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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. Students in World Literature Since the Renaissance read representative works of great literature from the Romantic period to the present in the forms of novels, poems, and plays from around the world. Authors come from Europe, the Americas, India, Russia, and Africa. The class may confront such questions as the following: What is the relationship between literature and history? What is the role of the individual in a world with shifting beliefs in God or the gods? In addition, the class may examine the possible biases that make us unable (or less able) to appreciate literature from cultures not our own.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. This course will define a genre of writing known as autobiography and highlight the ways in which writers have infused their work with an autobiographical perspective, both acknowledged or less directly stated. The approach will be interdisciplinary, uniting literary study with historical and cultural perspectives that will foster an appreciation for the ways in which an author's life, time period, and culture are integrated with her or his writing. Authors as diverse as Yukio Mishima, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Baldwin will be examined. The course will feature readings from fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. This course examines the social construction of race in the U.S. through the lens of American literature and popular culture. It focuses on key moments in American history, from pre-colonial America to the present, to explore how racial categories have been created and re-created. Students will analyze the evolution of these racial categories, like white, black, Asian, Latino, and Native American, while exploring how racial groups are pitted against each other and how categories like gender, class, and sexuality intersect with race. Readings from a range of disciplines will provide students with the historical and social context necessary to analyze cultural texts, like novels, short stories, advertisements, films, political cartoons, TV shows, songs, and speeches.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. This course examines the diverse literature of early America, such as Native American literature, the literature of exploration and settlement, slave narratives, abolitionist and suffrage literature, Enlightenment writing, Transcendentalist writing, and Gothic literature. Authors may include Anne Bradstreet, Washington Irving, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Students consider such issues as class, race, religion, and gender through the texts. RVCC 2008-2009 Catalog ? For updated information, visit www.raritanval.edu 165
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: GPA of 3.5 or permission of instructor. The influence of the earliest American writers evident in modern attitudes toward everything from the environment to Medicare. This course draws lines from the first days of our country to the pages of today's newspaper. The approach is interdisciplinary, with readings in history and culture augmenting more traditional literature and criticism. Students read classic American writers such as Emerson, Douglass and Dickinson, as well as explorers, soldiers, homemakers, slaves, and politicians. Students examine Puritan commentaries on the Salem witch trials, then look at the trials from the perspectives of history and psychology. Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" is examined through the lens of contemporary critical approaches, including feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, and deconstruction.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. American Literature: Post Civil War to the Present begins with the writers of the late 19th century and ends with contemporary literature. Writers may include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, W.E.B. DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, and Toni Morrison. Students study contemporary American issues as they read about social rebellion and social conformity, about the dilemmas that women have faced and those that men have experienced, about the struggles of African Americans against racism, and about changes over the last century in private relationships and the family.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I and a minimum GPA of 3.5 or permission of the instructor. Like the regular section of the course, American Literature: Post Civil War to the Present Honors begins with the writers of the late 19th century and ends with contemporary literature. Students study contemporary American issues as they read about social rebellion and social conformity, about the dilemmas that women have faced and those that men have experienced, about the struggles of African Americans against racism, and about changes over the last century in private relationships and the family. In contrast to the regular section of the course, Honors students construct their own crossdisciplinary research projects drawing on a variety of texts including, but not limited to, literature, the print media, music, art, architecture, and film.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. This course explores the connections between ethnic identity, literature, and culture in the United States. Focus will be representation of life stories and cultural experiences by writers from selected and differing ethnic communities and pasts, including literature by memebers of "old" and "new" ethnic groups in the United States: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos/as, white ethnics and others. Students will be defining this genre of writing, looking at themes such as the following: ethnic and racial stereotypes; ethnicity and gender; assimilation versus cultural heritage and memory; "translating" experiences into a new culture and language; responses to myths about immigration and other national narratives such as the American Dream.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. The course traces the evolution of the short story, from ancient roots in oral narratives, myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, but focuses primarily on its modern form, as expressed by writers of diverse cultures. Writers such as Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekov, Katherine Mansfield, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Yukio Mishima, and Bernard Malamud may be featured. Students analyze and write about the works and explore the basic components of the genre.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: ENGL 111 - English I. This course will help students to understand both the craft and the art of poetry; how poems are made and why they are valuable. Texts will range from ancient Eastern scriptures to the newest work of young American poets, from limericks to epics, from song lyrics to verse drama. The focus, however, will always be on language, form, and meaning. Students can expect, therefore, to gain not only a knowledge of the nature, history, and variety of poetry but also greater skill, insight, and pleasure as readers, writers and thinkers.
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