ENG 207-401 Beginning Workshop in Imaginative Writing: Fiction
T 6:00-8:30
Campbell, T.

A weekly workshop in the craft and creation of prose fiction and imaginative non-fiction, this course also offers support in developing a regular writing practice, one grounded in observation and sense image-based journal work. To that end, and as weekly meetings will be conducted primarily as workshops, devoted to the reading and development of your own work in progress, the two required texts serve as guides along the way, offering potential models, reflections on craft and form, and journal writing ideas. In addition to steadily increasing weekly writing practice and log of time spent, assignments will include four typed submissions of journal work (3-5 pp. each), and at least one typed submission and in-class reading of a longer story. 

Texts: Goldberg, Natalie, Writing Down the Bones; O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried

NOTE: Attend first class; registration won't guarantee a seat

ENG/LIN 210-401  History of the English Language
MW 6:00-7:15
O’Hara, M.

See description for ENG/LIN 210-001.

ENG/LIN 211-001  Introduction to Linguistics I
MWF 9:00-9:50
El-Guindy, B.

The first semester of a sequence of introductory courses on the scientific study of human language. We will explore the units of meaning and patterned structures of three of the four aspects of human grammar: morphology, phonology and syntax. We will then examine how the morphological, phonological and syntactic systems of all human languages are similar, and how they can change over the course of time. 

ENG/LIN 211-003  Introduction to Linguistics I
MWF 11:00-11:50
Harden, K.

See description for ENG/LIN 211-001.

ENG/LIN 212-001  Introduction to Linguistics II
TR 9:30-10:45
Bosch, A.

This is the second semester of a two-semester sequence introducing the study of Linguistics.  Linguistics is the scientific study of human language as a system.  Everyone knows a language--but what does it mean to know a language?  How are languages different from one another?  How are they similar?  This course will introduce students to the social aspects of the study of linguistics, focusing on the issues and problems of interest within each of these fields; topics include semantics, first and second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, brain and language, psycholinguistics, and animal communication. 

ENG/LIN 212-003  Introduction to Linguistics II
MW 3:00-4:15
Harden, K.

See description for ENG/LIN 212-001.

ENG 281-002  Introduction to Film
TR 12:30-1:45
Marksbury, T.

Our experience of film is so immediate and so simultaneous that this course attempts to break down the elements of confronting a movie into smaller, more manageable units--cinematography, editing, etc. At the same time, the overarching point of view will be our reception of narrative patterns and genre conventions. Towards that end, we will look at classical and more contemporary examples of the horror film, the screwball comedy, the western, the noir, etc.

We will also examine at least one silent film and a handful of so-called “art films” from other countries. With any luck, close readings of these movies will yield both particular riches and more general conclusions about the nature of film. When we first start really thinking about film, we depend too much on how we are taught to think about literature.

Although a focus on such matters as character, dialogue, and them is important, even essential, the jump we aim to make here is analyzing film as film, looking into the uniquely cinematic properties of these visual texts before us.

We will be using The Film Experience, by Corrigan and White, 2nd edition, and A Short Guide to Writing About Films, by Corrigan, as required reading. Films will range from Spike Lee’s X to James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil to Jean Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. Note: most film viewings will be scheduled outside of class. Expect plentiful discussion, a very short (5-7 pages) and somewhat longer (10-12 pages) essay, a mid-term, and a final exam which is not comprehensive.

LIN 317-001  Language & Society: English Around the World
TR 2:00-3:15
El-Guindy, B.

Discussions in this seminar will focus on structural properties of varieties of English around the world; descriptive surveys (covering both phonology and grammar) of the main national standard Englishes, as well as a selection of the distinctive regional, ethnic and social varieties and also major contact and ESL varieties; historical and cultural background and current sociolinguistic situation of the respective regions; global tendencies in phonological and grammatical variation (i.e. what are the least/most frequent features); notion of Standard English; attitudes to local varieties of English and the problem of standards.  Tentative textbook:  English Around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives by Jenny Cheshire Jenny Cheshire (editor) 1996 edition. Cambridge University Press.

