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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Rigorous textual analysis of short fiction as a means of defining its many formal and philosophical expressions. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course is a reading workout with the emphasis on quality rather than quantity. That means using a small number of important concepts in conjunction with a close examination of examples of classic and contemporary short fiction to develop reading and interpretive skills. Starting with the sound of words and moving to ideas of Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Poe we spend time examining the building blocks of short fiction: plot, character, setting, narrative point-of-view. By mid-semester we are ready to move beyond formalism to touch on several critical approaches: socio-political, Freudian, gender, and reader response. The objective is always for students to get to know each work well enough to be able to write a short essay that makes clear their understanding of its meaning, that explains the maximum number of its details without stretching or forcing, and that makes clear why it does or does not engage their interest. Because the stories are good and the discussion lively, this is an enjoyable course.
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of selected 20th- and 21st-century novels. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course provides an understanding of the concepts, techniques, and artistic goals associated with literary modernism, and it examines classic examples of modernist fiction by writers such as E.M Forster, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, as well as work by recent inheritors of modernism's legacy, such as Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The larger goals of the course are to give the student experience in identifying and writing about the concerns, values, and world views of novelists and the strategies by which novelists convey these elements. Students emerge from this course, in other words, with a much more detailed and sophisticated understanding both of "the modern" and of "the novel."
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3.00 Credits
Selected major novels of 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The major questions posed in this course are 1) what makes a novel "great," significantly superior to most others, and 2) how we reach such value judgments and, indeed, of what use it may or may not be to do so. The course pursues these questions by close study of some of the most celebrated works in the genre, by writers such as Austen, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, James, and Kafka. Together they offer a stunning variety in character, vision, and style. They also offer significant challenges to the reader: how to identify and evaluate the concerns, values, and world view of the author, and the literary strategies by which the author conveys those concerns and values.
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3.00 Credits
Selected readings in Medieval literature (some in translation), with focus on literary representations of love and war. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The literature of the Middle Ages is too often regarded as inaccessible because of its distance and difference from modern works. Reading texts written long ago does involve a sophisticated set of reading strategies, yet there can also be a good deal of pleasure in reading such texts. In this course, we consider how customary modern practices of reading measure up to the challenges of medieval texts; texts that were, after all, produced in a manuscript culture in which literacy and literary authority were conceived of differently than they are in much of the modern world. Our discussions are informed by methodologies of the new historicism,emphasizing some of the mediations through which modern readers are able to apprehend texts from the past as objects of study, as well as by more traditional approaches to historical and cultural context. Literary representations of "love" and "war" provide a focus for the course, and the theories that guide our discussions of these particular representations help us to consider (among other things) how gender and class are constructed in these texts.
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3.00 Credits
Study of resources, methods, and aims governing the re-creation of individual lives by writers of biography and autobiography. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This is a readings course that focuses upon life-writing as an art. It explores the ways meaning is constructed within biography and autobiography and considers the means by which life-writers collect, evaluate, and shape data from their own lives or the lives of others. It also attends to the similarities and differences in the processes of generating, interpreting, and presenting material used by life-writers and writers of fiction. In addition to assigned texts, students have the opportunity to read and write about a biography and autobiography of their own choosing.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to black vernacular oral and written art. Investigation of the black vernacular tradition in the wider context of American culture. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: Primarily, this course entails the study of and growing familiarity with the black vernacular tradition. We study novels, autobiography, music, film, dance, and, occasionally, selected popular culture texts (basketball games, church services, barbershop visits, etc.) that encompass a range of black social classes, sexual orientations, and genders, peering into each text in order to "read" it from a distinctly black vernacular perspective. Once we become proficient at recognizing and identifying the vernacular, we talk about what the use of the vernacular by black folk means in the larger American culture. At the same time, we also examine black vernacular-inspired texts from non-black artists and writers, and talk about what it means-not just to (white) America but to black America. The last portion of the course is devoted to black commentary on white participation in the black vernacular, sometimes while artists are executing their vernacular-based art itself. What is the range of responses available to blacks when confronted with non-black black vernacular practitioners What do those responses tell us about African American culture about American culture This course uses the black vernacular as a broad, in-depth cultural lens through which to view American culture, and in so doing, seeks to locate the black vernacular in the American cultural imagination
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3.00 Credits
Modern woman's search for identity and struggle for self-realization through study of selected figures from 19th- and 20th-century literature. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course examines literary representations of the modern woman's search for identity and struggle for self realization. It begins with two major questions: Do women write differently than men Do women read differently than men Because the novel is central to women's literary history, the course focuses on fiction and the changing nature of narratives by women. As literary critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis has pointed out, "Once upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social - successful courtship and marriage - or judgmental of sexual and social failure; death." As an example of such conventions, the course begins with a novel by either Jane Austen or Emily Bront , then moves to early modernists such as Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston, who critique the romance tradition, and finally to writers such as Virginia Woolf, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Danzy Senna, Penelope Lively, and Josephine Humphreys, who experiment with new literary forms, new endings, and new definitions as they examine women in untraditional roles.
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3.00 Credits
Survey of major works of African-American literature with attention to oral traditional contexts. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course introduces students to a selected body of writings by African Americans from the colonial period to the present. The class looks at varied forms, including the traditional genres (novels, poems, plays, short stories, essays), slave narratives, and oral forms (narratives and performance pieces, such as political speeches, sermons, songs, etc.). Some attention is given to distinctive and persistent elements of style in the Black tradition (oral and written), such as double vision, masking, signifying, wit, irony, verbal play, and all the complex area of language (voice/silence, metaphors, rhythms, idioms, dialect, etc., etc.).
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3.00 Credits
Fiction of both old and new South with attention to themes, techniques and perspectives of the region. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The South of myth and the South of history have combined to produce a literature fascinating in both its range and conflicting images. Issues of familial and communal heritage, conceptions of place and region, and relations among various racial and ethnic groups are among the most prominent and pressing themes in Southern fiction, but since such might be said of any regional American fiction, this course asks, what makes this fiction "Southern" We can begin to understand some of the oppositions constructed in the Old South and represented in its fiction "between blacks and whites, the landed gentry and the yeoman farmer, the strict gender roles of ladies and gentlemen" by examining particularly Southern attitudes toward honor and the land in works by Thomas Nelson Page, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. To chart the evolution of Southern fiction from the romantic rhetorical mode to the modern dialectical mode, the course investigates the effects of changing social conditions and new fictional forms on representations of the South by writers such as William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Peter Taylor, Jean Toomer, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. The final weeks of the semester focus on the following questions: Is today's South more a matter of social perception than social distinction Is there anything still "Southern" We may find answers in contemporary fiction by such writers as Ernest Gaines, Ellen Gilchrist, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, and Jill McCorkle.
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3.00 Credits
A broad range of works by indigenous writers since 1960 studied in the context of the historical and contemporary political and cultural relations between American Indians and the United States. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course is an introduction to the most recent fiction by Native American writers in the United States. It focuses on texts written in the last two decades by authors representing a variety of historical and contemporary indigenous nations and working in many different genres: short stories, historical novels, postmodern fiction, mystery, crime and detective novels, science fiction. We will consider this writing in the context of the United States colonial history, indigenous nations' contemporary attempts to reassert or regain their political sovereignty, and the long legacy of the hypervisibility of stereotyped Indians in American popular culture. Authors studied include Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, James Welch, Diane Glancy, Greg Sarris, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Daniel Heath Justice.
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