1510.101 English Freshman Honors Seminar : Analyzing Cultural Practices
MW 2:00 - 3:15 Professor Thomas Mc Laughlin
Freshman Honors Seminar, will be taught this semester as an honors section of English 2001, Writing Across the Curriculum, and can be used as a substitute for that course in the new general education curriculum.  All students in the Writing Across the Curriculum course  write in different genres for different academic communities, read a variety of academic texts rhetorically, and analyze the writing conventions of various academic communities.  In this honors section of the course students will choose a topic for the semester and write a series of papers that deal with that topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.  Students will be asked to engage in independent research and find a variety of  readings on their topic.  The topic will be a “cultural practice,” that is, an activity of everyday life that brings with it a culture -- a set of values, beliefs, ways of thinking and feeling, ways of using the body, and modes of relationship and community.  Students will be asked to choose a practice that plays an important role in their personal identity, their way of thinking about themselves.  Analyzing these practices from various disciplinary perspectives will help students understand the practice and also promote self-understanding.   

ENG 2040.102
MW     02:00 pm-03:15 pm  Instructor: Irina Y. Barclay
The October Revolution of 1917 in tsarist Russia was a life-altering event for all Russians.  It influenced the different spheres of Russian life: history, politics, art, freedom of choice, and it engineered Russian thinking.  This section of world literature will examine a representative selection of writing (fiction and poetry) and documentary films focused on these significant forces at work in a totalitarian state. Texts will include Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a  Dog, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's An Incident at the Krechetovka Station, Matryona's Home, Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, and  Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra; films will include Ten Days That Shook the World (1996), Fear and the Muse: The Story of Anna Akhmatova (1991), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2001), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1990), Introduction to Russian Literature (2000), Heart of a Dog (1988), Behind the Kremlin Wall (1997), The Hermitage:  a Russian odyssey (1994), The Island of Dr.  Moreau (1977; 1996), and Solovetsky power (1989). 

2040.103 & 104 World Literature: Selkies, Swans, and the Sidhe: Shape-shifting in Irish Literature and Film
MW 2:00 - 3:15 / 3:30 - 4:45 Kathryn Kirkpatrick
Ireland's rich Celtic heritage and its fraught colonial history and postcolonial politics have produced powerful literary and artistic voices. We will examine the ways Irish writers and filmmakers have tried to make sense of the complex socio-political contexts in which they have found themselves and analyze their representations of legend and folklore, political and religious conflict, and gender relations. Beginning with Irish legend and translations of early Gaelic poetry, students will address a wide variety of genres, including drama, poetry, fiction, film and song.  By exploring the ways these writers and directors retrieve and transform images and characters from Irish mythology, Irish history and Irish religious practice, we will begin to discover what constitutes Irish cultural experience and literary expression. Moreover, by focusing on the figure of the shape-shifter, a pervasive trope in Irish cultural productions, we will explore colonial subjectivities; human/animal connections, including inter-subjective relations with nature in general; fluid and wide-ranging gender performances; and numinous and supernatural aspects of spiritual transformation.

2050.101 Studies in British Literature
MWF 1:00 - 1:50 William D. Brewer
In this course we will focus on two monster myths that became culturally significant during the British Romantic period: 
the British (or Anglo-Irish) vampire and Victor Frankenstein’s botched experiment.  We will begin by reading Beowulf and examining the poem’s three monsters:  Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.  Then we will consider some other legendary and folkloric monsters (monster “traditions”) and discuss how British writers respond to monster and vampire myths in innovative ways.  Our readings will include vampire tales by John Polidori (Lord Byron’s doctor), two Anglo-Irish writers, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, E. F. Benson, Robert Aickman, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes.  We will also read Christabel, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which the heroine is visited by a mysterious figure who
resembles a vampire, and John Keats’s Lamia, which recounts the demise of a powerful snake-woman.  Films like Nosferatu and The Horror of Dracula will provide us with insights into 20th-century perspectives on the vampire myth. In addition, we will discuss works that portray non-vampiric monsters and “mad” scientists:  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau.  Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray will provide us with one of our examples of moral monstrosity.  Throughout the semester we will consider what literary and cinematic monsters tell us about British cultural beliefs, fears, and fantasies at different historical moments and how literary works help to shape the cultures in which they appear.  Our readings will be extensive:  please do not take this course if you are a reluctant reader.