LIN/ANT 319-401  Historical Linguistics
TR 5:30-6:45
Guindon, L.

A language changes over time, for example the language of your great grandmother will differ to the language you speak. Some of these changes are subtle and some are quite dramatic, especially over long periods of time. This course explores language change through historical processes that affect the phonology, morphology and syntax of a language’s grammar. It also introduces methods for reconstructing an ancestral language from what we know about a descendant language together with what we know about the ‘science’ of language change.

The objectives of the course are:

• to acquaint students with the fundamental theoretical principles and hypotheses of historical linguistics and their usefulness for understanding the forces which cause all living languages to change through time;
• to familiarize students with the techniques for analyzing and describing linguistic changes in a systematic way;
• to introduce students to the methods of language reconstruction.

Required Text: R. L. Trask’s Historical Linguistics [2^nd Edition] (Hodder Arnold, 2007).

ENG 330-004  Text and Context: The Great Gatsby
TR 12:30-1:45
James, P.

We will read Fitzgerald’s most celebrated novel and work to place it in various historical and literary contexts. Students will practice close reading and literary analysis, and will work beyond the boundaries of the text according to our collective and their individual interests.  We will certainly think of Gatsby in relation to World War I, the “New Woman” and changing gender roles in the 1920s, the arc of Fitzgerald’s career, and as a “great American novel.”  Critical readings will help us reflect on the relationship between history and literature, and on the methods of “new historicism.”  Assignments will include group projects, close readings, and a research paper.

ENG 331-001  Survey of British Literature I
MW 3:00-4:15
Giancarlo, M.

A reading survey of British literature from Beowulf to Milton (c. 500-1700), with special attention given to Old English lyric, Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Renaissance lyric, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney and the sonnet form, William Shakespeare’s drama, Seventeenth Century metaphysical lyric, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The focus of this course is almost exclusively on poetry with a few prose texts. There are also readings in historical background for context. Grades are based on weekly quizzes, mid-term exam, final exam, and attendance/participation.

ENG 334-001  Survey of American Literature I

MWF 10:00-10:50

Clymer, J.

This course will be an immersion in the literature and cultural history of America from the sixteenth century through roughly the Civil War.  Our primary, though not our sole focus will be on the complex and often ambivalent ways in which concerns of race, identity, and nationhood were imagined and intertwined by writers in these centuries.  Our reading will begin with the literature of empire – narratives of exploration written for a European audience by sixteenth-century adventurers and merchants.  This will be followed by a unit focusing on the writing produced by early New England and Southern colonials; here we will read accounts of internal strife and dissent stemming from gender and religious differences, while we also study the colonists’ fear borne of their contact with natives.  Next, as the colonies make the turn toward nationhood in the eighteenth century, we will study their increasing preoccupation with what being an “American” seemingly implies and entails, as well as what it excludes.  Finally, we will devote the last several weeks of the term to the stunning outpouring of work generated by American writers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.  In this unit, we will understand the writing of America’s most famous authors – including Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Dickinson, Brown, and Douglass – within the context of a roiling historical milieu dominated by slavery, women’s rights, and a changing economic structure. 

The primary text will be the Norton Anthology of American Literature, volume 1 and a few novels.  Students should expect to come away from this class with a deep knowledge of both famous and often-undervalued American writers, as well as a firm grounding in the cultural history within which these men and women produced their work. 

ENG 336-001  Studies in American Authors: Gloria Naylor & Octavia Butler
MWF 11:00-11:50
Oaks, J.

Breakers of boundaries, Naylor and Butler grow fresh universes to recover/recreate the mythic past/turbulent present/resplendent future of African America. Works by Gloria Naylor to be studied include: Linden Hills (1986), Mama Day (1989), and Bailey’s Café (1992).  Texts by Octavia Butler to be explored are: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)--known collectively as Xenogenesis (re-issued as Lilith’s Brood); Fledgling (2005) will also be part of our reading.  A couple of short papers, a presentation, group project, a take-home exam, and much lively discussion comprise the major assignments.

ENG 336-401  Studies in American Authors: Raymond Carver & Bobbie Ann Mason
M 6:00-8:30
Grubbs, M.

