Fall 2009 Course Descriptions

Here are the course descriptions for some of the English courses to be taught in fall 2009.  We will add descriptions as faculty make them available.

English 110: Composition
Instructor: Lois Lake Church

Writing Journeys: Enter the world of academic writing and reading:
learn skills and approaches that will carry you through the rest of your student years and your career. In a technology-supported writing classroom, working individually and in small groups, you will learn to create interesting theses, summaries, idea structures, researched essays, reflections, and revisions. The course will culminate with your publishing your best work in an electronic portfolio.

Eng 111: Composition
Instructor: Neil Sherman

English 111 is designed to support and direct students in their efforts to develop strong skills in academic reading and writing, and in
critical thinking.    No matter what students skill levels are at the
start of the term, they will have the opportunity to become better and more confident writers and thinkers by semester's end.  The course focuses on close, critical readings of essays, writing projects (both during and outside of class), and instruction in essay rhetorical forms and writing conventions.  Students will learn how to read analytically in order to learn about the craft of writing.  They will also develop critical skills by responding to the work of fellow writers during workshops, and ultimately, will become qualified editors of their own work.  Students will also learn to evaluate sources and gain an understanding of MLA citation format.

I will order the following book:
" Nadell, Judith, John Langan, Eliza A. Comodromos:  The Longman Reader, Seventh Edition. Pearson/Longman, 2005.  To be purchased in conjunction with MyCompLab.


English 111: Composition
Instructor: Justin Short

This course extends prior knowledge of composition to prepare students for the kind of close critical reading and analytical writing required for a successful university education. Students enrolling in this class should expect to read and reread many interesting and challenging essays. Students should expect to work hard, in class discussions and in writing, to create arguments and back them up with substantial, high-quality evidence. Much time will be spent revising written work, rereading sources for meaning, and questioning what it means to "think for oneself." In addition to several short papers, a longer 7-10 page research paper is required. Students will learn and observe the basic rules of grammar and work to control their style. Active class participation is mandatory. 


ENG 217: Introduction to Literature
American Dreams and Nightmares
Instructor: Paul Pasquaretta

Since the first European explorers made landfall on the shores of the western hemisphere, America, as the land came to be known, has been a place of dreams, optimism, and the promise of success. At the same time, the New World has been a land of danger, frustration, and failure. In this course, we will explore these dual aspects of the American experience through works that represent the diversity of American peoples and writing styles. Focusing on a variety of genres - autobiography, the short story, the novel, drama, and poetry - we will explore the rich and often dark contexts that inspire our writers, and how the ghosts of American history continue to haunt its peoples.
Featured writers will include Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, August Wilson, and a collection of contemporary American poets. The course will also focus on the building blocks of creative writing and language, with formal essay assignments given to hone crucial reading, thinking, writing skills.


ENG 217: Introduction to Literature
Women's Worlds and Women's Writing
Instructor: Tracy Roberts

What is literature and why does it matter?  What purposes does it serve, to those who write it, or to those who read it?  What are the skills necessary to understand, study, and appreciate it?  We'll be answering those questions, and many others, using the study of women's writings from the 1300s to the present.  Our study will be grounded historically and only focus on women writing in English.

ENG 301 Introduction to Literary Analysis and Critical Theory
Instructor: Prof. Petrie

Boot camp for English majors! Instruction and practice in using basic concepts and terms of rhetorical and literary critical analysis to analyze and interpret a broad variety of literary texts. Overview of literary genres and modes. Analytical "close reading" of literary texts, and development of meaningful interpretive questions and hypotheses. Strategies for using your writing process to move from first response to meaningful inquiry to thesis-based essay arguing for your particular interpretation of a literary text. Practice putting your critical ideas into dialogue with others', both your class colleagues' and published critics'. Lots and lots of writing, informal and formal, with opportunities and expectations of multiple drafting and substantive revision. 

ENG 312.01W: Grammar
Prof. Andrew Smyth

This course will make you think differently about language and grammar.  We will study how the English language works; where it comes from; how it is evolving; why it differs from speaker to speaker and place to place; and, of essential importance to many if not all of you, how to teach it.  Note Well: Even if you are not planning to become a language arts teacher, you will have to engage in pedagogical readings, writings, discussions, and practice in this course.