ENG 2050-102 Studies in British Literature: Christopher Marlowe
TR 12:30 pm-01:45 pm
In this course we will examine selected works by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Next to Shakespeare, Marlowe was perhaps the best known English playwright of his day. Certainly he was the most controversial. At the same time that he was praised for his artistic achievements, Marlowe was accused of, among other things, heresy, atheism, spying, and sodomy. On May 20, 1593, he appeared before the Privy Council to respond to a long catalog of charges; ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Igrim Frizer for reasons that still aren’t wholly clear. Our focus in this course will be on some of the major poems and plays Marlowe wrote during his contentious career. While we will resist the temptation to read these works as narrowly autobiographical, we will consider how they have helped to shape the image of Marlowe handed down to us from the early modern period. We will also look at some more modern adaptations of Marlowe’s plays to see how they have been appropriated to comment upon more recent political and cultural conflicts. Required course work will include reading quizzes, several shorter papers (2-3 pp.), a staging exercise, a midterm, and a final.

2320.104 & 105 American Literature
Michael Shriber
According to the ASU catalog, this course is “a study of major American writers from the beginning of realism through the present.”  One of the things we’ll be doing during the semester is considering what is meant by literary “realism” and related critical terms such as "romanticism" and “naturalism.”  The first three authors included in the anthology are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain.  Other major writers we’ll study are Henry James, W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams.
       We’ll also read writers that may not be considered “major” but that I think you’ll enjoy nonetheless—Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Hunter Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut.  We may even be able to squeeze in yet another, more recent author.  Suggestions are welcome.   Who's the best contemporary American writer you've read?
       As we study a century and a half of first-rate writing, you may also want to read or at least skim the anthology’s introductions to literary periods and movements.  Do read its biographical introductions to authors we study. Their lives throw direct light on their writings and are often fascinating in themselves.
       Finally, if you'd like to read a version of our history that focuses on Native Americans, women, African Americans, poor people, Latinos, dissidents, and other social underdogs, I strongly recommend Howard Zinn's richly detailed, anecdotal text.  I'll occasionally share some passages from it with you as background to the literature.

2350.101 Studies in American Literature
MWF 12:00 - 12:50 Lynn Searfoss
American Dreams / American Nightmares:  This General Education literature survey will read, discuss, and write about exemplary texts in American literature written before the Civil War.  We will be particularly interested in exploring the construction of the American Dream mythos in its positive, hopeful, and exuberant manifestations and its nightmarish ramifications. Among the authors that we will study are Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Poe.  Students should expect to participate both in person and in on-line venues.

ENG 2350:Sections 103 & 105: The Rebel in American Literature
Section 103: TR 08:00 am-09:15 am; Section 105: TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Instructor: Tammy Wahpeconiah
The individual is of paramount importance in American society, and as such, we honor and value those who exemplify the independent spirit.  One face of individualism is the "rebel" and she/he has moved through American literature since its earliest inception.  We will trace the "rebel," beginning with Emerson and trace his/her development in the works of Thoreau, Twain, Butler, Kingston, and Atwood.

2350.106 & 108 Studies in American Literature: African American Emphasis
TR 12:30 - 1:45 / 3:30 - 4:45 Dr. Kristina K. Groover
This course is a history of African American literature, from its beginnings to the present.  The course begins with two mid-19th century slave narratives and ends with contemporary texts from the 1980s and 1990s.
       Course requirements:  Students will read assigned texts with the aid of questions designed to focus their reading on important issues; take detailed reading notes in response to those questions; and take a midterm and final exam. This is a discussion-based class; most class sessions will be devoted to discussion of the assigned readings.  Regular, thoughtful, and constructive class participation is expected and required.
Required texts include:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Students are welcome to contact the professor at grooverkk@appstate.edu with any questions about the course.