The course will journey through the works—mostly short stories but also some nonfiction—of Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, two writers acclaimed for their unflinching glimpses into the heart of late twentieth-century America.  Carver’s and Mason’s characters, while living in different regions of the country, experience strikingly similar struggles and revelations.  Carver and Mason also share the accolade of master of the short story, and each has been called a literary “minimalist” and a “dirty realist.”  Moreover, the two together have been credited with helping to shift the literary short story homeward again—that is, toward the ordinary and solitary individual navigating—and looking for signs and signals—within domesticity.  Reading and discussing these two writers in close proximity will enrich our understanding of each and should lead to a profitable approach to valuing other contemporary short story writers.  Our readings will include Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Furious Seasons, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Cathedral; and Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories, Love Life, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, and Nancy Culpepper.  Grading components will include weekly written responses, class participation, two essay exams, a formal class presentation, and a term paper.    

ENG 340-001  Shakespeare

TR 9:30-10:45

Foreman, W.

  An introductory survey of Shakespeare's plays, covering all forms (comedies, histories, and tragedies) and periods (early, middle, and late).  Consideration of Shakespearean theater and performance (physical and philosophical shape, performance as interpretation, visualization of written texts, audience as part of action, play as play); of Shakespearean language and its relation to "truth" (arguments, meanings, metaphors, puns, verse, poetry: in short, wordplay); of the way the structure of the plays produces meaning (function and order of scenes); of the way words make characters, and the way characters interact, verbally and visually; and of the social implications of the plays (for both the 16/17th and the 20th centuries) and the ways audiences (including ourselves) interpret the plays.  We will read eleven or twelve plays, probably including A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Othello, King Lear, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

ENG 382-001  History of Film II
TR 9:30-10:45
Marksbury, T.

Note: this course is designed to pick up more or less where History of Film I, which is usually taught in the fall semester, leaves off. There is no requirement, however, to take the courses as one unit or in any special sequence.

After some preliminary attention to the mounting hysteria and alienation of the nineteen-fifties (Johnny Guitar and Touch of Evil), we’ll plunge in full bore to the sixties with Psycho and Point Blank, focusing on the collapse of the studio system and the glory of the American independent film through the seventies and moving through the transition to s more complex corporate climate in the eighties and the attempts to deal with a shifting and more competitive market in the nineties and the twenty-first century. The films themselves will be a mix of the canonical (Rio Bravo), the cultified (Dead Man), the overlooked (Near Dark), and the eternally left of center (Choose Me, Don‘t Look Now).

Although the viewing schedule will be skewed somewhat in the direction of American film, we will also try to touch upon international cinema as it developed in West Germany (Margarethe von Trotta, who extends the tradition of Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk), France (at least Godard and maybe Truffaut), Italy (Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita and Antonioni‘s The Passenger), Sweden (The Hour of the Wolf) and Mexico (if that’s where you choose to locate the wandering Guillermo del Toro and The Devil‘s Backbone). The aim is for as much variety and diversity as possible, so that Akira Kurosawa’s Ran might be scheduled next to Harold Ramis’

Groundhog Day.

We will also be trying to draw some genre connections, including a look at the postmodern Western as it mutates from Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks to The Missouri Breaks, Jarmusch, and ultimately There Will Be Blood. Aesthetic developments will be stressed over technical advances, but the beginning of this story is certainly about how each informs the other. Although many of these films could be viewed as isolated “masterpieces”, this course aims to understand how they still speak to one another across time--and how they continue their conversation with us as well.

The text will be A History of Narrative Film, by David Cook, 4th edition. Note: all film viewings are scheduled outside class. Expect two movies a week, lively discussion, and three exams, each of which has an in-class and a take-home essay component.

ENG 507-001  Advanced Workshop in Imaginative Writing: Screenplay
R 3:30-6:00
Marksbury, T.

Intended not so much as an introductory course but as a more intensive and ambitious upper level workshop, designed for students who are interested in launching, critiquing, and following through as far as possible on an extended project in the screenplay form. Working outwards from the bare bones of the individual “beats” and the isolated scene, we’ll try to build on that earliest connective tissue and develop a larger structure.

