Courses
ENGL-101C College Writing (3)
This course requires students to write personal and expository essays in response to texts and class discussion on a range of issues. Its goal is to improve students’ writing and critical thinking. Students work toward understanding texts and exploring and communicating ideas, as well as toward mastery of the conventions of written English. The course design encourages active participation and collaborative learning. Students who have taken a Freshman Learning Community may not earn credit for ENGL 101C.
Attributes: YLIB ZTRAENGL-101X LC College Writing (3)
This course requires students to write personal and expository essays in response to texts and class discussion on a range of issues. Its goal is to improve students’ writing and critical thinking. Students work toward understanding texts and exploring and communicating ideas, as well as toward mastery of the conventions of written English. The course design encourages active participation and collaborative learning. Students who have taken a Freshman Learning Community may not earn credit for ENGL 101C.
Attributes: LC YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-103 Writing Workshop (1)
This course provides additional writing instruction designed to reinforce the student’s classroom experience in ENGL 101C. It is intended for those students who are required to or who opt to register for it based on their ENG 101C writing assessment projects. Permission of the Writing Center Director is required for registration.
Attributes: YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-104 Writing Workshop (1)
This course, a continuation of ENGL 103, provides additional writing instruction designed to reinforce the student’s classroom experience in any of the 199C courses. It is intended for those students who are required to or who opt to register for it based on their experience in ENGL 101C. Permission of the Writing Center Director is required for registration.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-110X LC CriticalReading&Writing (3)
This course focuses on engaging students as writers and readers, building the reflective awareness needed for success in a wide range of college experiences. In this course, students will write consistently, receive feedback on their writing and give feedback to others, and practice conventions of academic writing. In addition, students will engage with challenging readings and begin putting others? ideas in conversation with their own. Building on the theme and topic of the specific Learning Community, readings in English 110 center on intellectual challenges and questions; in other words, course materials respond to and extend the conversations in academic communities of various kinds. Students who have taken a Freshman Learning Community may not earn credit for ENGL 101C.
Attributes: LC YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-152 WWI & Modern Literature (3)
This course will focus on the literature and culture of World War I, the “War to End All Wars,” which transformed the hearts and minds of all those who participated and called into question traditional values of militarism and patriotism. WW1 produced an unprecedented volume of reflective writing, both by participants and onlookers, and these writings capture the spirit of transformation that characterized the second decade of the twentieth century, including the advances in technology and communications that revolutionized the ways in which war was fought and perceived.
Attributes: YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-153 LC Writing in&Around Games (3)
As a growing cultural force, electronic games serve several important functions. In addition to commercially-produced games designed for entertainment, gaming is increasingly being used for education, training, activism, and art. This course will take a multidisciplinary approach to the study of video games, encompassing both the humanities and social sciences. Students will turn a critical eye both toward games themselves, and toward the culture and texts that surround them. Questions we will explore may include: How do games impact players? How do the concepts of narrative, interaction, and play change in a gaming environment? How can we evaluate games critically, aesthetically, and procedurally?
Attributes: LC YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-154 LC Reading the Court (3)
The Supreme Court of the United States has a unique role in our culture, in the way it both reads our norms and articulates them. The language of its rulings is enormously influential throughout American society, in ways we rarely recognize. In this course, we will read many important Supreme Court decisions, personal narratives of several individual justices, essays on the role of the Court, and fictional representations of the Court. The class will be largely discussion-based. Assignments will include traditional writing, legal writing, and mock trials.
Attributes: LC YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-155 Writing in the Digital Age (3)
This course explores how changes in technology affect writing as we know it. Students will both analyze writing produced on digital media and practice writing within these same media. A goal for the course will be to understand how we negotiate our identities in this hyper connected world.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-165 LC Images of Disability (3)
Studying disability in literature, art, and film helps us to explore what our culture decides is ‘normal,’ and to consider what makes us human. This course will ask students to examine cultural messages about ability and disability, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ through recent works such as Autobiography of the Face and Murderball, as well as through photographs of carnival ‘freak shows’ from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our readings will consist primarily of personal narratives, non-fiction essays, and autobiographical texts. As a whole, the reading and writing assignments for the course will allow students to explore their own understanding of disability while strengthening their use of analysis to determine what disability means in America today.
Attributes: LC YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: FreshmanENGL-199C RW Research-based Writing (3)
Students learn the basics of writing an academic research paper in this discipline. Emphasis is on elements of persuasive argumentation, the inclusion of more than one perspective on an issue, the proper use and documentation of sources, and revision. Students also learn how to make an effective oral presentation of their research. Department-determined topic may change from semester to semester and is likely to include literary texts as primary materials.
Restricted to freshmen and transfers.
Note: 199C courses may not be taken for credit more than once.
» Spring Research-based Writing (199) Courses & Topic Descriptions [pdf]
Attributes: RW YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: Freshman, SophomoreENGL-200C Literary Analysis (3)
In this course, designed for English majors and minors, students develop the ability to analyze literary texts closely and thoroughly. Students learn to apply the vocabulary of literary studies and to consider such external influences as biography and culture in their readings of poetry, drama, and prose works. The course also includes an introduction to the relationship between critical methods and literary theory.
Attributes: ENLT HHSM HHUM YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-201 Y SENGL-201 Career Seminar (.5)
The objective of this course is to foster the academic success of students who are beginning the English major at St. John Fisher College. Students will explore career options and career preparation. This course, which meets for five one-hour sessions during the semester, is required of all students enrolled in ENGL 200C and strongly recommended for all transfer students majoring in English. Graded S/U.