English 2515.  Sophomore Honors Seminar in English Literature
MWF  11:00 am-11:50 am    Instructor:  William D. Brewer
Course Goals/Objectives:  In this course we will survey English literature from 1789 to the late twentieth century.  We will focus on literary responses to nature, beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge and their pantheistic vision of a nature that “never did betray / The heart that loved her.”  We will consider John Clare’s writings on rural and peasant life, Mary Shelley’s exploration of “unnatural” birth and its consequences in Frankenstein, and Thomas Hardy’s and H. G. Wells’s post-Darwinian conceptions of nature.   Androcentric, feminist, ecological, dystopian, and religious perspectives on nature will also be discussed. 
Required Texts :
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams, et. al., 8th ed., volume 2 (rental book)
Making Humans, by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells
Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy
Course Requirements:  two papers, frequent quizzes, two group oral presentations, final examination.

3000.101 Approaches to Literary Study
TR 12:30 – 1:45 Jill Ehnenn
This course is designed to be a gateway to help English majors master the skills they will need for their upper level literature courses and thus should be taken as early as possible in the student’s program of study. This class will introduce students to the following: essential research methods in the discipline, including library resources and databases; major trends in literary criticism and theory; an introduction to prosody;  and practice writing in the discipline, including close reading, explication, annotated bibliography and papers incorporating a variety of theoretical lenses and historical approaches.  We will also discuss the question “What can I do with an English major?”

3050.101 Studies in Folklore
MW 2:00 - 3:15 Lynn Moss Sanders
This course is an introductory course that acquaints students with theories and methods of study and research in the field of folklore.  ENG 3050 carries both CD and MC designators. The study of folklore includes methodologies from various fields, including anthropology, ethnomusicology, literature, and religion.  The diversity of American culture necessitates a multi-cultural approach to American folk studies.  This section of 3050 will focus on Southern folklore, particularly Appalachian and African American tales, songs, and material culture as well as folklore in literature.

3090.101 Introduction to Professional Writing
TR 11:00 – 12:15 Pam Brewer
A study of the history, theories, concepts, and practices of professional writing.
Topics:  audience analysis, visual literacy, language situations, ethics, workplace culture, research methods, data collection strategies, and analysis.

3100.109 & 110 Business Writing
TR 8:00 - 9:15 / 9:30 - 10:45 Janet Palmer
Emphasis on advanced applied business writing genres:  specialized letters and memoranda, resumes, proposals, analytical and fact-finding reports, and other essential forms of professional communication and research.  ENG 3090 is recommended as preparation for ENG 3100.

3160-101 Law and Justice in Film
W 6-9pm David Larry
Law permeates our society in ways both obvious and subtle.  Law is (in part) about the distribution or balance of power, and lawyers have leverage because they speak the language that can effect changes in that balance.  Despite the low public opinion of lawyers (as epitomized in lawyer jokes), we are fascinated with "trials of the century" and other law-related media events.  Trials and other legal proceedings often are ritualized story-telling within the context of principles, and those stories have power because so much is at stake. Images of law, lawyers, and justice in film can convey powerful messages and can provide a partial context and springboard for exploration of issues fundamental to our society.  It is the purpose of this course to examine those principles, stories, images, and issues.  Textual materials, including constitutional provisions, ethics sources, historical documents, court decisions, course syllabus and the paper assignment, are posted at http://classdat.appstate.edu/AAS/Eng/larrydh/.  Aside from our viewings of the films, the course will be conducted seminar style, with occasional lectures.  Students are expected to be participate in, and in some cases lead, class discussions.  There will be a mid-term examination and a final examination, and students will write one significant paper on a film (or films) of their choice.