By the end of the semester, you’ll be expected to have nailed together the treatment for a feature-length screenplay and a revised version (90-120 pages) of the three acts which would comprise it. We’ll run sections of your writing through the workshop and you’ll be expected to revise, enhance, and polish it as much as possible.

Regular attendance, an openness to sincere and constructive criticism and a willingness to provide it are a must. In addition to the central writing project, we will discuss a number of films which will serve as paradigms in terms of construction, tension and resolution, dialogue, character development, etc. I hope this will help us to think in more pragmatic terms of what screenplays can and cannot accomplish.

Required, more as a reference on format than anything else, but essential for that reason, is The Screenwriter’s Bible, by David Trottier, 4th edition.

ENG/LIN/ANT 516-001  Grammatical Typology
TR 11:00-12:15
Stump, G.

This course deals with the application of linguistic theory to the morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis of natural languages.  We will discuss a variety of typological differences among languages, and we will develop a framework for describing these differences; in addition, we will investigate language universals of diverse kinds, and we will evaluate various recent attempts at explaining the existence of these universals.  Throughout, there will be a heavy emphasis on analyzing linguistic data from languages other than English.  To this end the course will include a fieldwork element where students will have the opportunity of consulting with a speaker of an unfamiliar language and eliciting the facts about the language.  Topics covered will include morphological typology, constituents and syntactic categories, semantic roles and grammatical relations, lexical entries and well-formed clauses, noun phrases, case and agreement, tense and aspect, mood and modality, sentence types, subordinate clauses, inflection vs word formation, word-formation rules and valence, allomorphy, nonlinear morphology, and clitics.  The textbook will be Paul Kroeger’s Analyzing Grammar (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

LIN 517-001  Special Topics in Linguistics: Intro to Computational Linguistics
TR 9:30-10:45
Hippisley, A.

This course will provide students with both a theoretical and practical understanding of the basic principles of computational linguistics, an increasingly important discipline in our digital information age. By the end of the module students should be able to: (1) demonstrate a detailed understanding of the basics of word-based, sentence-based, and meaning-based computational linguistics; (2) appreciate the distinction between rule based symbolic approaches and statistical approaches (the course will mainly focus on symbolic approaches); (3) acquire familiarity with practical computational linguistics, e.g. how spelling checkers work, and the basics behind the Google search engine.  To this end the course will be divided into lectures (Monday and Wednesday) and practical lab sessions (Friday).  Topics covered will include:

LIN 517-002  Special Topics in Linguistics: Phonetics
MWF 11:00-11:50
Bao, M.

Phonetics is concerned with describing speech. This course will cover three areas in articulatory, acoustic, and autitory phonetics.  Students will be acquainted with the physiological properties of the speech-producing apparatus, and the basic properties of sound in general. Students will also be able to perceive and produce the most common sound types of the languages of the world, and explain how speech sounds are similar and different from each other acoustically, including how to create and interpret acoustic displays using appropriate software.

LIN 517-003  Special Topics in Linguistics: Applied Linguistics
TR 2:00-3:15
DuBravac, S.

This course focuses on a few aspects of Applied Linguistics in order to present a more robust perspective on the field.  The teaching and learning of second or foreign languages has been the dominant application of linguistics and so this course concentrates on second language acquisition and assessment, but we also intend to delve into other areas of Applied Linguistics such as forensic linguistics, computer-mediated communication, language description, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics.

LIN 521-001  Sanskrit II
MWF 10:00-10:50
Stump, G.

The purpose of this course is to allow students who have completed LIN 520 (Sanskrit I) to pursue a deeper understanding of the Sanskrit language.  We will continue investigating the characteristics of Sanskrit grammar.  In addition, we will read representative texts from several chronological strata of Sanskrit, including selections from the Rig Veda, the Nalopākhyānam, the Bhagavad Gītā, Kālidāsa's Meghadūta, and other texts.  The texts for the course will be Madhav Deshpande’s Sanskrit Primer, William Dwight Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar, and Charles Rockwell Lanman's Sanskrit Reader. 