Methods of learning include using diagrams and formulas to illustrate the syntax of English; reading and commenting on articles about language, dialect, and pedagogy; learning about grammar through extensive writing; applying principles of rhetorical grammar to literature and other texts; engaging in amusing grammar activities; and teaching the class how to incorporate grammar into language arts instruction.  Your final grade will be determined by a combination of essays (with revisions), tests, quizzes, journals, collaborative projects (Grammar Wiki), homework assignments, in-class activities, and mini-lessons. 

This course has been designated a "W"-course, meaning that it is writing-intensive with a heavy emphasis on revision.  Nearly all contemporary pedagogical theorists and practitioners advocate teaching grammar in the context of reading and writing, so you will find that reading and writing of various sorts and genres will occur weekly if not daily in this course.  The idea is that you learn about your language options, particularly regarding syntax, through study, practice, and integration in your own writing.  Thus, do not be surprised if the texts you produce-journals, essays, smaller writing assignments-become primary sources for our class's study of grammar.  The aims of such exercises, some of which will be in peer workshop settings, will be to let you practice grammatical analysis on authentic texts and to lead to improved writing in your revisions.

We will also examine a variety of textual artifacts-newspapers, advertisements, poetry, children's books, sixteenth-century prose, etc.-to learn about the many different grammars that make up the English language.  Your reading will become a source of discovery and imitation.

ENG 361: American Renaissance
Instructor: Scott Ellis

In 1840, Alexis de Toqueville noted that "Americans have not yet, properly speaking, got any literature."  Fifteen years later, Walt Whitman responded in his epic Leaves of Grass, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."  When placed in conversation, these two statements reflect the dilemmas and opportunities for writers in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century.  On the one hand, many writers-from Charles Brockden Brown to Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson-lamented the scarcity of literature written by their fellow citizens of the young republic.  When viewed alongside the productions of their European counterparts, with their centuries of literary tradition, the literary output on this side of the Atlantic Ocean during the first few decades of the nineteenth century was indeed limited, both in quantity and quality.  The success of such writers as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper merely underscored the dearth of other such American writers.

On the other hand, the United States had potential for literary development, both in the developing population of potential writers as well as in the geographic, social, and political impulses that could inspire such writers.  The time was ripe for a literary birth-or rebirth, as the name "American Renaissance" implies-and the writers that we will read throughout the semester all contributed to this literary development.  When Whitman writes that the "United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he celebrates this development, beckoning his fellow writers to draw upon the untapped resources that he found all around him.  During the American Renaissance, writers did just that, and through their different styles, genres, interests, and goals, they created an era of remarkable creativity, giving the United States a level of literary respectability around the world.

Most of you have read (or at least heard of) such American Renaissance writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau, so my purpose in this course moves beyond a basic introduction to these writers.  Instead, I seek to unpack Whitman's statement and explore in particular how it relates to the momentous changes taking place in a land transforming itself into an emerging industrial economy, one that challenged everyone's understanding of what it means to be "human."  This notion of "humanity"-who you are as a person in relation to and often distinct from what you produce for society-underwent a radical change by the middle of the nineteenth century.  In many ways, the qualities of the industrial age-scientific development, notions of "progress," and an emphasis on expediency-put focus on one type of "verifiable" knowledge in science and measurement and shifted it away from essential qualities of humanity, especially the imagination.  "Why look to possibilities and make-believe," one might have said, "when we can dissect, categorize, and classify the world as we know it?"

The writers whose work we will examine responded to this bias by illustrating what, exactly, the imagination still had to offer.  For these writers, science and rational investigation were fine, but they were merely one way to understand the world.  Questions of life, death, morality, crime, slavery, violence, religion, and personal behavior could be better understood through acts of the imagination-even if that understanding led to even more questions.  In approaching these questions, we will try to understand how writers grappled with the growing importance given to science, technology, and "progress," especially how these ideas and institutions came to understand the world.  If the United States was indeed the greatest poem, then it was a poem under constant editing and revision, a poem in which was written competing forms of knowledge that detailed the many struggles and "rebirths" of a country and its writers.