3170.101: Advanced Film Studies: The History of Experimental Cinema
TR 3:30 - 4:45 Craig Fischer
What is experimental cinema? We’ll begin this class by considering the various characteristics—such as artisanal production, and a dogged tendency to subvert Hollywood storytelling rules—that define the experimental genre. Then we’ll trot through the history of American experimental filmmaking (with a few detours to other countries to watch movies that influenced American experimental directors). First is the pre-World War II period of moviemaking by such “amateurs” as Man Ray, Ralph Steiner, Mary Ellen Bute and Douglas Crockwell. Then comes the post-war explosion of experimental production, as in the films of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Conner, Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow. Finally, we’ll chart the rise of identity politics in the contemporary avant-garde, and consider how Michel Gondry, Sadie Benning and Todd Haynes use offbeat and outmoded technology to create cutting-edge films and videos.

3172.101  WORLD  CINEMA  II
TR 2:00 - 3:15 Leon Lewis
FILM:  THE ART  FORM  FOR OUR TIME 1950s  to  Now                           
     Building, but not dependent, on English 3171,  World Cinema: Origins and Early Development, the second part of the sequence devoted to the International aspect of film, English 3172,  will focus on the emergence of film as the dominant art form in the world during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Assuming a basic familiarity with the origins and early development of film during the first decades of the century, this course will concentrate on the evolution of film following World War II to the point where it seized the imagination and expressed the emerging consciousness of the generation which came to power in the Nuclear Age.
     Concentrating on the New Wave (Le Nouvelle Vague, as the French cineastes of Le Cahier Du Cinema described themselves) - the great surge of creativity in Europe highlighted by the work of filmmakers like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel and Ingmar Bergman; complemented by the surge of energy of the New American Cinema of the 1970s (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, etc.); and including global masters like the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, this course will follow the paths of the leading filmmakers of the post-war decades, and then turn to the even wider scope of a truly international medium which has included filmmakers from every continent, highlighted by the work of filmmakers in countries like India, China, Iran, South Korea,and Mexico,  and even some countries which are hardly recognized as cinematic centers. While there will be many films in their original language which require subtitles for most viewers, films from British Commonwealth countries (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada) will be included as a means of keeping in touch with the relatively familiar.
     Students will be asked to write three critical/analytic essays in response to appropriatefilms, do some manageable research on a specific director of their choice, and generally participate in the conversation about films and filmmakers.
     Screening:  Mondays,  7:00,  the Greenbriar (tentative but likely schedule)
Written Text:  Film History: An Introduction.  Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell. New York:  McGraw-Hill,  1994  (any edition) – a rental book.

3300.102 & 103 Applied Grammar
TR 11:00 - 12:15 / 2:00 - 3:15 Dr. Eugene L. Miller
This course will focus upon the syntax of the English sentence.  Our study of the thirteen parts of speech, phrases and clauses which comprise the grammatical sentence will help us to understand the interplay of the various sentence constitutents.  By the end of the semester, students will be able to identify specific types pf phrases (prepositional, verbal [gerund, infinitive, participial, etc.] and appositional) and clauses (adverbial, adjectival and nominal).  Emphasis will be given to classroom applications of traditional principles of grammar, with some attention to punctuation, usage and the conventions of standard written English.  Final course grade will be determined by class participation, attendance, completion of homework exercises, and performance on 5-7 exams, which will test both knowledge and understanding of concepts and require the application of critical thinking/problem-solving skills.

3515.101 Junior/Senior Honors Seminar in World Literature.
TR 3:30 – 4:45 William Atkinson
We will look at some theory on what world literature is and what difference it makes to read a text as world literature rather than British, American, or French literature. Then we’ll read some modernist fiction, with special attention to the representation of space. Writers may include Salih, Mahfouz, El Saadawi, Borges, Machado de Assis, Ocampo, Conrad, Kafka, Aleramo, Soseki, Tanizaki, Ichiyo.

