Spring 2013 Course Descriptions

150.001: The Study of Literature

TR 11:00–12:15
Belinda D. Wallace

This course is an introduction to the study and appreciation of literature for non-English majors. In our quest to develop a greater understand of and increased enjoyment from literature, this class will teach students how to read literature as well as how to write about the literature they have read. We will explore various literary genres and themes; different strategies for reading literature; and effective practices for writing about literature.

150.002: Adaptation & Invention of Myth

MW 5:30-6:45
M. R. Hofer

This course will begin with an extended discussion of Homer’s Odyssey as well as key selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We will then consider a broad range of twentieth-century texts and films that these two cornerstones of the western canon have informed or at least inspired. In the process we will focus on three related questions: 1) How have foundational myths of the ancient world extended their influence through historical periods and cultural traditions? 2) Why do so many innovative artists continually return to the classics, attempting to make them new? and 3) What, for readers, explains this persistent appeal of mythos into and beyond modernity?

219.024: Technical and Professional Writing

Online
Valerie Thomas

English 219 focuses on how to write and design documents found in the workplace. Students create documents that are based on the needs of their readers by considering the type of research to conduct as well as the appropriate structure, writing style, and page layout to use. Students also learn about ethical considerations in the workplace, writing for multi-cultural audiences, working with a team of writers, and using technology. Assignments include creating professional resumes, letters, memos, procedures, manuals, presentations, proposals, and analytical reports.

220.001: Broken Societies: Genre Studies in Dystopian Literature

MWF 8:00-8:50
Carol Stokes

Depicting its author’s vision of a unique society, dystopian literature can be fascinating, frightening, and fantastic. This course will explore genres such as totalitarian, cyberpunk, capitalistic, and post-apocalyptic dystopias within modern dystopian short stories, novels, and films. Because dystopias also function as a venue for social criticism, we will explore current topics such as equality, individualism, government intrusion in private life, book banning, population control, and modern attempts at creating utopian societies. Readings and writing assignments will allow students to develop their analytical and argumentative skills as they evaluate information related to a variety of topics.

220.002: Expository Writing: Hollywood, Humor, and Argument: Rhetorical Comedy in Film

MWF 9:00-9:50
Joe Serio

Students will write about modern issues as they are presented in film comedies ranging from the 1930s to today, how arguments about these issues are presented, and how humor is used to further and empower these arguments. The issues will include but not be limited to war/politics, sexuality, masculinity/femininity, Hollywood culture, and technology. Film criticism techniques, rhetorical devices and argumentative styles will be studied and employed. Despite the focus on comedy, genre differences will also come into play; parodies of other genres, mockumentary, satire, and film versions of classic comedic literature are included.

220.003: Medievalism: Modern Interpretations of the Past

MWF 11:00-11:50
Emilee Howland-Davis

Can you quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Have you read Harry Potter? Do you love Star Wars? This class discussing medievalism is for you! Pop culture has made good use of medieval themes, concepts, and works, and we see representations of medieval ideas in our movies, television programs, books, video games, and graphic novels. Discussed largely as “medievalism” these representations can help us explore the continuity of certain ideas. This course will explore the rhetorical and literary concepts of medievalism by looking at how a variety of examples are framed. Students will explore how authors create ideas of the medieval world in the twenty-first century. Students will not need an understanding of medieval cultural or literary history, as all relevant information will be provided through lecture, readings, and videos.

220.004: Monster Theory and the Zombie in Popular Culture

MWF 1:00-1:50
Breanna S. Griego

The zombie has become an important figure in American popular culture. We are fascinated by the living dead, their hunger for human flesh, their mindless group mentality, and the fallout caused by their existence. Yet we should also be aware that the zombie offers more than just a gory depiction of the macabre. Monsters represent a broader commentary on the individual, race relations, survival instincts, natural disasters, scientific progress, capitalism, and the collective social consciousness, among other things. This class will explore monster theory, the historical foundations behind common fears, and the fascination with demons, witches, mutants, and vampires. We will begin the course by studying the biblical Revelations, move through medieval apocalypticism, early modern identification of demons and persecution of heretics, and evaluate contemporary theory about borderlands and the notion of “the other”. The second half of the course will focus on the zombie as a relatively new icon in American popular culture. We will explore a re-interpretation of a literary classic and also read a popular series of graphic novels. Film has played a large role in constructing the mythos surrounding monsters and zombies, and our class will spend time analyzing motion pictures including George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Zombieland, and The Walking Dead TV series. The assignments for this course will involve film analyses, a commentary, and rhetorical and literary analyses. The final paper will be an in-depth research paper on a pre-approved subject of your choice.

Required Reading:
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Austen, Jane, and Seth Grahaeme-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009.
Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History on the Zombie War. New York: Broadway Publishers, 2006.
Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. Illustrated by Tony Moore. Berkeley, California: Image Comics, Inc., 2006.

220.005 Making the Medieval Woman: Saints, Sinners, Loathly Ladies, and Lovers

MWF 12:00-12:50
Colleen Dunn

“Saint,” “Sinner,” “Loathly Lady,” and “Lover”—these are just a few of the labels ascribed to women in medieval literature. This course will explore the extreme categories created for the medieval woman, and how the idea of “Woman” is actually constructed in the literature. We will begin by examining how gender is treated in works authored by women in comparison to similar works by men. After establishing a framework for the different ideas and the language used to describe them, we will explore the various categories of the medieval woman, beginning with the saint (including the warrior saints found in Old English and transvestite saints, such as Joan of Arc), then moving on to loathly ladies and mischief makers, using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the main text. Finally, we will examine the Arthurian lover found in Yvain and in excerpts from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D'arthur. We will end the course by looking at modern interpretations of the medieval woman, and tracing these interpretations back to their earlier counterparts. The goal of this course is to examine how the idea of the “woman” is created in the literature, and how this process both reflects and creates a sense of social identity.

220.006: The Brontë Sisters: A Rhetoric of Their Own

MWF 4:00-4:50
Katherine Marie Alexander

Emily and Charlotte Brontë, known as Ellis and Currer Bell in mid-Victorian England, were instrumental in anticipating feminist theoretical systems not to be defined until years later. Similarly, they established a “rhetoric of their own.” In this course, students will read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette as they explore the major rhetorical moves in these iconic works. Supplementing the novels will be readings from Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Available Means is significant because it shows how women managed to break through masculinist systems by using “available means.” This concept certainly applies to the Brontë sisters. The rhetoric of women writers, of course, developed alongside that of their male counterparts. However, until recent times, we had little knowledge of these feminine systems. As students look at the work of women from Antiquity to the time of Virginia Woolf, they will formulate their own ideas about what two of the three Brontë sisters are presenting rhetorically in their novels. Assignments will include weekly discussion posts, biweekly short responses, and six low stake assignments. The semester’s work will culminate in one long (10 pages) research paper with a memorandum or letter of reflection. Film clips and class activities will bring the texts to life. Students should consider this class for an interesting and exciting journey into the world of the Brontë sisters.