Attributes: YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C Y D-ENGL-203C Hist of English Language (3)
This class goes back in time (figuratively) to explore how English came to be the language we speak today. We look at some important historical moments that made English such a hybrid language, we study the building-blocks of language (phonology, morphology, syntax), and we examine the way English is still changing and expanding (slang, dialect, new vocabulary).
Formerly titled: History of English
Attributes: ENLT YLIBENGL-204 P1 Nature Writing (3)
What does it mean to be green from a literary point of view? How has nature writing shaped the landscape of American culture and behaviors? In this course we will begin to answer those questions by reading and writing about the environment. Through the study of fiction, memoir, and scientific writing, students will explore their place in relation to the natural world while simultaneously cultivating literacy skills.
Attributes: AMHU ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-207C P1 Bible as Literature (3)
In this course, we read from the all-time best-selling book, an anthology of stories, poetry, songs, history, law and building instructions. We read the Bible as a literary work, with special attention to the themes, structure, and style of biblical narrative. The course considers selected books of both Hebrew and Christian scripture, along with works that adapt biblical materials to modern purposes, demonstrating the ongoing life of biblical texts in our culture.
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-210 P1 Literature & Healing (3)
Are mind, body, and spirit separate entities, and how are they reflected in literature and affected by self-expression? This course will examine how creative and analytical writers have addressed issues of health, illness, and healing. Texts and discussions may include issues such as cancer, AIDS, and mental illnesses; fertility issues; grief; epidemics and war; drugs and altered states of consciousness; stages of life and death; the ethics of healing; and different cultures’ approaches to sickness, health, and healing.
Attributes: ENLT HHCF HHUM P1 YLIBENGL-211 P1 Young Adult Literature (3)
How young is a young adult? How adult is an adolescent? How dark can children?s literature be, before it crosses a border? Who establishes these borders ? teachers? Parents? Librarians? Publishers? In this course, we consider those questions and read YA lit both as works of literature and as texts for education. Students will explore current issues surrounding YA literature, such as censorship, multiculturalism, dystopian visions, sex and violence in art, and the place of the individual in society.
Attributes: P1 YLIBENGL-212C P1 Shakespeare and Movies (3)
Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen on stage, and many people think if he were alive today he would be making movies. In this class, we spend plenty of time reading Shakespeare’s works to understand his use of plot, character, structure, language, and genre, and we also put ourselves in the position of his audience. Viewing multiple film versions of plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Henry V, we consider how various interpretations are projected on screen, and we discuss what is gained and lost by close and loose adaptations of Shakespeare’s works.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-214D P1 Reading Gender (3)
This course is an introduction to feminist literary theory. Students will learn some of the major schools of feminist thought over the centuries and learn to apply these perspectives to a number of literary works. Major issues will include concepts of authorship and voice, representations of gender roles, and ideas of identity and agency. In addition, students will develop skills in close reading and critical analysis. Cross-listed with WGST 214D.
Attributes: ENLT P1 WGST YLIBENGL-215C P1 News from Poems (3)
“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” wrote American poet William Carlos Williams late in his life, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” This course investigates both the kind of news that poems bring “about who we are and what we do; about what we know and what we dream” and the challenges of getting that news. Readings include poems in English reaching back to medieval ballads, but the course emphasizes the work of poets writing the news of our own time and considers forms of poetry ranging from the epic to the popular song. No special prior knowledge of poetry or poetic forms is expected.
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-218C P1 Theater and Design (3)
Is a play the same when performed by different actors? With very different scenery? Whether in front of an outdoor audience of 20 or a gala audience of 500? In this course, we imagine a range of productions for a range of plays, taking into account budgets and political moments, sounds and silences, interpretations and physical humor. The course considers cultural and performance histories, self-conscious literary traditions, and the ways a present-day audience might “read” the plays. Formerly titled: P1 Introduction to Drama
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-220D P1 Black Writers in U.S (3)
Black writing in America is richly historical, international, and revisionary. We explore its sources in African culture, its often complicated relationship with traditional American culture, and its remarkable vitality. The primary focus of the course will be on Black writers of the 20th century, including Hughes, Dunbar, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Brooks, Morrison, Walker, and Walcott.
Formerly titled: P1 Modern African Amer Lit
Attributes: AMHU ENEA ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-226C P1 Arthurian Legend (3)
A study of the historical beginnings and literary development of the legend of King Arthur. The course concentrates on medieval literature, the time in which the legend came to have wide popular appeal, but includes some examples of later use of the legend as well as Arthurian films.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-230 P1 Lit of Travel (3)
Martin Buber said, “all journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” In this course, we investigate why humans willingly pull up stakes and travel to unfamiliar places – and write about the experiences. We read fiction and nonfiction narratives that investigate the human desire to leave home, see other lands and people, and learn about the self in the process. We also investigate anthropological theories about travel and its uses. Authors may include Mark Twain, Isabella Bird, Mary McCarthy, Bruce Chatwin, Mary Morris, Jon Krakauer, Andrew Harvey, Douglas Preston, and others.
Attributes: ENLT P1 WGST YLIBENGL-231C P1 Detective & Mystery (3)
Detective and mystery narratives raise fascinating questions about the process of reading and interpretation; the detective, like the reader/critic, reads “signs” in order to transform chaos into order. Beginning with the Old Testament and ending with The Silence of the Lambs (both novel and film), this course considers detective and mystery narratives by such writers as Poe, Conan Doyle, Collins, Sayers, Christie, Du Maurier, Hillerman, and others. By giving highbrow and lowbrow mysteries equal footing, the course challenges traditional notions of canonicity, including the distinction between literature and film. Students are responsible for applying major theoretical arguments to texts that focus on “reading,” while they study the changing cultural implications of “mystery.”