3530.101 Green Poetry: The Study and Practice of Eco-Poetics (SD 3530 – cross listed)
TR 11- 12:15 Kathryn Kirkpatrick
How have poets written about the earth? What can we learn from them about human relations with the natural world?  This course will explore the representation of nature in the Western tradition of poetry in English since the Industrial Revolution. 
In the work of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century poets as varied as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, and Derek Walcott we will explore an organismic view of nature where animals are helpers and kin; plants and planets have proper names; knowledge of both the visible and unseen, the natural and supernatural, is accessed both empirically and intuitively; and a poet’s sources include the material world, the dream world, and the illusory world of the psyche’s projections.  This challenge to a mechanistic model of nature, which environmental historian Carolyn Merchant has described as a “turning back to the organismic idea of a vital animating principle binding together the whole created world,” may give us roadmaps for surviving our current ecological crisis.
As part of this exploration, students will also be asked to make their own poems.  Other requirements include in-class exams and a final paper.  Texts for the class are John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth? and Mary Oiver’s A Poetry Handbook.

3610.101 Studies Principle of Language
MWF 10:00-10:50 Lynn Searfoss
This course introduces students to the general principles of human language with particular reference to English. We will, examine the sounds and sound patterns of English, the ways words are composed and used, phase and sentence structure, semantics (the study of meaning), the ways English is used in social contexts, and language acquisition.   We will work to apply the richer understanding of the English language gained through linguistic study to classroom practice and writing development.

4550.101: Senior Seminar in Creative Writing : “It’s Just Lines on Paper, Folks!”: Comic Strips, Comic Books and Graphic Novels
TR 2:00 - 3:15 Craig Fischer
This course has several goals. First, we’ll discuss in detail the form of comics, focusing on such issues as realistic vs. iconic representation, “la ligne claire,” different forms of closure between panels, and the comic book page as graphical map. Second, the class will function as a writing workshop where participants can try out different methods for drawing and writing comics (gag panel, full script, Marvel-style, etc.). Finally, we’ll survey the histories of American comic books and comic strips, from the Yellow Kid to Jimmy Corrigan.

4560.101 Adolescent Literature
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 Mark Vogel
Explores the exciting field of literature for and about adolescents.  The course will trace the historical development, noting pivotal books and authors, and investigating themes and issues surrounding adolescent literature.  The student will read at least 14 adolescent novels, and then link the texts to response-based teaching. Students will explore theories of adolescent development, read widely in adolescent literature, participate in web-based discussion, develop curriculum for teaching adolescent literature, and link adolescent literature with classic texts.
Expect to make one or more presentations, at least one of which will be on art, history, architecture, geography, etc.; twice weekly discussion boards; and one or two research papers.

4560.102/5302.101 Adolescent Literature
MW 3:30 - 4:45 Elaine O'Quinn
This course is designed to give prospective and practicing language arts teachers, as well as those involved with the selection and/or creation of adolescent texts, a familiarity with the literature adolescents relate to and enjoy. It also presents the reasons teenage readers make the choices that they do. Most importantly, the course is planned to help adults develop a positive attitude toward this kind of literature and understand the consequences of various aspects of Young Adult Literature in curricular and reading choices. An equally important intent is to provoke thought and debate about the many controversial issues surrounding YAL. Though institutionally accepted, it remains, for the most part, uncanonical and culturally marginalized. Because it does not fit into the dominant systems of hierarchies or classifications, YAL labors under misconceptions about its worth, quality, and purpose. Complicating those misconceptions is the place the conventional literary system has assigned it: adult male literature dominates, women's literature is secondary (even grudgingly so in some circles), multicultural texts are next, while YAL falls not only at the bottom of the heap, but remains mostly the province of women, a fact that has relegated it more to lower-status areas of "practice" rather than theory.  Students will read a variety of texts across genres and will engage in written and oral discussion of the reading interests, attitudes, and needs of teen readers and the cultural biases that work to keep YAL out of schools and out of the hands of "serious" readers.