220.007: Americans Abroad: Travelogues, Essays, and Travel Poems by Americans Away from Home

MWF 1:00-1:50
Ben Dolan

America (its values, its citizens, its idiosyncracies, its products, its trends) is “going abroad.” Actually, it went abroad a long time ago, and Americans continue to interact with other cultures, both on foreign streets and in international online forums (Youtube, Facebook). While unique cultural viewpoints, language differences, and religious tradition are nothing new, we have a new and rapidly-expanding ability to access, understand, and communicate with these distinct cultures and nationalities. By sampling a large body of American-written travelogues, essays, and poems, this class will explore the responsibility, difficulty, richness, and reward of “going abroad.” Students will: explore the depths of global culture; gain a new understanding of the power of travel+writing; and, ideally, cultivate a desire to use their unique positions as academics and writers to discover and engage other cultures.

220.008: The Rhetoric of Adaptation

TR 5:00-6:15
Jack Trujillo

This writing class will look at how meaning is created in two different kinds of narrative: the short story and film. We will read short stories later made into film and examine how rhetoric changes when it shifts from the medium of the printed word to the medium of visual imagery. In the process we will work at learning how to write about fiction and film from a craft and structural perspective. While we will watch a lot of film, it is important to note that this is primarily a writing class. Be prepared not just to watch movies, but also to read and great deal and write a great deal. There will be a number of short response pieces, two short papers and a longer paper or project at the end of the semester. Texts are Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screenby Stephanie Harrison, and A Short Guide to Writing About Film by Timothy Corrigan.

220.009: The Politics of Friendship and Desire

TR 8:00–9:15
Jaime Denison

How do the ways we socialize with one another become political? How does the law inscribe social divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality that predetermine potential associations? Are civility and kindness aesthetic qualities or moral demands? Why are private acts of intimacy being pulled into the public as political issues, and what exactly is at stake in these issues? Why are non-monogamous forms of relationships (such as polyamory, polygamy, and swinging) being openly discussed recently in the media, and how are their representations structured? Although as a culture we often try to depoliticize issues of friendship and intimacy, the fact is that they are crucial to the structure of any society and are often pulled into cultural discourses in distorted and irrational ways. In fact, Carl Schmitt defined the political specifically on the “friend/enemy distinction”, and avoiding such issues undermines the very foundation of the political community. Given that issues of racism, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, class and gender differences become taboo subjects that are to be avoided in “civil” discussion, they are in fact more effective in dividing society because they cannot be directly addressed. Thus we will look at how politics, friendship and love intersect and articulate one another, and specifically whose interests are being served when these issues are either kept silent or brought to light. The course will be divided into three sections: “Social Fragmentation and Violence”, “Aesthetics and Civility”, and “Desire, Love and Intimacy”. Readings will include disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literary theory, art history, philosophy, political theory, history, geography, urban theory, legal studies, critical race theory, archeology, sexology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, gender studies, and play theory.

220.011: War, Violence and Other Alternatives

TR 12:30-13:45
Kyle Fiore

For more than half our lives, the United States has been at war. This class will investigate war, violence and their day-to-day effects on us and our culture. We will also consider peace and other alternatives to war and violence, as these alternatives have happened both here at home and abroad. We will read, write about, look at, listen to and evaluate materials by writers, film makers, politicians and artists. We will investigate how authors of war and peace shape their documents for different audiences and analyze the strategies they employ, such as logos, ethos and pathos, to advance their points of view. Resources will include: Tim O'Brian's “The Things They Carried”, the United States Peace Index, documentaries, oral history, essays, film, photo essays, radio shows, digital presentations, and song lyrics, to mention a few. We will also consider letters, news articles, and political speeches.

220.012: War, Violence and Other Alternatives

TR 9:30-10:45
Kyle Fiore

For more than half our lives, the United States has been at war. This class will investigate war, violence and their day-to-day effects on us and our culture. We will also consider peace and other alternatives to war and violence, as these alternatives have happened both here at home and abroad. We will read, write about, look at, listen to and evaluate materials by writers, film makers, politicians and artists. We will investigate how authors of war and peace shape their documents for different audiences and analyze the strategies they employ, such as logos, ethos and pathos, to advance their points of view. Resources will include: Tim O'Brian's “The Things They Carried”, the United States Peace Index, documentaries, oral history, essays, film, photo essays, radio shows, digital presentations, and song lyrics, to mention a few. We will also consider letters, news articles, and political speeches.

220.021: Expository Writing: The Cultural Hero

Online
Mark Caughey

This course will explore not only how cultures construct their heroes but also how heroes construct a sense of cultural identity. We will consider both the hero’s ancient origins and its transformation over time and across cultures -- from the epic hero to its latter-day counterpart: the superhero. To that end, we will examine such texts as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Saga of the Volsungs and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Along the way, we will develop a framework that will help us understand how some characteristics of the hero remain constant while others arise from specific cultural beliefs and values. Students will hone their writing and research skills through assignments that include reviews, comparative analyses and annotated bibliographies.

220.022: The Politics of Landscape

Online
Julie Williams

In this course, we will examine the landscape of the American West from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, using literature, art, film, and history to raise and analyze a number of key questions. Through readings, class discussions, and written responses on a variety of styles and genres of texts, we will explore a range of cultural expressions that reveal the changes in how we think of the land around us from the 1800s to today. We will start by examining the variety of ways authors explore relationships between human and non-human nature. Then, in order to learn more about the places we live we’ll put the tools of nature writing—observation, memory, exploration, research, analysis, and expression—to work. We’ll ask questions like: How do relationships between humans and their environments reflect and shape literature? How do gender, race, ethnicity, and class shape an author’s standpoint toward the natural world? What is the relationship between nature and culture? What alternative views of nature (and culture) are possible? How does our attitude toward nature affect our reading of literature? What is the purpose and importance of writing about nature? Through examining these issues, the political consequences of how we view the land around us will start to emerge, and we will move on explore topics and themes such as cowboy mythologies, Native American and Chicano/a cultural identity, environmentalism, urbanism, and tourism. In looking at a wide selection of fiction, film, historical documents, and theory, we will investigate the ways in which writers deal with gender, sexuality, and a variety of political themes in representations of Western landscapes.

220.031: Asians in America: Secrets, Silences and Celebrations

TR 11:00-12:15
Nikki Nojima Louis

Paper sons, picture brides, war brides; exclusion, inclusion, internment; redress, refugees, model citizens, the “other”—behind these terms lie multiple versions of the Asian American Dream. The content of your research and the papers you write will be built around projects in Asian American Studies. The methods of engagement will be interdisciplinary and interactive, involving oral history taking, community outreach, Readers’ Theater and other collaborative practices. The goal of this course is to 1) acquaint you with writing skills that will serve you throughout your college career; 2) provide a classroom experience that stimulates critical thinking and knowledge acquisition in diverse and applicable ways.

