ENGL 205 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
SPRING 2008
Title: COMEDY
AND HUMOR
Time:
Class#: 75609
Place: 4021 Wescoe
Instructor: CAROTHERS, James
COURSE
DESCRIPTION: In addition to reading
the texts listed here, we’ll consider various definitions and theories of
comedy and humor. In the last part of
the semester, each member of the class will present a series of reports on a
comic or humorous writer of his/her own choosing.
Regular class attendance and participation; 4-6 essays of 1,000-1,500 words, a longer end-of-the-semester project.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Barry, Dave
Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Hughes,
The Best of Simple; Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at
Pooh Corner; Shakespeare, Four Comedies; Thurber, The Thurber
Carnival; Twain, Selected Shorter Writings; Lunsford, The
Everyday Writer; and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.
Title: THE CONCEPT OF HAPPINESS
Time:
Class #: 56435
Place: 4021 Wescoe
Instructor: EVERSOLE, Richard
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Is happiness possible? What do people mean by the use of the word? What are some of the notions and attitudes which support the formation of the concept? This course is concerned with how literature conceptualizes in a critical way about happiness through the details of a fiction, an imagined situation. We begin with a close reading of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and proceed in that manner to Thomas More’s Utopia; each of these tests the conditions of naïve and intellectualized concepts of happiness. Then we look back at the secular tradition of the latter with help from Aristotle and Cicero. We go on to the cultural facets peculiar to the shaping of this country in Mark Twain’s Roughing It and Henry Thoreau’s Walden and then to this past century in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. We finish by an out-of-class project where you yourself bring in a literary text relevant to the course. Four papers and a final examination (as well as an attendance policy).
REQUIRED TEXTS: More, Utopia; Johnson, History of
Rasselas; Twain, Roughing It; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own;
Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer;
and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.
Title: HOME: YOUR PLACE
OR MINE?
Time:
Class #: 56439
Place: 4021 Wescoe
Instructor:
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The
class will read and discuss a number of works concerned with or attempting to
give flesh to concepts of home and
such related ideas as identity or sense of self, alienation, nostalgia, exile,
belonging, etc. We will study a few
films as well. Our major texts will come
from three countries and will include novels, a history, a graphic novel, and a
children’s book. We’ll also read some
short stories, essays, and poems available on handout or on the internet. Classes will be discussion driven. Written work will most likely consist of 3 or
4 major papers, some much shorter assignments, and a take home final
examination.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Stegner
Wolf Willow; Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt; Egan, The Worst Hard
Time; Doig, The Whistling Season; Grenville, The Secret River; Yang, American Born Chinese;
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Wilder, Little House on the
Prairie; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer; and Dept. of English, Composition
and Literature.
Title: LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Time:
Class #: 72671
Place: 223 Fraser
Instructor: FOWLER, Doreen
COURSE
DESCRIPTION: Arguably, wars are
fought to decide who will represent what Toni Morrison calls “the dominant
cultural body,” and who will be recognized as the marginalized other. When the South lost the Civil War, an entire
region experienced the loss of the subject position. English 205, Literature of the American
South, will focus on how white and black and male and female writers of the
American South struggled with the shadowy role of “the other.” Assigned texts will include works by
Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Carson
McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy. Course
requirements will include two papers (approximately 7-pages each), response
papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
Class participation also is a requirement.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Faulkner, Selected Short Stories of
William Faulkner; Faulkner, Sanctuary; Twain, Pudd’nhead
Wilson; Douglass, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Wright, Eight
Men; Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; McCullers,
The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other
Stories; O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge; Percy, The Moviegoer; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer; and Dept. of English,
Composition and Literature.
