English programs

The Middle Ages was a Christian millennium. Authors, philosophers, astronomers and economists pursued their calling within a Christian worldview and a Catholic power structure. When warlike Anglo-Saxons imagined the crucifixion, they saw a heroic prince stripping for battle and mounting the cross in triumph. Medieval dramatists recreated the entire pageant of biblical history on a long summer's day. In this course we read literary and historical works by both men and women, including Beowulf , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and The Canterbury Tales . Prerequisite: ENG220. (4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, the Empire has written back. The last half of the 20th century has produced a number of literary texts written in English by authors from the recently independent nations of the Old British Empire. These texts have proved so rich in both literary value and cultural context that their authors, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, and Rushdie himself, have won the most prestigious literary prizes available. We will be reading and appreciating these books, both as ripping good yarns, and as significant cultural documents that teach us much of how members of other societies think, feel, and act.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

The course introduces students to the art of adaptation of texts. Although we are frequently viewers of film, we are not always good readers and interpreters of visual texts. Students in this class will read original literary texts and then view the film adaptations of those texts. Through class discussion and writing about adaptations, students will learn how to read a film intelligently and understand the place of film as a literary form.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

William Shakespeare never attended college, yet he saw the world sharply in his mind's eye. He wrote piercingly about kings and college students, warriors and witches, goblins and gravediggers, his 1,000 characters have never been off the stage in 400 years. In this course we read eight plays which fathom the range of human experience and take the English language to the height of expressive beauty. Prerequisite: ENG220 (4 credits)

A study of some of the best contemporary American non-fiction writing on such subjects as politics, the arts, religion, natural science and medicine. Students write on similar topics and develop their own style by emulating such models.Prerequisites: sophomore class standing and ENG184 or ACT English score of 30 or above (SAT 680 or higher), or permission of instructor.(2 credits)

A study of prose and poetry in the United States from America's beginnings through the end of the Civil War. The course will focus on the works of Colonial and Romantic writers and the literatures of Native and African Americans. Special attention will be given to defining the qualities and concerns that make this literature distinctively "American."Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

A study of prose and poetry in the United States from the Civil War until the present. The course will study works by realists (including regionalists) and modernists, as well as contemporary writers.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

Like our own age, the Renaissance saw spiritual perspectives and secular perspectives in conflict and in synthesis. Writers, like seafarers, expanded our understanding of what it is to be human in this world. In this course we read plays, speeches, and poems by such authors as Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Donne and Milton.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

The industrial revolution resulted in an urbanized, more literate population. Writers of the time sought to reach a popular audience in a way unparalleled in English literary history. We shall read Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Eliot and their contemporaries, examining what they thought of and had to say to the common people of their day.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

England was largely depopulated of young men and nearly reduced to rubble by two world wars. The nation that arose, stripped of its empire, has continued to be a literary center. We shall read Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Heaney and others, examining how they have analyzed and expressed the modern human condition.Prerequisite: ENG220.(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

Some writers are especially interested in the ways people transform places and the ways places influence people. The elements of a place--the mountain ranges, shopping malls, grasslands, forests, migratory patterns of animals, rush of automobiles, or the portals of cyber-places-- shape the imagination. This course examines significant literary works, especially non-fiction, that explore the relationship between persons and places. In particular, we will examine the tension between the writer's need to construct definitions of "home places" and how the places themselves respond to human "home making."Prerequisite: ENG220(4 credits, alternate years, consult department)

America is home to a variety of peoples and literatures; this course focuses on the development of literatures produced by those outside the Anglo-European tradition whose experiences tell a different story about America. The goal of the course is to enrich students' views of the content of American Literature and to familiarize them with a culture or cultures with which they may not be conversant. The course may be taught as African American, Native American, Asian American, or Hispanic American literature. Alternatively, the instructor may choose to focus on literatures in contact and conflict with one another, for example, the turbulent confluence of Native American, Anglo, and Hispanic Literatures of Nueva España. Prerequisite: ENG220. (4 credits, alternate years, consult department)