220.032: Pop-Culture, Fandom, and Fan-fiction

TR 2:00-3:15
Megan Abrahamson

Do you like entertainment? Do you enjoy movies, music, books, or sports? If so, you are a “fan,” and therefore a member of a “fandom”: a social phenomenon where non-creators and non-originators (“fans”) of any form of entertainment become partial owners of a text, from Fantasy Football to downloaded music to vampires that sparkle in the sun. Fan-fiction is, by definition, a text dependent on a pre-existing canon of events and characters in an “original” source, but it is nevertheless highly debatable where “fanwork” ends and “original” material begins. In today’s popular culture, we are bombarded by the fact that very little is “original” anymore: one need look no further than the recent box office for a barrage of remakes such as Total Recall, re-characterizations like Snow White and the Huntsman, franchise series’ like Marvel’s line of comic book movies, and film adaptations of books such as The Hobbit. In this class we will explore the fluidity of “originality” in popular culture, including who owns a text in the face of copyright legislation, definitions of intellectual property, and freedom of information. Ultimately you will be encouraged to form your own conclusions and definitions of what it means to be a fan and a conscientious consumer in the information age, and also how to define the boundary between derivative and original material.

220.033: Collapse: Understanding Human Success, Failure, Past, and Present

TR 5:00-6:15
Lisa M. Fontes

“Collapse” will focus on exploring human behavior in the past and present, using Jared Diamond’s popular book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, as a springboard for discussion, debate, and research. Diamond focuses his argument on five factors that he believes prove significant in understanding how human societies fail or succeed: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and (most critically) human responses to environmental problems. This course will explore and critique each of these factors through a series of lectures, discussion-based seminars grounded in case studies, independent student research, and regular written assignments. Students can expect to: complete weekly reading assignments from Collapse and supplementary texts; compose occasional article summaries and syntheses; submit questions for class discussions; make a group presentation to the class about a seminar topic and lead discussion; and carry out independent research on a topic of their interest. Overall the course will focus on why and how humans made decisions in the past, what we can learn from these cases, and how we can apply that knowledge to present circumstances.

220.035: Mark Twain and the Construction of America(ns) through Travel Writing

MWF 1:00-1:50
Jill Walker Gonzalez

While Mark Twain is famous for his irreverent humor and his two most popular novels, Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is perhaps lesser known that he was also a travel writer, an essayist and the biographer of Joan of Arc. In this course, we will focus on Twain’s texts—namely Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad—about his travels in the United States and overseas. Through these texts, we will consider Twain’s construction and conception of the United States, the American dream and what it means to be an American, both at home and across the pond.

220.036:Expository Writing: Technology and Society in the 21st century

TR 2:00-3:15
Erika Jungwirth

From Google to Facebook, from smartphones to tablets, computer technology in the past decade has dramatically transformed the way we live our lives. The explosion of technological innovation through the last several decades has led many people to ask anxiously – what impact is this technology having on our lives? How is it changing our societies and our relationships to one another? Is this technology “good” or “bad”? What does it mean for our future? In this class, we will explore the answers proposed by leaders in the field – programmers, researchers, social critics and authors. By seeing the texts these people write as part of a largely ongoing conversation about the ramifications of technology, you will learn how to insert yourself into the discussion, to write nuanced responses to what’s been said and to offer your own perspective with the sophistication that will ensure that you are taken seriously.

224.003: Introduction to Creative Writing

TR 11:00-12:15
Mark Caughey

This course will introduce students to the craft of writing in the genres of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. In the first half of the course, assignments will stress generative strategies; in the latter half, we will focus on structuring, revising and refining our work. Likewise, while the first few weeks will address issues of craft common to all genres, we will ultimately be focusing on those concerns and conventions that define and distinguish each genre. Although each student will be writing in all three genres, no one will be expected to master any of them. After all, the goal is exploration, not conquest. Because one cannot be a thoughtful writer without first being a thoughtful reader, we will be engaged in quite a bit of reading -- using stories, poems and essays by established authors as models for our own work. Moreover, students will be expected to give considerable and considerate feedback on their classmates’ writing.

224.009: Intro. to Creative Writing

Online
Lisa Chavez

This online introductory course will introduce students to the craft of writing literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We will begin with issues that all genres share, and then go on to look at some of the conventions of the individual genres. Students should be prepared to learn to read like a writer, to try out a lot of different exercises, to learn the art of revision, and to write in all three genres. Lively online discussion of the assigned readings are expected, and there will also be an introduction to peer review in small groups. A final portfolio will include work in all three genres that has been revised during the course.

240.001: Traditional Grammar

TR 5:00-6:15
James Burbank

This course gives students a thorough understanding of sentence grammar. The class develops a descriptive linguistic mode of analysis to develop a systematic approach to grammar, so that students can build on a cumulative understanding of sentence structure. The course also allows students to understand some of the social and scholastic contexts of grammar study. Students who take this course come away thoroughly versed in grammatical principles and applications.

240.002: Traditional Grammar

MWF 11:00-11:50
James Burbank

This course gives students a thorough understanding of sentence grammar. The class develops a descriptive linguistic mode of analysis to develop a systematic approach to grammar, so that students can build on a cumulative understanding of sentence structure. The course also allows students to understand some of the social and scholastic contexts of grammar study. Students who take this course come away thoroughly versed in grammatical principles and applications.

248.001: Gods and Heroes: From Saga to the Screen

MWF 2:00-2:50
Colleen Dunn

Norse mythology has recently made a comeback in popular culture, thanks in large part to the popularity of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Marvel’s Thor. But how did the images of gods and heroes reach the form we see on the big screen? This class will explore the dissemination of the legends and myths about these figures across time and space, as well as the cultural significance of the adaptations, with particular interest in how modern notions of heroism (both individual and communal), intelligence, and humor can be traced back to their medieval sources. Students will first read excerpts from theVolsunga Saga, the Poetic Edda, and the Prose Edda in order to have a contextual framework in which they can read the main text for the course—Neil Gaiman’s American Gods—as well as selections from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Interspersed with these readings will be film showings, such as The Lord of the Rings and Thor, so that we can discuss the adaptation of Norse mythology in the larger context of popular cultural.

250.001: Analysis of Literature

MW 5:00-6:15
Morgan Sims

This class concentrates on methods of literary analysis and critical writing. The study of literature is a formal, academic field with rules and conventions of its own that require skills in close analysis, critical thinking, and writing. There are theoretical approaches to literature that are currently being practiced in the field of English. In this class, we will focus on some of those forms of criticism including: Gender, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminist, and Post-colonial theories, and you will use them to analyze works of literature from three major genres: fiction, drama, and poetry.

250.002, .003, .004: Analysis of Literature

TR 11:00-12:15
Daniel Worden

This course introduces students to the major genres of Anglophone literature—poetry, drama, and fiction—and ways to write thoughtfully, interestingly, and analytically about them. We will read works by authors ranging from Emily Dickinson to Sherman Alexie and develop an understanding of literary history. We will also think about how the category of “literature” has been shaped by historical, social, and political forces and how different theories of reading produce meaning. Writing assignments will demand close readings of particular texts as well as comparative and research-based analysis. During this course, we will discuss and practice how to make compelling close readings, formulate arguments about literary texts, use sophisticated critical terminology, and synthesize close reading with theoretical analysis. The goal of this course is to develop your ability to make coherent, lucid, and informed arguments about literary texts.