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-235D P1 Irish Literature (3)
What does it mean to be an Irish writer? How do religion, family, and nationalism feature in drama, short stories, poetry, and novels by Irish writers? Students will explore these themes through reading and writing about the literature of Ireland. This course will examine the evolution of Irish culture through a study of selected works primarily from the 20th century.
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-236D CC The American Dream (3)
What is the American Dream? What is “American”? This course explores the American Dream – the dream of financial success, independence, tolerance, religious freedom – through the eyes of disparate groups. We emphasize the problem of cultural integration/assimilation alongside attempts to define a diverse culture as “one nation, indivisible.”
Attributes: AMHU CC ENEA ENLT YLIBENGL-237 P1 Flash Fiction (3)
Whatever name you choose for it?short-short, sudden, minute, micro, or flash?don?t be fooled by the diminutive stature of this genre; powerful storytelling can be found in the briefest of forms. In this seven-week online course, students will learn and practice the process of writing and critiquing flash fiction. This course translates the traditional workshop format of creative writing courses into an online experience, and the majority of students? time each week will be spent reading, discussing, writing, and responding to very short works of fiction written by their classmates.
Attributes: ENWR P1 YLIBENGL-239D P1 Haunted Houses (3)
Haunted Houses are a staple of the gothic genre. In this class we will investigate the Haunted House “formula” and variations on it, seeking to understand how it is that haunted house stories “get you where you live.” If home is where we are supposed to feel most secure, why do we enjoy stories which threaten this comfort zone? Course material will include short stories and novels by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Edith Wharton and Henry James, as well as films and some psychoanalytic theory such as Freud’s “Uncanny.”
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-247C P1 War in Literature (3)
This class takes an inclusive, multi-faceted look at our nation at war–at war with racial “others,” at war with itself, at war abroad–and how war has affected not only soldiers who fight but also non-combatants. It examines depictions of U.S. wars in literature and films, from the colonial era’s “Indian Wars” to the Vietnam war. Because of the focus on literature (text and film), we also explore how the literary form affects the material.
Attributes: AMHU ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-248 P5 World Literature (3)
This course introduces students to a wide variety of literature from around the world, in translation, with attention to how such literature communicates the values and traditions of the cultures in which the writers live. The course will help students learn to analyze literature through written and oral assignments.
Spring 2015 Focus: Middle East
Attributes: ENLT ENWL P5 YLIBENGL-249 P1 Open Book:Read to Write (3)
We often hear that the more we read the better we write. In that spirit, this course will engage students in accomplishing two significant goals: to read actively and thoughtfully and to write creatively and critically. By analyzing a variety of written works that might range from a Shakespearean sonnet, to a popular novel or memoir, to a rap song, students will learn how close reading contributes to an understanding of the elements of the writer?s craft, including point of view, characterization, dialogue, image, and voice . At the same time, they will seek to improve their writing through imitation and practice.
Attributes: ENWR P1 YLIBENGL-251 P1 Int Creative Nonfiction (3)
Creative nonfiction is the happy accident of fact and craft at the intersection of journalism and literature. In this class, students will draw on stories from their lives and the larger world to write vivid, compelling prose about people and events as a way of better understanding the world around them. Students read the published work of others and share their own work in small groups with an eye toward improvement.
Attributes: ENWR P1 YLIBENGL-253 P1 Intro Creative Writing (3)
Does poetry, fiction, or play-writing light your fire? Would you like to spend a whole semester igniting your imagination and kindling your writing skills? Creative writing will help you to discover and nurture your unique writer?s voice through guided exercises. Students will share their own work in small groups with an eye toward improvement.
Attributes: ENWR P1 YLIBENGL-259 Argument and Persuasion (3)
What persuasive strategies make some people and groups more convincing than others? Have you ever “won” an argument only to lose something larger in the process? Why do we use war metaphors to describe the act of arguing? In this course we will examine our assumptions and experiences with making arguments and explore theories of persuasion from the fields of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. We will experiment with using language persuasively to become more aware of the rhetorical situation, including audience, genre, context, and purpose. Emphasis will be given to both raising awareness in students? personal approaches to argument, and also raising awareness of notable moments in the history of persuasion in social, cultural, and political contexts.
Attributes: ENWR YLIBENGL-261C Topics:Sexuality & Lit (3)
Sometimes gender and sexuality are portrayed in literature in ways that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes and sometimes in ways that break or transcend them. How does language?and literature specifically?shape sexuality and sexual politics? The course looks at LGBTQ issues in a wide variety of types of texts, old and new.
Attributes: ENLT WGST YLIBENGL-262P CC Tpc: Coming to America (3)
This class gathers literary texts created by American writers of color in order to explore issues of racial and ethnic identity and difference. The texts chosen will offer a sampling of the richness of American literary and cultural traditions, and will focus on both immigrant and non-immigrant groups. The goal of this course is for students to develop an appreciation for a range of responses to the world?seen through a variety of American eyes?and an awareness of the many different ways of defining a self and a community in American cultural and geographical spaces. Formerly titled: Ethnicity & Literature
Fall 2016 Topic: Multicultural Literature
Attributes: CC ENEA ENLT YLIBENGL-263C P1 Topic:Lit & the Arts (3)
Fall 2017 Topic: Music, Literature, Politics Does music and literature merely reflect culture or can they change it? Can a song shift how the public thinks about an issue? In this course we will listen to the work of Marvin Gaye, Beyonce, Green Day, and others. How do artists represent and give voice to an experience of America that exists outside of mainstream culture? How does their music enact a “politics” that engages their audience in questions of class, race, and ideology? All of these questions will take shape in a course that also focuses on developing college-level reading, writing, and speaking skills.