ENG 618-001  History of the English Languag

MW 4:30-5:45

Giancarlo, M. 

An exploration of the development of English from its roots in Indo-European, through Old, Middle, and Early Modern English(es), culminating with a review of the English languages of today. We will focus on the phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes of the language as well as on the social contexts of the spread of English as a world language. Emphasis is given to a linguistically informed understanding of how English has changed in response to political and historical pressures. This course is not a substitute for English 210. Grades are based on homework assignments and small projects, mid-term exam, final exam, and attendance/participation.

ENG 653-001  Studies in American Literature Since 1900: American Modernism
R 3:30-6:00
James, P.

This graduate seminar will focus on American modernist writers of the 1920s and 30s and their places in literary criticism about the period.  Texts include:  Stein’s Three Lives, Toomer’s  Cane, Hemingway’s  In Our Time and  The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom.  Requirements include class presentations and a research paper.

ENG 660-001  Modern Critical Theory

W 3:30-6:00

Roorda, R.

Though I intended to use this number to offer my usual course in ecocriticism, I think some students might appreciate the chance to take a less thematic, closer-to-introductory course in critical theory, one that does not assume they already know what they take the course to learn.  Hence this course in Narrative and Genre.  Though it won't be an introduction as such, under this heading we'll be able to sample attributes of both structuralism and poststructuralism (via narratology and subsequent narrative theory) and to touch on some influential figures in theory's much-vaunted "social turn": Bakhtin, Burke, Todorov, Geertz, and French thinkers of various stripes, among others.  We'll pay particular attention to accounts of genre as social situation-a point of connection between literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, media studies, and other realms of inquiry within and adjacent to English studies.  As I am neither expert nor current in these areas, I'll depend even more than usual on active participation of class members, who'll pitch in even to the point of helping select readings and chart directions.  Requirements are likely to include short reading responses, sponsorship of a topic or two in class sessions, and either a couple critical essays or a longer final project applying narrative and genre theory to cultural artifacts of some sort.  (I'll see that we learn something about ecocriticism, too.)

ENG 738-001  Seminar in Victorian Literature: The Victorian Triple-Decker

T 3:30-6:00

Trask, M.

An immersive study of five indispensible 19^th-century door stoppers: Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Trollope’s Barchester Towers, Collins’s Woman in White, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.  The slow and deep reading of these books will be accompanied by equally sustained attention to Victorianist criticism of the last generation.  Relevant commentary by D.A. Miller, Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Garrett Stewart, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Catherine Gallagher, and other eminent Victorianists will be central to our discussions.   We shall be concerned with the enduring appeal of the long-form narrative perfected by the Victorians; with the social and political milieus that gave rise to the triple-decker; with realism as a historical category; and with many other issues that touch upon the pleasures and anxieties of this eminently prosaic genre.  Required work: a lot of reading; team presentation; annotated bibliography; and a final paper (15~ pgs).

ENG 751-001  Seminar in American Literature: 1800-1860

M 3:00-5:30

Clymer, J.

The focus of this advanced research seminar in nineteenth-century American literature is on the intersections of slavery, law, and imaginative literature from roughly 1800-1865.  While the law is authorized by the state’s power, it, like literature, mobilizes language to imagine, restrict, enhance, or consolidate the machinations of power.  As such, we will read theoretical discussions of the law’s interests and powers, as well as nineteenth-century court cases, alongside imaginative literature’s own efforts to think through social problems, to condense and clarify political thought, and to imagine alternative scenarios of power and justice.  Students should take this course if they are interested in both thinking about the law as a cultural quandary and narrative force in its own right and as an incitement to nineteenth-century literary production.

Some legal theorists whom we will certainly read:  Cheryl Harris, Ian Haney Lopez, Ariella Gross, Rosemary J. Coombe and Patricia Williams, among other critical race theorists.  We’ll also read at least The Confessions of Nat Turner; Mary Denison’s Old Hepsy; Martin Delany’s Blake; Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic; and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.  Legal cases we will study include the Amistad case, Dred Scott, and John Brown’s trial. 

Grade to be determined by class participation and a final seminar paper.