4580-101:  Studies in African American Literature
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 Professor Bruce Dick
This particular section of ENG 4580 focuses on African American humor from the 19th century to the present.  It includes well-known satirists such as Toni Cade Bambara, Langston Hughes, and Ishmael Reed but also examines an assortment of writers whose comic side is often overlooked—Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X among them.  The course explores zanier, in-your-face contemporary figures like Paul Beatty, Darius James, and Fran Ross as well. Books for the course include Hokum:  An Anthology of African-American Humor (Beatty), Flight to Canada (Reed), Oreo (Ross) and Negrophobia (James).  Course requirements include reaction papers on each book; two short papers on a selected topic; and a long, analytical paper on the comic tradition in African American literature.

4590-101: World Literature
TR 3:30-4:45 Howard Giskin
     A study of literary content, theories, and problems of a specific world-epoch.
     In this class we will focus on the influence of American literature (in particular Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass) on twentieth century Latin American literature. Texts will include a complete edition of Whitman's classic, a bilingual collection of Latin American verse, a monograph on Latin American literature and politics, and a bilingual edition of the poems of Pablo Neruda.

4591.101 Theory and Practice Teaching HS English
MWF 12:00 - 12:50 Mark Vogel
This course explores pedagogy and curriculum for Secondary English through reading, discussion, and presentations.  Students will leave the course better prepared for their student teaching experience, with a portfolio of activities and ideas.  They will learn about future students, and about state mandated goals, and procedures. They will articulate their philosophy for teaching writing, language, and literature.  Students will explore resources available for English teachers, and essential professional organizations.  Students will develop and present mini-lessons, philosophical statements, technology competencies, and bibliographies.  A final teaching portfolio will include unit plans, mini-lessons, resources, and philosophies for teaching literature, language, and language.

4710.101 Advanced Studies in Women and Literature: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
TR 11:00 - 12:15 Dr. Kristina K. Groover
     In this course we will study Virginia Woolf as writer, as reader, and as cultural icon:  as writer of novels, letters, diaries, and essays; as reader of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and T. S. Eliot; and as the subject of films, plays, paintings, theses, photographs, poems, and songs.  We will examine these texts not only through close reading, but also by understanding the various contexts in which they were written – biographical, historical, and cultural.  This class will be conducted as a seminar, with most class sessions devoted to discussion of the assigned texts.  Students will present their own critical papers and research projects, lead class discussion, and respond to the work and ideas of others in the class.  Students will write a series of short essays, an annotated bibliography, and a researched seminar paper.
     Texts will likely include:  Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and Moments of Being; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours; Jane Austen’s Emma; among others.
     Students are welcome to contact the professor at grooverkk@appstate.edu with any questions about the course.

4760.101 Literary Criticism and Theory
TR 12:30 – 1:45 Thomas Mc Laughlin
Literary Criticism is a course that allows us to reflect on the issues raised by the act of reading and interpreting literature.  Serious engagement with literature raises moral, political, psychological, aesthetic and philosophical questions that have been considered by some of the great thinkers about literature throughout our cultural history.  Over the last thirty years especially, questions about literary study have been raised by feminists, post-colonial scholars, post-modernists, and many other groups interested in the politics of cultural and personal identity – all trying to define what exactly is at stake in the act of reading.  For English majors, this course provides the opportunity to reflect on what we are doing in all of our literature classes.  Just how do we interpret what we read?  What approaches to literature are prominent in our discipline?  What do these approaches allow us to see in literature, and what do they keep us from seeing?  In this course we will read writings on such issues as creativity, representation, form and structure, history and politics, and reading and interpretation.  Some readings will be from recent literary theory, and some will come from the classical tradition, the romantic period, and the modernist movement of the early 20th century.  In addition, we will focus on selected literary works in order to ground our inquiry in the act of reading literature itself.

