories have neither the luxury of a novel’s length nor the constraint of a short story. What are the possibilities and characteristics and challenges of the form? Students will both read examples of long stories and novellas and, over the course of the semester, write one of their own. Offered alternate years. III.O, III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. Stories in collections of narratives linked by theme, setting, and/or character function both individually and as a unified whole. What are the pleasures and achievements of such collections? Is there a particular narrative that lends itself to this treatment? How are such stories different from chapters in novels? Collections of linked narratives will serve as models for students as they write their own series of linked stories and examine the pleasures, challenges, and opportunities of the form. Offered alternate years. III.O, III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. This course introduces students to the strategies for writing with depth, intelligence, and style about film and music. Students will learn to write brief capsule reviews for general audiences and longer researched review essays for more sophisticated and niche audiences. All students will be required to create and maintain a blog as well as attend film screenings and live musical performances. Offered alternate years. III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. Ghosts, talking animals, and aliens - among other strange phenomena - belong to the fictional universe referred to as magical realism or fabulism or fantastic fiction. What is the difference between this broad genre and so-called fantasy fiction (and why is one a higher order of art than the other), and how and why does a writer employ the impossible to describe the possibilities of human experience? Students will read and write stories that push at the boundaries of the real world. Offered alternate years. III.O, III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: ENGL 106. Students in this course will examine and attempt journalistic and essayistic accounts of human rights disasters and social justice issues, discussing the ways in which writers balance personal agenda and ideology against the burden of proof and objectivity, both of which are often difficult to come by in the midst of a war, natural disaster, or atrocity. Readings may include Martha Gelhorn, Orwell, Primo Levi, John Hersey, Seymour Hersh, Tim O’Brien, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Philip Gourevitch. Offered alternate years. III.O,III.W, V.6b

Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. A study of a wide range of poetry in English from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Poets may include Auden, Larkin, Bishop, Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Brooks, Rich, Heaney, and Walcott. We will focus on questions of form, technique, and interpretation while relating these works to relevant movements and traditions as well as to the writers’ lives and times. Offered alternate years in the spring semester. May be counted as an auxiliary course toward the minor in gender studies. III.O, V.2

Prerequisite: Open only to senior English majors and minors and English/creative writing majors. During this fall term course, a student under the supervision of an advisor will prepare her proposal and annotated bibliography for her senior thesis in the spring term. She will select a topic and line of inquiry that matches her strengths and interests. She will have the option to 1) re-envision and develop an earlier paper in ways that lead her into new areas of inquiry or 2) start an new project entirely. Each student should get departmental approval for her proposal by November 1. An annotated critical bibliography will be due by the end of the semester. This course will be graded P/CR/NC.

Prerequisite: Senior standing; open to English/ creative writing majors only. This course serves as a workshop for senior English/creative writing majors completing their creative writing portfolios. Students will read across three genres — fiction, poetry, and nonfiction — from a range of contemporary literary journals, developing a picture of the current publishing landscape beyond the traditional form of the book. In addition, through peer and instructor responses and editing, students will revise and refine the work to be included in their final portfolios. III.W, V.6b