Attributes: AMHU ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-264D P5 Topic:Politics & Lit (3)
As long as politics involves controversy and persuasion by words and images, literature will sometimes be inspired by, enlisted in, or blamed for these disputes and the social struggles they represent. Examining both traditional literary works and works intended to challenge and redefine our expectations of literature, the versions of this course will explore ways that books and authors, voluntarily and involuntarily, have been drawn into politics.
Spring 2016 Topic: Writing about War in the 21st Century
This course will examine prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and blogs concerning the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya that have marked this young century. Our material will be witnessed or imagined and written from several perspectives: male and female, military and civilian, Afghan and Iraqi as well as American. Our fundamental questions will be: what can contemporary texts add to our understanding of the complex and intense experience of war in our own time? And how does war shadow our experience of the world away from it?
Attributes: AMHU ENLT P5 YLIBENGL-266 Writing as Social Practice (3)
Does developing reading and writing skills as a writer for the college newspaper differ from developing them in a prison writing group? How does your context–at home, work, school, and play?shape your work with texts? This course introduces students to some of the most important issues underlying contemporary studies of literacy. Typically, the general public, as well as many teachers and researchers, assumes that to be ?literate? an individual has attained a particular level of reading and writing competence. However, since the 1980s “new literacy” research has successfully challenged that view. Literacy?the social practices surrounding texts?and our understanding of it is thoroughly entangled in a complex web of cultural values, beliefs, and practices. The objective of this course is to examine these interconnections and, in doing so, become more purposeful, stronger readers and writers. Note: Beginning Fall 2011, this course replaces ENGL 258 in the English major and Writing minor.
Attributes: ENWR YLIBENGL-268 P1 Fundamentals of Film (3)
This course will begin by defamiliarizing the apparent accessibility of film. It will acquaint students with the basic tenets of film studies, including the technical aspects of film production, visual communication theory, and theories of film “authorship.” Then we’ll study a wide variety of films, including early silent movies, canonical classics like Citizen Kane, and films from divergent genres and traditions, like The Draughtsman’s Contract, Do the Right Thing, and Friday the Thirteenth. Student writing will focus on three areas: on how technique (form) creates content; on theories of visual pleasure; and on the politics of film ideology.
Attributes: ENLT P1 PROD YLIB
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-270C Becoming a Writing Tutor (1)
The best way to learn something is to teach it. This course trains students to become writing tutors in the College’s Writing Center. The course covers the writing, critical reading, and communication skills necessary to become an effective writing consultant. Dedicated writers in all majors are welcome. In addition to the weekly class meeting, students will be part of the Writing Center staff; as such, they will spend two hours each week there both observing and tutoring. Graded S/U. Permission of the Writing Center Director required to register.
Attributes: YLIB
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-271 Legal Writing (3)
This course is intended to be an introduction to reading and writing legal documents. Students in this course will learn the different kinds of legal documents lawyers rely on and create but will also learn methods of reading and analyzing that are crucial to work in the law. Individually and as groups, students will research, read, and analyze cases and write up their findings in the proper formats, primarily the legal memorandum and the legal brief. At the end of the semester, students will have an opportunity to present their findings as if they were arguing before a trial judge. Formerly titled: Intro to Legal Writing
Students must have successfully completed a 199C course to register.
Attributes: YLIB ZEXL
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-272 P2 Digital Feminisms (3)
Reliance on technologies is, and has been for some time, an essential component of daily life in contemporary America. However, while we frequently treat the technological artifacts around us as simple tools, doing so ignores the complex cultural forces that shape our technologies. This course will use feminist theory to explore the co-production of identity and technology, examining how each helps to shape the other. Indeed, first-wave feminism emerged at a time of great technological upheaval, and as technology has continued to change rapidly over time, so to has feminism.
Attributes: ENWR P2 YLIBENGL-273 Topics in Film & TV Hist (3)
This course will cover a topic not regularly offered from the perspective of film and television history, either focusing on the history of a specific genre or on film and television within a particular era.
Possible topics include the history of screen comedies, Hollywood film, silent film, movie musicals, the sitcom, avant-garde film, video art, science fiction film and television, British Film, French New Wave, and New German Cinema.
Firmerly titled: Topics: Hist of Film & TV
Spring 2017 Topic: James Bond This course will explore the series of James Bond films with an eye to ways in which the films represent and embody an evolving set of cultural values over the last fifty years. Of special interest will be issues of gender and class, nationalism and globalization, technology and late capitalism. Plus, James Bond!
Attributes: YLIBENGL-284 P5 Global Business Writing (3)
This course studies the many ways cultural practices and traditions inform public and professional writing throughout the world. The course examines how language, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, traditions, customs, and values affect communication across cultures. With this knowledge, class members will develop awareness in how cultural perspectives influence and shape human interactions, including the work of writers. Course participants will select a foreign culture and workplace context to research and present to peers.