4780.101 19th Century American Literature: Glorious Failures
TR 2:00 - 3:15 Grace McEntee
     This course will examine some of the most important literary “failures” during a century of American writings (1798 to 1899).  We will discuss works that today are considered important milestones in American literary history, but which were judged failures in their authors’ lifetimes.  We’ll probe why they were not the immediate successes that these writers hoped they would be: some failed because of the economics of publishing, some because of the authors’ unconventional experiments with genre, some because of controversial subject matter.  All are works that today are considered glorious efforts; most are considered true masterpieces.  Texts that might end up on our reading list include Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; Melville’s Moby-Dick; Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance; the poetry of Emily Dickinson; Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

ENG 4795:101
20TH C AM LIT: 1945-PRES
TR 12:30 pm-01:15 pm   Instructor: Michael Wilson
For this class, we'll be doing a classic historical overview of the period, encompassing a variety of authors, genres, and works, using as our primary text Volume E of The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Contemporary Period,  supplementing this with handouts of various examples of literary criticism relevant to these works.  You can expect the usual midterm and final exams, as well as two research papers, along with an annotated bibliography.

English 4840.101: Shakespeare—The Later Plays
TR 2-3:15 Susan C. Staub
This course will survey a selection of Shakespeare's plays from later in his career. We will consider the four great tragedies—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear—but we will also read some of the romances to avoid being overwhelmed with blood and gore. Most likely choices are Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Our discussion of the plays will consider staging and language, but also the culture in which they were written. In particular we will look at gender, race, religion, nationality, and politics.

ENG 4840-102 Shakespeare II: Shakespeare and the Death Drive
TR     02:00 pm-03:15 pm   David Orvis
While death is inevitable for most of the characters who inhabit Shakespeare’s tragedies, the modes and cultural significances of these deaths differ markedly from one another. In this course, we will discuss what it means for death to be compulsory in Shakespeare’s tragedies. We will begin with the poem The Rape of Lucrece and then examine, in turn, six plays—Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. As we shall see, the instinct that Freud termed the death drive (Todestriebe) takes on different forms contingent upon perceived differences in gender, race, rank, religion, and so on. This drive can be both terrifying and exhilarating, both anguishing and liberating. Indeed, in early modern England, the verb “to die” often carried with it sexual connotations, as “to die” could also mean “to swoon” or “to orgasm.” We will take this bawdy pun seriously and explore salient connections between love (eros) and death (thanatos) in Shakespeare’s tragic corpus. This focus may appear quite narrow. In fact, it opens up new ways of reading and understanding Shakespeare’s works and the early modern culture that produced them. Required course work will include a presentation on staging or culture, a midterm, several shorter papers (2-3 pp.), and a longer paper (12-15 pp.).

English 4850.101: Renaissance Literature: Engendering the Renaissance
TR 12:30-1:45 Susan C. Staub
A female monarch. . .cross-dressed women.  . .boys playing girls playing boys on stage. . .wandering wombs and vagina dentata. . . hermaphrodites and sodomites. . .   The Renaissance was a period of rapidly changing ideas about the body and sexuality.   This course will explore a variety of Renaissance texts in order to interrogate the ways that gender and sexuality get constructed in the period.  What did it mean to have Elizabeth I on the throne--a woman who defied gender categories and presented herself in both male and female terms--and how did that fact affect ideas about masculinity and femininity? How fluid were those categories? Did they differ from one social class to another?  How different were Renaissance assumptions about masculinity/femininity from our own? In reading a broad selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, drama and prose, we will historicize notions about love, sexuality (including same sex, chastity, adultery and incest)  marriage, and gender relations. 
Possible readings include Marlowe, Hero and Leander and Edward II; Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl; George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J.; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller ; lyrics by John Donne, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips; poems, speeches and portraits of Elizabeth I;  Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9.

4860.101 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
MWF 1-1:50 Jennifer Wilson
This class takes its cue from two cultural events: the chartering of the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge in 1662 and the publication of The Spectator in 1711.  In retrospect, we see that these occurrences marked new modes of observing, recording, and responding to the world around us.  As we consider these changes, we will read a wide range of poetry and prose from throughout this era, including Daniel Defoe's mixture of reportage, allegory, and propaganda, Journal of a Plague Year.  Class activities will include two papers, two tests, and a presentation.