265.001: Intro to Chicano/a Literature

MWF 10:00-10:50
Erin Murrah-Mandril

This introductory course to Chicano/a literature will examine a variety of literary genres - poetry, short fiction, and novels - to explore the historical development of Chicano/a social and literary identity. We’ll cover several time periods, beginning with the nineteenth century and concluding with contemporary works, and we’ll focus on important issues such as race, class, gender, religion, family, education, language, and the act of writing itself. We’ll examine the way writers represent the complexities of being caught between Mexican and American cultures, and we’ll also consider key literary concepts that shape and define Chicana/o literary production. By the end of the class, we’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the literary and historical formation of Chicana/o identity and the complex, even contradictory, experiences that characterize Chicana/o culture.

290.002: Introduction to Professional Writing

MW 5:00-6:15
James Burbank

This class provides students with a foundation to understand the many directions and opportunities in professional and technical writing. While the course involves writing in several technical and professional genres, or types, the class is not specifically about writing. The class focuses on professional development, effective use of the professional writing internship program and professional ethics. Students who take this class come away with practical professional writing skills, the ability to analyze a number of professional writing situations and their different audiences.

290.010: Introduction to Professional Writing

Online
Valerie Thomas

English 290 introduces you to the field of professional writing. To help you learn about job opportunities within this field, you will explore the different types of careers available as a professional writer. You will also study a variety of professional writing genres so you understand their major traits and when it is appropriate to use each of them. Focusing on the need to create documents that convey professionalism, you will study the use of writing style and document design and learn how to manage the production of documents and deal with ethical situations that often arise in corporate, professional, private, and public workplaces.

Projects in this course will allow you to do research, manage projects, work with others, and make presentations. This is not a course in a specific type of professional writing/freelance writing, public relations writing, public information writing, business writing, or technical writing; rather it will allow you to understand the fundamentals of these genres of professional writing and give you the chance to practice writing some of them.

293.001: World Literature 17th Century - Present

MWF 9:00-9:50
Jennifer M Nader

This course seeks to explore the balance between identity and difference across and within cultures, and will introduce you to some of the most important literary works from a variety of the world’s cultural traditions, from about 1700 to the present. Our readings will be organized by historical period, with a general theme of crossing cultural boundaries, especially through travel. We will read major works by authors from Africa, India, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Europe, America, and Russia, and will work to interrogate the complex negotiations of identity in cultural contact zones by placing texts in continual conversation with each other. Initially we will look at both fictional and non-fictional narratives of travel in the eighteenth century, and will then shift to looking at radical Otherness of the supernatural and fantastic briefly. We will then shift our focus to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will consider the effects of identity, colonization, and globalization, as well as race, class, and gender while acknowledging multiple points of view. Throughout the course, we will consider the impact of the past on our own present global culture, and how things are intricately woven together.

293.002: World Literature 17th Century - Present

TR 11:00-12:15
Calinda Shely

This course will explore the different representations of gender roles in world literature. We will examine the ways in which representations of men and women complement/contradict/subvert traditional depictions of what is “masculine” and “feminine” in different cultures throughout the world by reading a variety of poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and drama. Students will be asked to write several short response papers and take a mid-term and a final exam.

295.001: Survey of Later English Literature

TR 5:00-6:15
Annarose Fitzgerald

From Mr. Darcy’s party manners to Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory experiments, British literature continues to leaves its mark on our imaginations today. English 295 will introduce you to some of the major novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists of British literature from the end of the 18th century to the start of the 21st. We’ll begin with William Wordsworth’s call for poetry to be written as “a man speaking to men,” delve into novelist Emily Brontë and others who spoke to the concerns of 19th century British women, consider how the late 19th and early 20th century British writers pushed the boundaries of what literature could speak about and how, and end with Caryl Phillips’s In the Fallen Snow, a 2009 novel featuring a protagonist who speaks as a British and a West Indian man while not being fully accepted by either culture. Throughout class discussions, historical research projects, and literary analysis papers, we will consider these works as responding and reacting to the cultural, political, religious, and social concerns that Great Britain faced in particular eras.

297.001: Later American Literature

TR 12:30-1:45
Kadeshia Matthews

This later American literature course will survey the development of American literature as the United States moved from the bitter sectionalism of the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century to world superpower in the late twentieth. We will study the major movements and authors of later American literary history, paying attention to literary/aesthetic issues and questions as well as the political, social and economic issues that shaped the times. Grades will likely be based on a short essay, a research project and presentation and midterm and final exams.

297.002: Later American Literature

MWF 1:00-1:50
Daoine S. Bachran

This later American literature course will cover the development of American literature form the end of the civil war to the present. We’ll study a variety of writers, genres, and movements representative of the variety of people, histories, and themes that make up the nation. We’ll appreciate literature as art, analyzing its form, style, and use of language, and we’ll also consider literary texts within their cultural contexts, exploring issues of gender, race, class, colonialism, and nationalism. Along the way, we’ll learn the vocabulary and techniques of literary studies, acquire a sound, broad base of American literary history, and most importantly, we’ll hone our critical reading and thinking skills through written analysis.

297.003: Later American Literature

MW 5:00-6:15
Karen Roybal

This course covers the development of American literature from the end of the Civil War to the present. We’ll study a variety of writers, genres, and movements representative of the people, histories, and themes that make up the nation. We’ll also study literature as art, analyzing its forms, use of language, and overall aesthetics; and we’ll put literary texts within their historical contexts. Using an interdisciplinary approach to literature, the class incorporates other narrative forms (film, art, and other forms of cultural production) to analyze the literary texts we read. The course will help you become familiar with the writers of this era, help you to achieve a broad understanding of American literary history, and learn how to discuss the materials you read/view using literary and interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Through the course, you will develop your reading and critical thinking skills and learn how to apply those skills through written analysis.

304.001 Bible as Literature

TR 12:30-1:45
Janet Gaines

The Bible contains some of the most powerful stories of all time. This course will explore the literary/critical possibilities for reading biblical sagas of love and war, faith and doubt, salvation and degradation. We will examine literary elements of biblical tales, determine how these narratives have shaped our culture, and study what they reveal about our world. Units of study include heroic narratives (including non-traditional heroes such as Jezebel and Lilith), history of the Davidic monarchy (from Saul through Jesus), wisdom literature and poetry (such as Job and Psalms), prophetic literature (several Minor Prophets), the letter as literature (the writings of Paul and his contemporaries), and apocalyptic literature (strains of Joel, Ezekiel, and Daniel that reappear in Revelations).

Midterm, final, and one analytical or creative ten-page paper.

305.002: Mythology

MWF 10:00-10:50
Renée Faubion

This class will provide students with a survey of archetypes and theories of myth, including creation stories, marriage, the scapegoat, and a variety of interpretations of the hero pattern. Those patterns and theories will be considered by reading and analysis of a cross-section of myths from a variety of cultures. Featured texts will include The Odyssey, Ovid’sMetamorphoses, and selections from The Prose Edda, Le Morte Darthur, the Bible, and the Popol Vuh. Course requirements will include three exams, three essays, and a variety of short assignments.