Attributes: ENWR YLIB ZCIV ZEXL
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-290 Science, Rhetoric, Public (3)
This course teaches the craft of writing and speaking about science research for general audiences. Our class sessions will cover how to read science research, writing explanatory and narrative prose, finding the most interesting news angles in published research, interviewing scientists, writing key story elements with creativity and accuracy, responding to editing, and presenting our work to real audiences. Through course readings, class activities, group and individual writing and research projects, and a public oral communication contest, we will experiment in the range of work science writers and speakers do, develop an understanding about the ethical and civic challenges of the work, learn about science communication as a career, and enhance your writing and oral communication skills along the way.
Attributes: ENWR YLIBENGL-293 P1 Early Engl Literature (3)
This course covers English literature written between the 10th and 17th centuries. Students become familiar with earlier forms of the English language, the genres which characterized literature of this period, and the cultural contexts which valorized and continue to valorize certain authors, subjects, and narrative styles in the literature of that period.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-294 P1 Milton to Romantics (3)
John Milton, who published Paradise Lost in 1667 at the end of his career, influenced every major writer in English for the next 150 years, yet each responded differently to Milton as a literary forebear. What did Milton mean to writers as different as Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth, and what accounts for their differences? How do England’s changing literary tastes reflect the social and economic changes that made it, by 1820, the world’s foremost industrial power? Why do classical literary forms give way to native English models, lyric displacing satiric verse? How do the poems of Wordsworth and Blake reflect the revolutionary impulse felt throughout Europe? The course considers these among other questions. Besides Milton, it includes such writers as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-295 P1 Literary Revolutions (3)
This course traces the evolution of English literature from the eighteenth century to present day, a period of extraordinary intellectual and social upheaval. The readings will investigate imaginative responses to debates between science and religion, the reorganization of communal life by the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and the impact of multiple wars and shifting political realities. We will consider how writers responded to these conflicts and continuities, paying close attention to their explorations of questions of genre, power, and the status of literary writing.
Formerly titled : P1 English Lit 1830-1950; P1 Victorians to Moderns; P1 British Lit. Since 1700
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-297 P1 Readings in Amer Lit (3)
Beginning with the Puritan arrival in the “New World,” this course traces the development of an American national literature. Students will learn about history and culture by reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from a variety of literary periods. Topics such as race, religion, immigration, and expansion will surface in readings by a range of writers who explore the possibilities of American experience and of an American voice.
Formerly titled: Emergence of American Lit
Attributes: AMHU ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-298 P1 Modern American Lit (3)
This course surveys American literature representing a period that ranges from the consolidation of a national culture following the Civil War to the current paradoxical condition of a sole global superpower whose national culture has seldom seemed more fragmented. Topics to be explored include intellectual and imaginative responses to industrialization and urbanization, to the culmination of westward expansion and the loss of the frontier, to the integration of free African Americans and millions of immigrants into the culture and the economy, and to the challenges and responsibilities of world power. Readings include the work of such writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and others.
Attributes: ENLT P1 YLIBENGL-306 Law & Literature (3)
Law and Literature is a growing field that includes both literary analysis of legal texts as well as the study of legal structures depicted in works of fiction. In both cases, work in the field examines how language helps us make sense of the everyday lives of citizens. The content of the course will shift each time it is offered: it might, for example, focus on novels featuring courtroom dramas, the writings of Supreme Court justices, or the history of censorship internationally. As in all 300?level English courses, students will improve their critical reading and writing skills, ability to interact with scholarship, and oral or digital communication skills.
Attributes: ENLT LEST YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D- OR ENGL-259 D- OR ENGL-271 D-ENGL-312C P1 Shakespeare (3)
Shakespeare’s plays have been and are continually re-interpreted by critics, theatrical and film productions, and audiences. Students investigate what literary interpretation is and how it is affected by historical and cultural contexts, reading the assigned texts both as works of literature and as scripts for a stage performance. In addition, students study current critical approaches to these plays to develop a sense of their own cultural lens for interpreting Shakespeare.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT P1 YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-318 English Lit Renaissance (3)
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, writers saw themselves as participating in a time of artistic rebirth. This course will offer an in-depth study of literature from this vibrant literary era. Reading literature of the time within a social and historical context, students will focus on issues such as the emerging ideas of authorship, nation, and gender in the English Renaissance.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-325 The Romantic Tradition (3)
Everything you think you know about poetry starts here. The expectation for strong emotion and unusual experience, the idea of poetic value, indeed poetic identity, as a matter not of education but of individual genius, particularly and even innately heightened sensitivity, and the dominance of the lyric mode ?these are significant and enduring innovations of the Romantic era, and they?re not the only ones. New conceptions of the natural world and our relation to it and a particular interest in the tensions between traditional ways of life, forms of community, and an increasingly industrialized and urban-centered modernity begin here, too. This course will explore the complex roots and branches of this broad cultural shift, with beginnings in the late 18th century and extensions well into the 20th, including its expression in the novel and other literary forms besides poetry, and sometimes in other arts as well.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-327 Studies in Victorian Lit (3)
Queen Victoria’s sixty-four-year reign (1837-1901) witnessed sweeping social changes: the growth of industrialization, imperialism, nationalism, and the struggle for women’s rights. At the same time, the writings of Marx and Engels, Darwin, Freud, and others challenged long-held ways of understanding the world. These profound social and intellectual changes paralleled the rise of narrative fiction and poetry, which achieved unequaled popularity with both writers and readers during this period. Because it is impossible in one semester TO comprehensively “cover” Victorian literature, and because literature is inextricably linked to culture, we study several writers’ imaginative responses to the sense of dividedness and loss that characterized Victorian culture.
Attributes: ENBL ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-329 Film/Television Analysis (3)
In this course, students will view a variety of films and television programs through critical perspectives related to montage, genre analysis, narrative, psychoanalysis, gender, and fan studies. This course is designed equally for students interested in film and television studies and those focused on video production.