4895.101 20th Century British Literature: 1945 – Present
MWF 11:00 - 11:50 Dr. James Ivory
In our thinking about events following the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, we must start to think critically about historical “posts”: post-imperial, postmodern, and postcolonial.  This class will investigate a number of those “posts.”  Post-imperial: We will think about English cultural hegemony through a number of writers who are responding to the diminishing powers of the British Empire.  We will investigate how writers view their relationship to empire as contentious and complex.  While some although not all of these national writers embrace some forms of Englishness, their writings often reveal that to write in English does not mean to prop up Britain’s cultural arrogance or collaborating in its global or local hegemonic practices.  Postmodern: While discussing and defining postmodernism, we will explore some writers whose biographies are culturally British but whose narrative strategies and subject matter interrogate the taxonomy of classical or canonical texts.  Postcolonial: We will also examine some postcolonial writers who investigate and interrogate Britain’s imposed language, educational, and cultural standards and systems, and cultural; these writers of English emerge from a number of national sites, like Nigerian, South African, Indian, and West Indian, among others.  By engaged in the complexities found in these writers’ fictions, we should begin to understand the importance of global communities, economies, diversity.  Now more than ever an understanding of multiculturalism in higher education is essential to the liberal arts and education.

5300.101 Studies Rhetoric & Composition
T 6:00 – 9:00pm Georgia Rhoades
This course will focus on Writing Across the Curriculum issues in Composition Studies:  we'll read several theorists, including Art Young, Toby Fulwiler, Susan McCleod, Michael Carter, Terry Zawacki, and Chris Anson.  While we'll consider models for programs and administrative issues, I will also ask students to conduct extensive primary and secondary research into the writing of one discipline.  

ENG 5650-101 Queer Theories and Histories of Sexualities
W     02:00 pm-05:50 pm   David Orvis
In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, Michel Foucault makes his memorable distinction between sodomy and homosexuality: “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious morphology.” While Foucault’s interrogation of the sodomite and the homosexual continues to influence the way we do histories of sexualities, historians and literary critics have usefully complicated the notion that sodomy was, ineluctably, an “utterly confused category”—one that would have precluded the formation of sexual selves. In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the debate Foucault is traditionally credited with inaugurating. In fact, we will begin with studies that predate Foucault and work our way forward to more recent interventions in queer literary history and culture. A central question will guide our reading and discussion: how do we do histories of sexualities and sexual identities without imposing our own, distinctly modern regimes of gender and sexuality? Requisite reading will include germinal works by Kenneth Borris, John Boswell, Alan Bray, James Creech, John D’Emilio, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Carla Freccero, Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Goldberg, David Halperin, Mary McIntosh, Rictor Norton, Adrienne Rich, Amy Richlin, David M. Robinson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alan Sinfield, Valerie Traub, Martha Vicinus, and Jeffrey Weeks. While the bulk of our reading will be in theory, the expectation is that students will use this material in the pursuit of their own scholarly interests. Required course work will include a presentation, a conference-length paper, and an article-length paper.

5870.101 Romantic Period
R 6:00 - 9:00pm    William D. Brewer
In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke provides the reader with a riveting, if inaccurate, description of an attempt on Marie Antoinette’s life:  “A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with ... blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.”  Inspired by one of the most popular literary genres of the Revolutionary period, Gothic novels, Burke casts Marie Antoinette as a terrorized heroine and the revolutionaries as bloodthirsty villains.  In this class we will explore the connections between the French Revolution and British Gothic literature, which was at the height of its popularity during the 1790s.  We will consider the following questions:  how do Gothic tales reflect anxieties about revolutionary violence, social chaos, and moral license?  How do these texts comment on the reign of terror, the injustices of the old regime, the plight of Marie Antoinette, and riots by the sans-culottes?  To what extent are Gothic novels, plays, and poems reactions against the empiricism of the Enlightenment and the so-called “Age of Reason”?  Is Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey an effective critique or dismissal of the Gothic novel as a serious literary genre?  How can Frankenstein be read allegorically as a meditation on the French Revolution’s cycle of violence?  Required texts will include Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (which has nothing to do with the French Revolution), a few poems and plays. Course requirements will include two medium-length papers, oral presentations, and a final examination.