308.001: Jewish American Literature

TR 2:00-3:15
Dr. Janet Gaines

This course will examine works by the most thought-provoking American Jewish writers. Units of study include American Views of European Roots, The Immigrant Experience, The War Years, and Post-War America. Required reading includes short stories, novels, and a graphic novel by Nobel Prize authors Isaac Singer, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Art Spiegelman, and others. Class discussion will focus on the varying worldviews of this diverse group of Jewish authors who are vastly different yet whose common heritage is undeniable. As we explore their individuality and struggles with their culture and religion, we will also determine the universality of their sentiments. Mid-term, final, one five-page paper.

315.004: (Re)Writes of Children’s Literature

TR 2:00- 3:15
Feroza Jussawalla

This course will focus on how Classics of Children’s Literature have been (re)written and (re) produced in our contemporary times. We will start with the actual Classics of Children’s Literature and examine through contemporary media and film Disney versions new productions of Alice in Wonderland and even such productions as the contemporary ABC series Once Upon a Time. Each student will be required to find new rewritten /reproduced version and try to analyze WHY that production re-examined the classic and what the message is behind that rewrite. That will constitute the research paper. This course is cross-listed with education majors and hopefully will help education majors teach the classics in new contexts.

315.009: The Postcolonial Short Story

TR 9:30–10:45
Belinda D. Wallace

Post-colonial literature consists of writings by people of/in previously or currently colonized countries, and often addresses issues of race, identity, nation, language and “othering.” Under the umbrella of reclamation, this class will explore postcolonial short stories that examine these issues from the perspective(s) of the “colonized.” In our quest to understand these complex and contested issues, we will use an interdisciplinary approach to literary analysis as we unpack meaning(s) from the short stories.

315.010: Myth & the Modern Mind

R 4:00-6:30
M. R. Hofer

Travel fascinates people. So does change. In this upper-division literature course we will investigate the desire to travel and the travail of exile as well as desired and forced metamorphoses. Our discussions of heroes and antiheroes, creation and destruction, and the mythic quest will foreground contemporary practices of literary, visual, and cultural analysis. We will analyze influential poems, fiction, and film in an attempt to assess the tense yet productive relationship of myth to reason, in both the ancient world and our own. We will consider of the transmission and renovation of enduring mythic narratives from antiquity into modernity and even post-modernity. This consideration will underwrite our effort to comprehend not only how but also why “myth” continues to inform the cultures of the future. Our examination of mythic figures, structures, and thought thus aims to clarify the extent to which individual subjects may be determined by the narratives they tell as well as those told about them. At the same time, we will examine metacritically the function of the critic, asking whether, if myth is “ideology in narrative form,” the mind of the critic is really a mind of myth. Is criticism itself ultimately a form of myth rather than, say, reason or truth? What does it mean if it is?

320.001: Writing Across Academic and Public Cultures

TR 12:30-1:45
Michelle Hall Kells

English 320 is an advanced introduction to composition from a rhetorical perspective. (*English 102, 219, 220, or 290 isprerequisite to English 320). The course will focus on the writing process, organization, style, revision, editing, communication strategies, and the use of ethnographic, library, and electronic sources of information.

The aim of ENG 320 is to actively engage you in writing and publishing for diverse audiences by helping you analyze rhetorical situations, construct interpretations of texts, and generate writing samples in a variety of genres. This course will explore the distinguishing features of genre as well as examine how the boundaries of genre become blurred in academic and public culture. During the semester, you will have extensive practice in writing, editing, and presenting your work. To support the emphasis on the writing process, multiple drafts of major projects are required as well as pre-writing and in-class assignments designed to develop critical thinking skills.

Group work, peer review, reader response journal writing, film viewing, and field exercises, and oral presentations are integral features of the course. Production of writing samples suitable for submission for publication and/or presentation in academic, popular, or public on-line venues will represent the capstone project of this course.

The first half of the course will concentrate on the formation of the writer by exploring multiple voices and genres of writing. You will produce:

• Reader Response Journal;
• Literacy Narrative.

The second half of the course will focus on generating texts for different readers by:

• Writing and Publishing for Academic Culture;
• Writing and Publishing for Public Culture.

Required Texts
The Norton Field Guide to Writing, Richard Bullock.
Field Working: Reading and Writing Research. Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater.
Films:
The Way
Off the Map
The Milagro Bean Field Wars
How Smart Can We Get?

321.010: Intermediate Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

Online
Diane Thiel

This online course in writing fiction will build on the foundations established in 224. Exercises and assignments will focus on various concerns involved in the writing of fiction, such as developing scenes and plot, creating tension, setting, dialogue, characterization, theme, style and tone. Students will read fiction by a range of writers, including Tim O’Brien, Alice Munro, and Jamaica Kincaid, among numerous others. This course will also involve some emphasis on the way working in other genres (nonfiction, poetry, drama) can inform the writing of fiction. Peer workshop will be a significant part of the course, in response to class exercises, as well as in response to students’ longer, more developed pieces in the course. Portfolios of about 30 pages will contain responses to exercises, two longer pieces, short prose responses, and revisions.

321.002: Intermediate Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

TR 11:00 – 12:15
Jack Trujillo

This is a craft-based class in short literary fiction. The focus of our work is one the specific elements of craft that writers (that’s you) use to construct stories and an examination, using your own writing and the writing of others, of how those craft elements can be manipulated to achieve different narrative ends. The first half of the semester is spent attacking in multiple ways the first short story you write: changing point of view, starting the story at an entirely new place, or removing back story, for example. The second half of the semester is spent workshopping a second story written for the class. Both stories have specific limitations and rules (known lovingly around UNM as “Jack’s Creativity-Destroying Rules”). Class requires much writing, much reading, two complete stories, a live reading review, a craft review of a collection of short fiction and written critiques of each of your fellow student’s stories. Texts are Deepening Fiction by Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren and Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson.

323.001: Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Writing

MWF 11:00 – 11:50
Marisa P. Clark

English 323 is an intermediate creative writing class that will introduce you to the many possibilities of literary nonfiction, including memoir and the personal essay, literary journalism, travel and nature writing, humorous writing and graphic nonfiction (yes, comics!). The writing you do for the class will ask you to draw from your past experiences and passions, your interests and observations. A variety of short exercises will target various craft elements of literary nonfiction and will guide you in generating material for full-length works. You will draft two essays in our class, at least one of which will be read and evaluated in workshop by the entire class and significantly revised at the end of the semester. In addition, you can expect to read numerous published nonfiction pieces and essays on craft. Class discussions will cover elements of literary craft, naturally, but also the special kinds of responsibility that fall on writers of nonfiction.

323.002: Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Writing

MWF 3:00-3:50
Marisa P. Clark

English 323 is an intermediate creative writing class that will introduce you to the many possibilities of literary nonfiction, including memoir and the personal essay, literary journalism, travel and nature writing, humorous writing and graphic nonfiction (yes, comics!). The writing you do for the class will ask you to draw from your past experiences and passions, your interests and observations. A variety of short exercises will target various craft elements of literary nonfiction and will guide you in generating material for full-length works. You will draft two essays in our class, at least one of which will be read and evaluated in workshop by the entire class and significantly revised at the end of the semester. In addition, you can expect to read numerous published nonfiction pieces and essays on craft. Class discussions will cover elements of literary craft, naturally, but also the special kinds of responsibility that fall on writers of nonfiction.