Graded S/U.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: COMM-231 D- OR COMM-261 D- OR COMM-264 D- OR ENGL-200C D- OR ENGL-268 D- OR ENGL-273 D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-335 Studies in AFAM Literature (3)
This course will explore the work of African American writers who sought, largely between about 1965 and 1975, to create what we might think of as a Black nationalist cultural movement that paralleled the Black nationalist and Black Power political movements of the time. We?ll read poetry, plays, novels, cultural analysis, and philosophical arguments by such writers as Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, Nikki Giovanni, and several others. Beyond the individual works themselves, we will consider the political and social background of the movement, its similarities to and differences from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the idea of a ?Black Aesthetic,? and questions of the movement?s enduring influence.
Attributes: ENEA ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-336 Studies in Native Amer Lit (3)
This course explores the means, styles, and purposes of self-representation, at both the individual and the communal levels, in a variety of texts by Native American writers. Themes and issues might include the struggle for cultural authenticity, the experience of conquest and the idea of the reservation, ideas of nationhood and the relations of tribal nations to the United States, and the pluralism of cultures within the Native American community itself.
Attributes: ENEA ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-337 Ethnicities in/and Literature (3)
Ethnicity, often linked to but not the same as race, has a complex history in this nation whose motto is “E Pluribus Unum” (from many, one). It has been an obstacle to achieving our motto?s unity, and it has been a sustaining value to many of our citizens. Often it has been both these things simultaneously. This course examines literary representations of ethnic identity and culture, inviting students to explore definitions of ethnicity and their implications in the daily operations of peoples and nations. The course considers such questions as these: What is the difference between race and ethnicity? Do only “minorities” have ethnicity? How might we define ethnicity in an increasingly multiracial society? How do we handle the history of discrimination in today’s world?
Attributes: ENEA ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-339 American Literatures (3)
This course explores the ways in which Amerian Writers have conceptualized the American experience and America as a nation. The plural in the title is deliberate; variety is a key concept. Possible areas of focus include key genres such as Romance, realism, regionalism, and naturalism; central themes such as race and ethnicity, religion, technology and the self-making narrative; and repeated motifs such as the American Adam and the American abroad.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-341 Studies in Poetry (3)
Poetry has a history that goes back nearly three thousand years that we know of, more than one thousand in English. The different versions of this course will range among many eras, poets, and structural plans, but all will focus on issues arising from the nature, resources, evolution, and cultural status of the art of poetry and its practitioners. One recent version explored the whole careers of two poets, American Gwendolyn Brooks and Irishman Seamus Heaney, trying to restore a sense of context and of development inevitably missing from anthology selections. Other versions have explored Modernism as an idea and a motive in early 20th century poetry and the Poetic Sequence as a genre.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-342 Studies in the Novel (3)
However the particular texts for any version of this course are chosen, it will focus on issues related to the nature and history of the novel, the literary form that has, over the last 250 years, become the dominant mode of literary production. The course will explore conventions, traditions, and innovations in point of view, narrative structure and style, and the cultural place of the novel in relation to its historical moment and its audience.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-343 Studies in Drama (3)
Writers of drama rely on living people “actors and auditors” to make their works fully real. Studies in drama therefore rely on an understanding of those contemporary audiences, the conditions of theater, and the politics of the day, as well as shifting generic conventions. In some semesters, this course will focus on Renaissance drama, of which Shakespeare makes only a portion, in others Restoration Comedies, or Theater of the Absurd, or any of a number of periods in which the English language theater flourished.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-344 Popular Genres (3)
While it is common to distinguish between “high” culture and mass culture, that distinction is often blurred, and more and more consistently, critics have devoted concentrated attention to the products of mass culture, arguing that their widespread popularity and large audiences suggest that they may be especially revealing about the structures and concerns of the public mind. Moreover, the various forms of popular culture have their own sets of styles and conventions, just as the traditional arts do, that help us to define them and to recognize innovation within them. This course focuses on such popular genres as (mass market) films, TV series, music videos, genre fiction (e.g., romances, detective novels, westerns), and comics to investigate both the nature of the forms themselves and what they may tell us about their social and cultural contexts.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-346 Narrative and New Media (3)
Technologies shape the way people read, create, and analyze texts. In this class we?ll explore some of the new tools through which people are approaching literature in the digital age. Possible areas of focus include transformational media like online fan fiction, tools for multi-media presentations of a text, coding literary texts, and data mining resources for texts.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-347 Studies in Postcolonialism (3)
This course will introduce students to postcolonial theory to help them develop an understanding of the historical forces and literary influences shaping writers in both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Reading classic literature of Empire along with emerging literature from the postcolonial world, students will put texts into dialogue with each other and examine how the experience of colonization affects individual authors and the process of cultural production.
Attributes: ENLT ENWL YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-348 Women Writers (3)
An exploration of major works of English and/or American women writers often grouped by historical period. This course will attempt to discover common themes and images in women’s writing that we will place in a cultural and historical context. Mindful of the astonishing variety in this literature, students will try to discern whether there is what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar call “a strong continuity” in the writings of English-speaking women, and if so, to what degree, as Virginia Woolf contends, books (particularly by women) “continue each other”.