Title: MEN, WOMEN, NATURE
Time:
Class #: 72897
Place: 4021 Wescoe
Instructor: HARDIN, Richard
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The texts to be studied in this course all ask whether human nature is best fulfilled in “real” nature or in the environment that we create with our technology or art, and call civilization. Can the return to nature overwhelm us or bring us closer to our supposed former perfection as a species? We’ll begin with an ancient Greek romance, Daphnis and Chloe, and conclude with Ursula Leguin’s fantasy novel, The Beginning Place. Shakespeare’s late romances, in particular The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, respond to this situation with characteristic ambivalence, while Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, written in the age of Rousseau’s “noble savage,” has no doubt about the ennobling effects of living on an island in the Indian Ocean. Two more island books, Melville’s Typee (based on the author’s own experience in the Marquesas) and the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima’s post World War II work, The Sound of Waves, dwell on innocence and love from a more complex perspective. Jack London’s Sea Wolf participates in the deterministic circumstances favored by American-European naturalism on the decades either side of 1900. Several short papers and two of medium length, quizzes, and a final exam.
REQUIRED
TEXTS: Greek Daphnis and Chloe;
Leguin, The Beginning Place, Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale and The
Tempest, de St. Pierre, Paul and Virginia, Melville, Typee;
Mishima, The Sound of Waves;
Title: AMERICAN MODERNISMS
Time:
Class #: 80039
Place: 4050 Wescoe
Instructor: SHARISTANIAN, Janet
COURSE
DESCRIPTION: A study of some of the
major ideas, themes, and artistic developments in early 20th Century
American literature. The formative
period of modern literature in the
This course will attempt to get at some of the major themes and forms of
the early 20th Century by questioning the distinction between
"modern" and "modernist."
It will ask in what ways experimental writing is conservative as well as
in what ways apparently traditional texts are experimental. This will allow us to construct a broad
picture of early 20th-century American culture, one that includes
writing by women and men, blacks and whites, and forms that speak to large and
to smaller audiences. It will also allow
us to see connections among apparently dissimilar authors and to ask general
questions about how modern American writers have represented such subjects as
the make-up of the individual, gender differences and relationships, the
family, war, nature, social change, and history itself. Regular class attendance and participation
are required. There will be three papers
and a final.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Frost, Poems, (ed. John Hollander);
Wharton, The Custom of the Country, (ed. Orgel);
Hughes, Selected Poems; Cather, The
Professor’s House; T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems; Hemingway, A
Farewell to Arms; Hurston, Their Eyes Were
Watching God; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer; and Dept. of English, Composition
and Literature.
Title: WAYS OF SEEING
Time:
Class #: 56437 / 75931
Place: 223 Fraser
Instructor: KLAYDER, Mary
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course will focus on the concepts of perception, perspective, and vision in literature. How do we see things? How do we view the world? How does literature show our different ways of seeing? We will consider different perceptions of art, nature, gender, and culture; we will investigate various cultural and personal perspectives; and we will address the notion of vision as a metaphor in literature. There will be four papers, a final exam, a project, and assorted short assignments throughout the semester
REQUIRED TEXTS: Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We
Live By; Donne, Selected Poems; Dickinson, Dickinson, Collected
Poems; Edson, Wit; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
Woolf, To The Lighthouse; Whitehead, The Intuitionist; Garcia, The
Aguero Sisters; Silko, Storyteller; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer;
Dept. of English, Composition and Literature; and selected essays and poetry
handouts.
Title: WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY & BILDUNGSROMAN
Time:
Class #: 69327
Place: 4021 Wescoe
Instructor: CONRAD, Katie
COURSE
DESCRIPTION: In this course, we will
examine two popular and powerful literary genres embraced and challenged by
women writers over the years: the autobiography and the bildungsroman,
or novel of development. We will read and discuss these works with attention to
a number of questions: what is the self?
What conditions affect the development of the self? What does gender have to do
with selfhood and authorship? What is the subject of autobiography? What
choices must be made when making a life into a narrative? What is the
relationship between authorship and authority? We will also explore questions
of voice, authority, genre, and purpose with attention to the writing students
will produce for the course; students are encouraged to write one
autobiographical essay.
Authors whose works we will read will include Charlotte Bronte, Harriet
Jacobs, Virginia Woolf, Zora
Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong
Kingston, and Alison Bechdel, among others. Students will help to choose at least one of
the texts we will read. Requirements include both short and mid-length (5-6 pp)
writing assignments, a final exam, and classroom and Blackboard participation.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Bronte,
Jane Eyre; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Bechdel, Fun Home; Lunsford, The Everyday Writer;
and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.