347.001: Viking Mythology

TR 9:30-10:45
Craig Davis

"Damaged Gods: Myths and Legends of the Vikings"

A reading of eddic poems and prose sagas reflecting traditions of the early Norse divinities and their cults during the Viking Age (ca. 800-1100 AD). These are preserved mainly in Icelandic, but also in Latin, Arabic, Old High German, Old Swedish and Old English manuscripts and runic inscriptions. We will explore the world-view and value system of this unique religion, from the creation of the world by damaged gods of dubious ancestry to their defeat at the end of time. We will examine relations, often violent, but sometimes comic, between groups of highly intelligent, vulnerable beings, both living and dead, animal and human, male and female, god and giant, Æsir and Vanir, plus trolls, elves, witches, dwarfs, valkyries, berserks, shapeshifters and various social classes of human being. Readings will include the Germania of Tacitus, ibn Fadlan’sRûsiyyah, Beowulf, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, selections from the Poetic Edda, Völsunga Saga, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, The Saga of Gisli, and Eirik the Red’s Saga.
Written work: a midterm, final examination and final critical essay or term paper.

350.001: Medieval Tales of Wonder

MWF 9:00-9:50
Marisa Sikes

The medieval period is rife with literature of wonder, a word that has a number of meanings in Middle English, one of which is “a strange thing, an unusual phenomenon or event,” and another that is “a manifestation of divine greatness or benevolence.” This course will immerse students in the reading of a variety of texts from the Middle Ages that will range in genre from saga, to chivalric romance, to Breton lay, to saints’ lives. We will find heroic knights, explore the worlds of visionaries and their miracles, plunge into the underworld and go on pilgrimages—Christian and otherwise, watch as virginal martyrs humiliate their pagan tormentors, and uncover the monstrous races of the medieval world.

This class will include readings in Modern English translations as well as some Middle English reading, but no previous experience with Middle English is necessary. We will go beyond a simple reading of the texts to an analytical study of the wonder produced in and by these texts and progress towards an exploration of how these stories resonate today and allow us to consider contemporary social issues despite our pragmatic world of science and rationalism. This will be achieved through an immersion in the texts and their manuscript history, writing, some individual research, a creative project, and lively and informed class and small-group discussions.

Texts will include excerpts from the Poetic Edda, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Medieval Bestiaries. Other works will include Dante’s Inferno, the Old English Wonders of the East (in a Modern English translation), the Saga of the Volsungs, the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, several plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the Middle English Havelok the Dane, as well as various texts dealing with saints, some in Middle English and some in Modern English.

351.001: Chaucer’s Love Visions

MWF 10:00-10:50
Marisa Sikes

Students will read Chaucer’s first major poem, along with everything else he wrote aside from the Canterbury Tales. Students often think of Chaucer as the poet who brought us the Miller’s Tale and the Wife of Bath in the colorful and earthy idiom of our ancestor language of Middle English. But Chaucer is more than the author of the Canterbury Tales —for his medieval audience, he was the “neo-pagan singer of love,” the poet who extensively reworked classical love stories in a medieval mold. This course is designed to offer interested students an opportunity to study critically Chaucer’s best poem, Troilus and Criseyde, his most intriguing female figure, Criseyde, and all his other love visions. Delve into the medieval anatomy of love and find out where many of our modern romantic notions come from!

352:001: Early Shakespeare

> MW 2:00-3:15
David Richard Jones

An introduction to Shakespeare’s first decade of creation, beginning with a fairly simple comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, and ending with his first great tragedy, Hamlet. Other plays include the history Richard III, the comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and As You Like It, and the tragedies of Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar.

My approach is a blend of literary criticism, intellectual context, and theatre history with particular stress on the performance qualities of the plays. I make extensive use of short clips from videos of the plays as an aid to understanding.

Class format is lecture and discussion. Requirements include midterm and final exams, one paper, and six quizzes.

352.010: Early Shakespeare

Online
Renée Faubion

Come meet one of the greatest writers in all of literature! In addition to close study of the texts themselves, students will receive instruction in cultural trends influential to Shakespeare’s work (regarding developments in economic classes and Renaissance notions of race, for example); in Elizabethan history and theatrical conventions; and in some of the most important sources for the plays and poetry. Students will also perform assignments requiring them to review and respond to scholarship on Shakespeare's work. Readings will include Titus Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet; The Merchant of Venice;Much Ado about Nothing; Henry IV [parts I and II]; and Hamlet). Course requirements will include three papers, a variety of short assignments, and a research project.

353:001: Later Shakespeare

MW 4-5:15
David Richard Jones

An introduction to the last decade of Shakespeare’s work, the period in which he finished a line of great comedies with Twelfth Night and morphed the form into the problematic Measure for Measure; when his tragedies climaxed with Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear; and he began an entire new form of writing with the romances The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

353.002: Later Shakespeare

TR 2:00-3:15
Marissa Greenberg

Shakespeare wrote some of his most powerful and enduring works in the latter part of his career: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. These plays continue to fascinate because of their haunting representations of racial hatred, family conflict, ambition, violence, and redemption. In this course, we will read these and other plays as dramatic poems and theatrical scripts that engage the cultures in which they are read and performed. Through discussion of the political, social, and religious world in which Shakespeare lived, we will explore what these plays meant for their original audiences; and through recent stage productions and films, we will examine how their meanings have changed for modern-day audiences. Students will be expected to write two formal essays, complete a group presentation, and engage actively in class discussion.

360.003: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Byron: The Radical Imagination

MWF 11:00-11:50
Gary Harrison

In the summer of 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, and Mary’s half sister Claire Clairmont visited Lord Byron who was leasing the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva. It was at there in June 1816 that Mary Shelley penned her myth-making novel about the “pale student of unhallowed arts” Victor Frankenstein and his creature. Sensationalized in films such as Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer (1988) and Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), this notorious coterie of literary rebels inspired each other with late night readings of German ghost stories, heady conversations about the Prometheus myth and classic Greek tragedy, and speculative reflections upon revolutionary politics and the new electro-chemistry of Humphrey Davy and Luigi Galvani. As Mary Shelley began Frankenstein, Byron was finishing Canto 3 of Childe Harold, and Percy was working on his brilliant “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” an encomium to an unseen force he calls the Spirit of Beauty. In this course we’ll weave together the biographical, intellectual, and poetic filaments that spurred the “radical imagination” of these writers ensconced near Lake Geneva in what became known as the “year without a summer” caused by a number of volcanic eruptions around the world. In addition to the works named above, readings will include key works by the Shelleys and Byron, including Prometheus Unbound, The Last Man, and Manfred.