ENG 366 American Poetry
Instructor: Prof. Petrie

Not a comprehensive "survey" of American poetry, this course will nevertheless pay some attention to poetry of different eras in U.S. literary history, from colonial and new national to Romantic, Modernist, and contemporary poetry. We'll pay special attention to shifting ideas and assumptions about the purposes, functions, and aesthetics of poetry: why do people write it and read it? What place did it, does it, and should it have in American society and culture? Class will be discussion-based, with minimal lecture and the expectation that students always come to class well prepared to discuss their pre-class-meeting reading and interpretive thinking. Student work, in addition to routine reading, interpretation, and note-taking, will include some combination of: blogging / journaling; wiki construction; in-class mini-presentations on poems, poets, or cultural contexts; formal essays; written exams, in take-home or hybrid format. Nervous about poetry? Not to worry: while your prior completion of ENG 301 will come in handy, with or without that we'll spend ample time in class learning and practicing basic techniques for productively approaching the reading and interpretation of poems. This course hasn't been offered in over a decade, and there's no telling when it might be offered again, so . . . get it while it's hot!

ENG 486: Seminar in American Literature

Instructor: Prof. Pritchard

Telling Border Stories: Literature of the U.S.-Mexico Border

This course examines the social, economic, and political organization and representation of the U.S.-Mexico Border. We will trace an analytical trajectory represented through the fiction, poetry, documentaries, histories and theories constructed about the border and the borderlands.  Though we will begin by considering the history and origin of the border as it now exists - as a political, economic, social entity - the class will progress more thematically than chronologically.  Our readings, viewings and discussions will be guided by a collective project to seek answers to several pressing questions:

Why has the border held such attention, especially since the mid-1900s, among Chicana/o / Mexican American writers?  What does the entity, history and the meanings of the border have to offer these authors? 

What theorizing does that geographic context provide?  Why does there persist (what I believe to be) a national obsession with the U.S.-Mexico border that feeds ongoing manifestations of racist xenophobia? Throughout the class, thus, we will consider the late 20th and early 21st centuries' proliferation of literary, filmic and theoretical texts that have been produced about the U.S.-Mexico border.

Together, we will work to answer such additional questions as: How have the representations of the border changed over time?  What relationship can we map between culture and the recent political histories of the border?  Why, in the present moment of late capitalism and globalization, does the U.S.-Mexico border still loom large not only in the U.S. national imaginary, but also in the legislation of the U.S. Southwest (in particular) and the U.S. and Mexican nation-states (more broadly)?

Eng 487: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature

Instructor: Prof. Karen Remedios

This seminar course is designed as an introduction to postcolonial literature, in other words, works by people from formerly colonized countries which deal with the experience and consequences of colonization. We will read contemporary literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia within the historical, cultural, and political context of European imperialism and postcolonial resistance.

The tentative reading list includes:

• Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
• Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun
• Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night
• Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy
• Sara Suleri, Meatless Days
  

This course fulfills the Multicultural Literature requirement.

EDU 490
English (Secondary School)
TR 4:45-7:15 (Sept. 1-Oct. 22)
Instructor: Prof. Andrew Smyth

Important: This course is taken in conjunction with EDU 452 (Student Teaching) and EDU 453 (Student-Teaching Seminar) for those who are concluding their Teacher Certification under the pre-2008 English Education program.  If you have any questions or concerns about the "old" or "new" Methods/Student-Teaching curriculum, please see Dr. Melissa McClain, Dr. Andrew Smyth, or Dr. Anjanette Darrington before registering.

The English Methods course provides essential training for your upcoming student-teaching experience. It is also an opportunity to bring together all of your preparation in English, education, and general education for the benefit of the diverse range of students you will be teaching in your career.  The course emphasizes a number of practical elements of teaching-planning instruction, assessment, management, technology usage, and more; at the same time, you will have frequent opportunities to reflect on your practice, your teaching philosophy, and your career ambitions.

EDU 490 serves as Gate 3 of our B. S. in English with Certification

(7-12) Program, and satisfactory completion (grade of 80% or higher) of major projects is required before you can move on to Student Teaching (Gate 4).

This class meets two nights a week for 2-1/2 hours, thereby allowing you to earn three credits in eight weeks.  The intensive nature of the class and its overlap with Student Teaching, which begins six weeks into the semester, mean that you should be prepared to devote significant time outside of class for mandatory coursework.  That includes at least four hours per week during the first six weeks of the semester in your assigned school, and many hours preparing assignments for student teaching.  Major projects include a fully developed unit plan, a philosophy of education essay, regular observation reports, CAPT/CMT instruction, media literacy instruction, and a multigenre project.