Attributes: ENLT WGST YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-349 Major Authors (3)
In addition to studying the literature of an author or group of authors in depth, students will examine the literary and social context which brought these authors to a place of prominence and the ways in which literary critics have approached their work.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-350 Literary Theory (3)
This course focuses on methods of interpretation. Students will read works of theory and learn to apply their theoretical perspectives to works of literature. In some semesters, the course might focus entirely on one branch of literary criticism. In another, the course might more fully survey the history of literary theories, including new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-351 Language of Animals (3)
Humans have long assumed that we are the only species on the earth that creates complex, multivalent languages. But researchers have consistently shown that animals use sign systems that have been ignored or underestimated by human beings, what we might call “animal languages.” In addition, humans? assumptions about the emotional and intellectual complexity of animals have been unsettled by evidence that animals think, feel, create, and communicate in ways that were previously unknown to us. What is our relationship to animals? Why do we identify with them as children, love some them as pets, but eat and abuse them in other circumstances? In this course, we?ll pair some of the biological findings about animal languages with literature written about animals, interrogating our relationship with animals, the beings that naturalist Henry Beston called “other nations, caught with us in the net of life and time.” Formerly titled: Literature & Other Discourses.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-352 Rhetorical Theory (3)
This course explores aspects of classical rhetorical theory in contemporary forms of communication, both digital and traditional. Students use the tools of classical rhetoric to answer questions: how does persuasion work? What are the distinctions between informing, entertaining, and persuading an audience? How does moral stance affect the ability to make an argument? How do invention, style, and organization interplay with argument? Students will learn to write and speak persuasively and to think critically about both contemporary and classical rhetoric.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-ENGL-353 Rhetorical History & Trad (3)
Can the silence of a Quaker Meeting be rhetorical? What rhetorics are embedded in the patchwork quilts that helped fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad? What are the main rhetorical strategies of the presidential campaigns and how have they appeared in the rhetorical choices of presidents? This course examines the rhetorical features of social, ethnic, religious, or political groups. We will read methods for analyzing cultural rhetoric in order to explore the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values that shape the identities and purposes of groups. Central to this approach is that all artifacts from a group are rhetorical, and so we will “read” traditional artifacts like sermons, speeches, letters, and essays, but also art, film, clothes, photos, bumper stickers, and so forth in our work to make sense of the traditions of the groups under investigation.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT YLIB ZCIV
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-ENGL-355 Professional Writing: Tpcs (3)
A professional writer is no mere machine, programmed to spew out formulas for easily identifiable occasions. Therefore, this course emphasizes decision-making processes that inform the ethical and effective design of professional texts. To ground our studies, we will explore principles and advanced practices of professional communications?situations where the stakes often involve monetary, human, or other valuable resources. Rhetorical principles of context, audience analysis, document design, and assessment are applied with professional rigor. Students may have the opportunity to work in collaboration with a community organization to design workplace documentation in digital or other formats, including grants, handbooks, letters, reports, and technical documents. In addition, students develop a portfolio of revised documents. Students will advance critical skills in language use, such as grammar, structure, and tone as they work to complete substantial professional projects.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB ZCIV
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-356 Editing and Publishing (3)
The world of editing and publishing is filled with exciting challenges that demand specific skills: guiding a writer to complete an article or book for publication; collaborating with a team of editors, graphic designers and marketers to get a book to readers; or putting out an online publication, such as a monthly newsletter or journal, for a trade publisher or a not-for-profit. This course introduces many of the essential skills needed for editing and publishing at the professional level. Writing, editing, and in-class critiques will be a regular feature of a course that teaches grammatical and rhetorical competency. Readings, activities, and projects involve analysis of diverse genres and contexts for editing, including a focus on how evolving technologies affect publication. Practice in editing sample texts will be supplemented by projects, including revision and editing a text of one’s own for a specific purpose, audience, and publication; and collaboration with a community partner on a text bound for publication.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB ZCIV
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-361 Writing with New Media (3)
What does it mean to be a writer and reader in the 21st century? How have developments in digital media required writers to consider the visual in addition to the verbal as well as interactivity? How do conflicting interpretations of copyright law impact creativity? This course focuses on the emerging area of digital writing studies, and we will discuss texts and new media works?both scholarly and popular?addressing such issues as the impact of information technology on research and teaching/learning, the social and cultural dimensions of technology, and models of writing associated with digital media.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D- OR COMM-263 D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-370 Gender and Writing (3)
Social differences of every kind are reflected in the way we write. Differences such as age, social class, and ethnicity inform our beliefs and values; they shape our experiences and how we express those experiences to others. This course examines how gender shapes written communication. It draws on a variety of research fields, including feminist theory, literacy studies, rhetorical theory, and literary studies to define concepts such as masculinity and femininity. Course readings and projects explore how critics, writers, and artists imagine the relationship between gender and writing.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT WGST YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-ENGL-371 Creative Writing:Fiction (3)
In this course, students will give and receive detailed critical evaluation of short stories and chapters of novels. Students will leave the course with several works of short or longer fiction, according to their own preference.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-251 D- OR ENGL-253 D-ENGL-372 Creative Writing:Poetry (3)
In this course, students will give and receive detailed critical evaluation of poetry. Students will leave the course with a collection of poems.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-251 D- OR ENGL-253 D-ENGL-374 Creative Writing: Drama (3)
In this course, students will give and receive detailed critical evaluation of plays. Students will leave the course with several short plays or substantial scenes from a longer play.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-251 D- OR ENGL-253 D-ENGL-376 Creative Writ: NonFiction (3)
In this course, students will give and receive detailed critical evaluation of different types of creative nonfiction. Structure, voice, character and scene will all receive emphasis in the course. Students will determine their own semester projects.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-251 D- OR ENGL-253 D-ENGL-378 Topics in Advanced Writing (3)
This course explores a specific type of writing, according to the interest of the instructor. Past topics have included Young Adult Fiction, Detective Fiction, Humor Writing, and Sports Literature. In this course, students will give and receive detailed critical evaluation of different types of creative nonfiction. Students will determine their own semester projects. Spring 2016 Topic: Literary Writing and Publishing This course provides a thorough introduction to contemporary literary magazine culture with the assumption that students have an interest in publishing their own creative writing. In addition to writing and revising creative works, students will read and review submissions for The ANGLE, SJFC?s literary magazine, gaining experience and insight into the editorial selection process as they prepare to submit their own finished works for publication.