360.050 (AFST 397.050; WMST 379.008): Black Women Writers

TR 2:00-3:15
Kadeshia Matthews

Scholars have identified the decades since the 1970s as a renaissance for black women writers, as their works have achieved previously unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success. In Black Women Writers, we will examine this contemporary moment, but also its prehistory. Black women have been writing and getting published in the United States since before the nation existed, but is there a distinct tradition that connects Phillis Wheatley to Nikki Finney, Frances E.W. Harper to Alice Walker and/or Toni Morrison, Pauline Hopkins to Suzan-Lori Parks? What concerns (personal, political, aesthetic, etc.) have motivated African American women’s literary production, and how has their writing addressed these concerns? How have these concerns, and the ways in which African American women writers address them, changed over more than two centuries? Assignments will likely include short response papers, a longer formal essay and a research project. I also expect students to be active participants in class discussions. Previous knowledge of African American literature is not required.

397.001: Regional American Literature

MWF 9:00-9:50
Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

Regional literature has shaped and responded to American history and culture from the very beginning, and we will explore the topic byway of three major themes: the newcomer, modern change and the folk. These three themes structure the class and its exploration of regional literature, from New England, New Orleans, the South, the Midwest, Far West, Plains West and Southwest. We’ll come to understand the aesthetic diversity of regional writing as it encounters romanticism, realism, naturalism, local color writing and modernism, and we’ll also examine how the emergence of regionalism occurs as a response to national and global pressures bearing down on a specific geographical locale. We’ll enjoy regional writing in its most comfortable genre—short fiction—and in the end come away with a critical definition of regionalism that encompasses writings from the diverse places that characterize the US.

410.001: Literary Criticism and Theory

M 4:00-6:30
Jesse Alemán

This course charts the rise of major schools and movements in literary theory and criticism from Marxism to post-colonial studies. We’ll study psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism; feminism, gender studies, and queer theory; new historicism, cultural studies, and post-colonial theory. The class will consider the intellectual foundation of each theoretical paradigm and explore what’s at stake with the questions specific theories pose, but our overall goal will be to work toward understanding how ideas, terms, and concepts overlap, undermine, or repeat with a difference theories of meaning, being, identity, and representation. By the end of the course, we’ll have a broad repertoire of critical tools at our analytical disposal. Most of the reading will comprise of the primary theoretical texts—dense work that requires the time to read more than once, with dictionary in hand. We’ll also use several short-story case studies, which will be available on e-reserve.

Required Text:
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology (2nd edition)

417.002: Editing

Online
Stephen Benz

This course focuses on editing as a professional skill. Along with practicing advanced copyediting skills, you will learn about "information design": the creation of documents that are complete, accurate, correct, comprehensible, usable, and appropriate for readers. Because editors must often be responsible for a document from its inception to its presentation as a finished product, you will also learn about layout and document design, as well as contemporary production processes. Successful completion of this course will provide you with the foundation necessary for a future career in the field.

418.001: Proposal and Grant Writing

MWF 1:00 - 1:50
Natasha Jones

This course will introduce students to grant and proposal writing in the business, scientific, technical, and activist domains. Students will examine the rhetorical and practical implications of grant and proposal writing. Students will be required to identify an organization that would benefit from the expertise of a grant and proposal writer and assist the organization by developing, creating, and presenting a completed grant or proposal by the end of the semester.

418.010: Proposal and Grant Writing

Online
Valerie Thomas

In English 418, you will learn how to write persuasive proposals. Drawing off the principles of rhetorical analysis, you will learn how to develop a clear statement of need, offer achievable objectives, design logical step-by-step plans, create specific and accurate budgets, and present your organization powerfully. We will explore how to locate appropriate funding opportunities and how to evaluate requests for proposals. We will also discuss methods of writing persuasively that are both ethical and effective, and study how to use document design to create a professional proposal package.

Because proposal writing is not a solitary task, but rather a process of working with others to identify needs, locate opportunities, and develop a persuasive solution, it is helpful to understand how the process works in the real world. To accomplish this need for real world experience, the major project for the course is to write a real proposal by working with a local organization or business in a service learning experience or to write a research proposal on a topic for which you are currently doing research.

419.001: Visual Rhetoric

TR 5:00–6:15
Stephen Benz

This course covers the basic principles of graphic design that writers should understand when creating documents for professional contexts. Our goal is to be able to do quality, basic layout and design work and to be able to talk sensibly to professional designers. Visual Rhetoric is defined as the art of using images to inform or persuade. A course in visual rhetoric, therefore, purposes to introduce students to the working vocabulary of this rhetoric, as well as the fundamentals of theory and practice associated with document design. In ENGL 419, we learn how to employ principles of effective document design and visual argumentation. We learn how visual elements contribute to and affect the meaning of documents. We study various aspects of document design, including layout, use of headings, typography, photos, illustrations, charts, tables, and graphs. The assignments in the course involve a series of projects that can ultimately become part of a professional portfolio.

420.001: Blue Mesa Review

W 2:00-3:00, F 3:00-4:00
Justin St. Germain

This class introduces you to the production of UNM’s national literary magazine, Blue Mesa Review. We receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of submissions each year from authors hoping to see their stories, essays, or poems published in our journal. Your primary responsibility in this course is to assess these submissions—collectively called “slush”—for possible publication in BMR. In addition, you will keep an informal journal about your participation in slush, attend two discussion meetings, and write a few short papers. This class requires you to be self-motivating; in some respects, it is very much like an independent study. You must be able to keep up with the workload on your own—and often on your own time.
NOTE: The meeting times listed are open computer lab hours, NOT class meetings. Please contact instructor for more information on requirements and meeting times.

420.002: Prose Stylistics

TR 9:30-10:45
Jerome Shea

Prose Stylistics is a wide ranging course that tries to find out what makes for good prose (and what makes for wretched prose). We will study periodic sentences and running sentences, noun style and verb style, parataxis and hypotaxis. We will study such questions as “What do we mean by voice?”; “What assumptions do we bring to prose that we don’t bring to poetry?”; and “What do we mean by ‘high style’ and ‘low style’?” And we will question whether prose is transparent or opaque, and what the ramifications of that are. Five or six short papers, no midterm or final.

420.004: Professional Writing in a Globalized World

TR 2:00–3:15
Todd Ruecker

This course arises out of the recognition that there are more nonnative than native speakers of English and that we can increasingly expect to communicate with people from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds in our professional lives. The class will begin by giving students a theoretical grounding in cross-cultural communication with readings primarily from scholars in applied linguistics and rhetoric that focus on issues such as native/nonnative speaker power hierarchies, communication styles, and cultural situatedness. As the semester progresses, the readings will focus on cross-cultural communication considerations when communicating in different professional settings: journalism, advertising, technical communication, and internal corporate communication. Anticipated projects include a facilitated cross-national email exchange with an accompanying reflection essay, a cross-national media analysis, a research paper focused on comparing/contrasting communication styles in two cultures, and various applied projects such as product instructions and press releases.