Attributes: ENWP ENWR YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-251 D- OR ENGL-253 D-ENGL-380 Visual Rhetoric (3)
Developing a critical awareness of the way images, both moving and still, are constructed to convey particular messages is an important part of rhetorical awareness in the digital age. This course will explore various theories of visual rhetoric, using them as a lens through which to approach a variety of texts. Artifacts being analyzed in the course include graphic novels, film and television, advertisements, memorial spaces and museums.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-381 The Rhetoric of Hate (3)
Hate crimes and acts of symbolic and physical violence against particular people and groups can usually be tracked to specific cultural discourses and worldviews. In this course, students learn how rhetorical histories of hate have formed the foundations of genocide, racial supremacist ideologies, homophobia, and sexism. We will also study how these developments have been resisted by forces seeking social justice. Through the lens of rhetorical and cultural theories, we will analyze the historical, political, and economic contexts that have produced the rhetorics of hate and the rhetorics of social justice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT YLIB ZCIV
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-ENGL-382 Digital Literacies (3)
The popularity of blogging, social networking sites, and Twitter mean more people are writing more words than ever before, and that writing can be read and commented on instantly. As a result, people are not just consuming media but also producing media. What it means to be a writer and reader is changing. Literacy is in a transitional period, and these new ways of writing and reading are called “new literacies.” In our readings, discussions, and projects we will consider the social, cultural, and legal implications of digital media and the new conditions for literacy.
Attributes: ENWR ENWT YLIB
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D- OR COMM-263 D-
Restrictions: Excluding: -Class: FreshmanENGL-420 Senior Literature Seminar (3)
This is the capstone course for senior English Department majors, culminating in an extensive research paper (20-25 pages) of each student?s design, along with an oral presentation. During the semester, students read articles from academic journals in order to become familiar with critical perspectives on literary and cultural texts. In their research papers, the students then situate their own critical perspectives on a text (or texts) within the context of established critical discourse.
Attributes: ENLT YLIB ZCAP
Pre-requisites: ENGL-200C D-ENGL-425 Senior Writing Seminar (3)
This capstone course for senior English Department majors is a writing seminar open only to senior English majors with a writing concentration and senior writing minors. The course culminates in an extensive project of each individual student?s own design. Each project includes a substantial written component and an oral presentation. During the semester, students read scholarly and other texts in order to become familiar with critical and rhetorical perspectives on writing. Students then situate their own writing and critical perspectives on a text (or texts) within the context of established critical discourse.
Attributes: ENWR YLIB ZCAP
Pre-requisites: ENGL-259 D-ENGL-475 Washington DC-Internship (6 TO 9)
Washington Experience semester is offered through The Washington Center. Permission of the advisor, department chair, and TWC liaison (Dr. Monica Cherry) is required to register.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-476 WashDC Experience-Sem (3 TO 6)
Washington Experience semester is offered through The Washington Center. Permission of the advisor, the department chair and TWC liaison (Dr. Monica Cherry) is required to register.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-477 WashDC Experience-Forum (1 TO 3)
Washington Experience semester is offered through The Washington Center. Permission of the advisor, the department chair and TWC liaison (Dr. Monica Cherry) is required to register.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-490 Internship (1 TO 3)
Through the department’s internship program, eligible junior and senior majors may earn academic credit for supervised off-campus work in business and industry. No more than three credits earned in an internship will be counted toward the major. Permission of the internship coordinator is required to register.
Attributes: YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Major: English, English -Class: Junior, SeniorENGL-496 Independent Study (.5 TO 3)
In consultation with a given instructor, the student decides on a topic for consideration. A written proposal, approved by the instructor, is then submitted to the department chair for approval. The student’s independent study culminates in a paper of approximately 25-30 pages. Completion of the Independent Study/Tutorial Authorization form is required.
Attributes: YLIB
Restrictions: Including: -Class: SeniorENGL-498H Honors in English (3)
A one- or two-semester sequence of independent study during the senior year, culminating in a thesis. Upon completion of the project, a student receives three or six hours of 400-level credit toward the major. The candidate should carefully select a member of the department to direct the project and work closely with him or her. The advisor evaluates the student’s performance and determines a final grade. No later than the end of the junior year, the student should consult with his or her director and submit a detailed description of the project to the chair of the department for approval. Completion of the Independent Study/Tutorial Authorization form is required.
Attributes: YLIBENGL-499H Honors In English (3)
A one- or two-semester sequence of independent study during the senior year, culminating in a thesis. Upon completion of the project, a student receives three or six hours of 400-level credit toward the major. The candidate should carefully select a member of the department to direct the project and work closely with him or her. The advisor evaluates the student’s performance and determines a final grade. No later than the end of the junior year, the student should consult with his or her director and submit a detailed description of the project to the chair of the department for approval. Completion of the Independent Study/Tutorial Authorization form is required.
Attributes: YLIB