442.001: Major Texts in Rhetoric

MWF 2:00-2:50
Cristyn Elder

If we want to understand rhetoric in theory and practice, we need to go back to its historical sources, to the Greeks and to the Romans. This course will focus primarily on the works of the ancients, though we’ll continually cycle back to contemporary practice and theory. We’ll begin with selections from Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History, and a contemporary speech or two, which will raise some fundamental questions about the nature of rhetoric. Then we’ll start exploring the Sophists, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, Lysias, and others. From here we study Plato’s attack on rhetoric and on the Sophists, and we’ll spend a great deal of time with Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric as a true technē (or “art”). We’ll finish the semester examining the Romans Cicero and Quintilian and finish with Burke. Throughout this odyssey, we’ll examine these ideas not merely as historical curiosities but as ideas that help us think about our own arts of discourse, how they work, and how we (ought to) teach and study them. Throughout the course, we’ll discover and forge connections between the rhetorical tradition and contemporary writing and speaking. We’ll often explore contemporary and ancient speeches as a way to ground our theory and do some rhetorical inquiry.

445.001 (LING 490): History of the English Language

TR 2:00-3:15
Jonathan Davis-Secord

The English language can be traced back many centuries to a form nearly unrecognizable to most modern speakers. Nonetheless, present day English still contains many significant features of its previous incarnations. This course will examine the history of English from its Indo-European roots through its medieval developments to its modern, international forms. In the process, students will learn methods of linguistic analysis and description along with the historical contexts of the developments. No previous knowledge of Old or Middle English is necessary.

456.001: Romantic Poetry and Poetics

MWF 2:00-2:50
Gary Harrison

In this course we’ll study the historical transformations of Romantic poetry and poetics in the work of William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Thomas Moore, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. While the focus will be upon English Romantic poetry and poetics, our reading will also include some of the key theoretical and philosophical works that contributed to the formation of Romanticism as a self-conscious literary movement, as well some European and possibly American “romantics” in order to establish a broader sense of early and mid nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. We will also read some selected critical and aesthetic works from Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as well as recent critical and theoretical writings on Romantic poetics. While time and academic criticism has done much to temper the radical, exploratory character of Romantic poets and poetry, our aim in this course is to reconsider all that was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron.

457.001: Victorian Studies

MWF 10:00-10:50
Aeron Hunt

This course is an undergraduate senior level survey of British literature and culture of the Victorian period (1832-1901). We will read poetry, fiction, and drama, analyzing especially how writers responded to the dramatic social changes of their time. Guided by the preoccupations of Victorian writers, the course will focus on these themes: the Condition of England question, and issues of industrialization, capitalism, and class society more generally; the Woman Question, gender, and sexuality; faith and science; empire; and the role of art and “Culture” in society.

Course objectives include:

• developing an understanding of and appreciation for the literature of the period: the way authors responded to the social and philosophical questions of their time through particular genres and styles
• developing skills in written and oral literary analysis through the production of rich discussion questions and responses and research essays
• practicing approaching texts through a cultural studies perspective that connects literary texts to nonliterary writing; researching analyzing how literary texts were influenced by and helped to shape the culture and history of which they are part

Course requirements will include two research essays (8-10 pages each); in-class midterm and final exams; several discussion questions and short response papers; and class participation. Authors we read may include: Charles Dickens; Charlotte Brontë; George Eliot; Thomas Hardy; Thomas Carlyle; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Browning; Matthew Arnold; Algernon Charles Swinburne; Christina Rossetti; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Michael Field; Oscar Wilde

458.001: Modern British Literature

TR 5:00- 6:15
Feroza Jussawalla

This course will showcase how the “face” of British Literature has changed with new immigration into Britain. It questions what constitutes “British.” Are the Caribbean writers Naipaul, and Zadie Smith British? Is Salman Rushdie British? The class will open with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and we will take a trip up to Santa Fe to hear her speak at the Lannan Foundation at the end of January. We will read V.S. Naipaul’s An Enigma of Arrival, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia and other such fun and contemporary novels, watch the movies of these, and talk about how our notions of British have changed along with such theories as Paul Gilroy’s “There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack.” There will be reaction response papers together with a research paper on “What constitutes being British.”

462.001 American Realism & Naturalism

TR 3:30-4:45
Kathleen Washburn

In the 1890 study How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis combines photography and “plain public records” as the means to document life in the New York tenements and call for social change. From immigrants as new urban subjects to literary tourists and colorful locals, this course investigates the complex strategies that various writers employ in order to represent “the real” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will address the literary and critical histories of American realism and naturalism, tracing how various texts negotiate categories such as the aesthetic, the ordinary, and the extraordinary.

The course will focus primarily on short fiction, novels, and nonfiction prose by writers such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Zitkala-Sa, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, and Sui Sin Far. Additional materials may include photography, film, and texts from the emergent discourses of psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology. Course requirements include a short essay, a research presentation, and a long essay (8-10 pages).

465.001: Chicana/o Literature

MWF
Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

This advanced study of Chicana/o literature will explore the various genres and styles that characterize the subject, from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century. Chicana/o literature became a recognized field of study as a result of the Civil Rights era, so the class will begin with a critical examination of the Chicano literary canon and its cultural criticism. The class will explore the various theories, ideas and aesthetics of Chicana/o identity and poetics (cultural nationalism, mestiza consciousness, diaspora, immigration, and language), and we will use this exploration to understand better the field of Chicana/o literature, both before and after the watershed moment of the Civil Rights era. We will read texts from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period, and in the process we will chart the trajectory of Chicana/o literature, with attention to both the aesthetics of genre and style, as well as to the social and political conflicts that give meaning to Chicana/o literature.

472.001: Postmodern/Postwar/Contemporary

R 4:00-6:30
Daniel Worden

This course will focus on the shifts in how literary critics have periodized post-1945 American literature since the 1980s. We will begin with works central to postmodernism, featuring texts by Don DeLillo, Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Art Spiegelman. We will then move on to works central to the reconfiguration of postwar American literature currently underway, including writing by James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Amy Elias, Mark McGurl, Norman Mailer, Walter Benn Michaels, and David Foster Wallace. We will conclude with an account of contemporary literature, focusing on writers like Dana Spiotta, Chris Ware, and Karen Tei Yamashita. In each section of the course, we will focus on how certain styles of postwar prose are elevated or left behind based on the political and aesthetic expectations of literary critical discourses. Course requirements include active participation, an in-class presentation, a book review, and a research essay.

487.001: Genre Studies: The Tragic Tradition

T 4:00-6:30
Marissa Greenberg

This course will survey the extended history of the genre of tragedy. We will read theories of tragedy from Aristotle’s Poetics to John Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy to Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy. We will situate these theories within a body of dramatic writing and performance, specifically Shakespearean tragedy and its adaptation. Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet and King Lear, not only engage with neoclassical interpretations of ancient tragedy; they have also been repurposed to shape and to accommodate emerging notions of tragedy. This course will come up to the present day through examination of post-9/11 debate about the purpose and efficacy of tragic art. Students will be encouraged to shape their research to their areas of focus, whether classics or post-modernism, rhetoric or eighteenth-century studies.

499.001: Internship Seminar

MWF 2:00-2:50
James Burbank

This seminar focuses on preparing professional writing students for career development. This capstone course in the professional writing sequence focuses on encouraging students to develop and present career materials such as the resume and a professional portfolio. The class engages the professional writing internship experience to develop student awareness of current professional and marketplace trends that affect those who are developing and implementing career and job development campaigns following college. Students who wish to learn how to deploy effective, winning career plans will find this seminar to be of great value.